This series evokes abstracted
sceneries and spectral landscapes,
emulating the experience of gazing
out over your environment, reading its
essence and dynamics, rather than
individual components. Each painting
works through stylization,
methodically deconstructing and
bringing into being the feel of a view
within the painting.
Vertical and horizontal brush-marks,
resolutely non-organic and associated
with more geometric abstract
painting, make up potential
backgrounds or foregrounds,
depending on their relationship with
the other pictorial elements.
These sharper bands of color create a
sense of space in concert with more
fluctuating areas of gradients and
discordant hues. The eye acclimates
itself to the level of abstraction
through those constructions of lines
and multiple layers, wanders and
creates its own path to recompose a
perspective, a view.
The titles of the works, reinforce their
earthbound subject matter, leading us
through Cargo freights in the cold and
onto The straight, then reminding us of
our own experience of viewing and
standing within landscape: Where the
gaze splits into two lands.
The mechanical strokes employed
relate to geological stratification and,
in their most luminous, indicate
reflections of light, but they also
create a visual noise reminiscent of
pixel deterioration. This moves our
focus away from abstract painting to
other analogies we experience of
landscape through our digital
communications.
The reflection of the fantasy that a
landscape could be effectively
compressed into either a picture plain
or an electronic screen comes to the
fore. This leaves the opportunity to
think about the process of artistic
stylization and the process of digital
recreation. Those two reproductive
techniques align with our own optical
experience of de-focused viewing; at a
glance the features of a tree or a
human figure within a larger view
start to vanish to the point of
resembling one another, holding
similar weight and presence within
an abstracted vista.