How do you communicate the sense of humans’ meaningful relationship to landscape, instead of just talking about your own, private relationships to specific places (central Florida, grandparents’ farm, Pennsylvania, etc.)? The latter flirts with inaccessibility and sentimentality.
"What you’re making, it's not an abstract painting, and it's not a landscape. It's a cerebral construction." (Dona Nelson)
"You must have the illusion of space in the painting, for the signage of space to be activated." (also Dona)
Integrate the abstract and representational parts, make them need each other.
Why landscape imagery at all?
I’m not interested in painting as an illustration of the idea.
Why am I so allergic to physical terrain in the painting, or to using actual collage? I want a singular place, a singular illusion. There's something about the entire painting having the same skin that goes to this, to holding all those disparate parts together the way I want.
Ways that the work may be problematic (just a few):
aestheticizing, showing as beautiful the modern-industrial world
suggesting some sort of symbiosis between modernity and nature
underpinned by the romanticization of nature/landscape
What’s on the wall:
