Hoorah!
This year I will focus on developing myself as an artist, both professionally and creatively. I will work with mentors and set some goals. I have 1500 to spend on materials and possibly a residency, and I am excited for these new possibilities. I am focusing my attention on landscape, and have been reading about its inter-dynamics with power and identity, how we relate to nature and ecology.
During this mentoring period, I aim to develop a body of work focused on landscape and geometric design. By painting landscape I infuse myself with the essence of a place—I relive the balmy expansion of summer sea, or black tendrils of winter birch, mirroring my psyche in the patterns of earth and air. If our bodies are focal points within a matrix of millions of molecularly shared life forms, the language of mathematics underpins all of life experience. The rules and consistent proportion of mathematics and geometry make an interesting counterpoint to the intuitive physicality of our animal bodies. Maths uses numerical symbols to represent objective truths, perhaps just as color and can encode subjective truth. I shall visually explore the living land and sensual body, in contrast to harmonic proportion and logic, to learn what lies between them. This project is a meditation on the mind/body split, a study on the pure form of color and design, and an engagement in the art historical swing between abstraction and figuration. The images below show some recent collage studies which may be developed into paintings. I want to destabilize the horizon, and have us consumed by the texture and pattern of land, rather than the distancing and surveyed perspective traditionally employed in landscape art. And also two recent paintings .
