City Wide Open Studios 2007

            

 

Desert Landscapes

Artist Statement;

My most recent work is an investigation of landscape begun six years ago. As a landscape designer and former geologist, I am interested in landscape as space, and in landscapes’s materiality. I want to depict landscape in a way that powerfully expresses its formative forces, spacial qualities and tactility – landscape as more than a view. I would like to pit the audience in the landscape.

My artistic work complements my academic and professional work. As a landscape designer I wish to convey the full experiential quality of my designed spaces. I have always found traditional presentation drawings – elevation, section, perspective – limiting. This body of artistic work grew out of that search.

One aspect i am investigating is medium. My newest work is paper (art, acid free, translucent/opaque) applied to canvas with matte medium as glue and sealer. The pieces are very layered. Although the finished work is flat, its obvious tactility lends depth and immediacy. The layers are also evocative of geologic processes (sedimentary, tectonic, surficial) that underlie topography.

Scale is a decided conscious aspect of these pieces. The newest landscapes encompass large expanses, but the pieces are small and intimate and consequently expressive of place.

The body of my landscape work also investigates perspective, abstraction and horizon.