Landscape and Time

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i like to try to capture some semblance of a gene for almost as though you're looking at a wall that has been repeated by a lot of people over a long period of time i think of each painting that i create and experience in another cell they all our landscape but they're much more than that to me they're about struggles and perseverance and wide they are an

anti he landscape for me is another hearing to work with the storm's and experiences i know best and to express myself through those forms i'm not interested in doing landscape in a traditional sense that you have a traditional allies of line and you have a sky where's the post they only supposed to be in the three but i can use these an abstract them or create new forms the ways of seeing and thinking of a three or a body of water a blade of grass years my family has literally this house for several generations we're the only family it's never the scouts and

we have ended up with with objects that were owned and used by previous generations here there was a painting that i was very intrigued by as a child which was a posthumous portrait of a young girl had died when she was probably around hey here's a painting always painter who came to alabama nicola marcela who's like tanner she was not anyone that was actually for my family it's ordered millions of the way as children we were sleeping in that room when the lights when out her dress her white dress still low carbon and it was a very frightening thing that that he had this sense of all of our presence and that she was not something that that cease to exist even when the lights went out and so this this object that was of course very

preoccupied to children is something that i think also got me thinking a lot about painting as a result of our house been so old of objects that had been long deceased before i felt that there was very little space for from microsoft's and perhaps it's why i had turned more tee hee outdoors teenager he had a wonderful time coming really and we would climb trees and swing on fines we had such a wonderful experience to be inventive kind of childhood the landscape became a place for me to go and to create my own reality fortunate to have a combined experience of

a well manicured gardens such as the ones that i grew up in here if it's falling and then also in a very wild landscapes just the foliage that bordered the farmland and then they scatter name that existed in the rows of costs in the farmland made things have found their way into my painting that struggle of giving nature to behave the way that you would desire poised to provide a lot of metaphors for me in my thinking of what it's like to be human and working toward getting the things that that you desire to get and that's it's challenging and sometimes very frustrating but it's also what keeps us alive and very interested one of the painters that has been very influential to me is then go and and that sense of struggle and one's own life is something that that he also seems to have very directly related to the landscape and you

see a great deal of emotion and his brush work in his transformation palm trees and buildings other number painter that i think are really doing extraordinary work they have a different sense of time there seems to be a slower build up a surplus you once it's got to lay low in the field to my heel and many many others but they both happened to be from the state was not government and whatnot i had a very rich folk tradition producer maryam injury is derived largely this full history and i felt that in the south there was a lot of this kind of fodder for unique imagery that i could try to tap into

when i prepare to do an image a campus or drawing i like to pull out my boxes in significant parts of the landscape allow them to give me ideas through their formal qualities those kinds of fragments enabled me to deal with landscape was still alive because these are parts that i can actually move around and rearranging i can take those in significant elements and isolate them almost in an iconic sense and memory a local flashes a broader saudis believe from my perspective my muslim is my photographer and he's from white americans from we can parallel experiences and it was amazing the end of life and the south are assembled some curious in my life and i understand exactly which

was talking about but what we're actually unite as maurice is a lot of this the activity we always or most of the war we go we are really on this interview at women married eighteen years and our influences have gone back and forth classes always had these since oriental element of getting very close to elements in nature in a lot of hours that you have these kind of flowers and of course i begin to do the same thing and begin to understand the intricacies of of the natural landscape and that authentic enough approach to me whether you're more like a huge campus where i'm going to struggle and the amount of for some shaved some pictures of normalizing so that way when i a met fernando in the dominican republic in nineteen eighty four we both were we're living out our column a bear and

he was having an exhibition of his photographs is in one of the galleries he had a series that he calls the frame series basis to this that in brule use in windows in a window she uses a culture developed in the renaissance they were great alaskan we find the window so we looked through the window you see the paint in the wall so federal support for the graphically orally from ways that we weakened for him something he had created a mask that would fit over the negative inside of a four by five camera and that mask would have some areas that were cut out of it so they were completely on obscure the views of the subject and some areas that were translucent and some that were opaque i've gained a great deal about how we fragments our mom our view of of a landscape for instance because we know encompassed everything in one moment the center's in that lead departure from ilya for moritz poorly

defined and they slowly we margin we think very independently about our work but because we do live together and travel together we are influenced many different times by some of the same things luskin is a mahdi or think you can see almost anything you can but you can find a metaphor you can find a deep thought there you can find out since will and i'm a black belt region of alabama which is where i grew up and the foliage is almost jungle like and i have found ways of understanding human relationships through these very lush environment very sensual environments there are a lot of minds the wrapped themselves around the trees and it's it appears to be a very loving embrace but it

actually is a parasitic situation there was a period of time in the many years that i've been exploring landscape as my primary imagery what it incorporated the female figure and that was a very direct attempt to on to do why these metaphors that i've found in nature for instance in one case the female figure is contained within a wire cage and only split side it has a tomato plant and it's tied into position as a support on but it's not free to take it on configuration and that particular image really has to do with my desire to paint landscapes pure and simple but with my interpretation my take on that i am not failing i was

allowed to do just that i had a sense that as a female artist that i needed to make statements about being female and there've been a lot of important than women in my young life there was of course my mother who is very supportive of me and my interest in art my grandmother's both lived in the same town with me and that they were very different from each other from one grandmother i gained wanderlust in a great appreciation for travels she she traveled a great deal to different countries and from the other grandmother i gained a real love love love the landscaping and nature because she was an avid gardener and then there was a lady named annie made her a worker family for i guess about thirty seven years she always had gorgeous plants in the yard of true green thumb and it was always

amazing to me how ge with very little apparent effort to cause things to be very exuberant and lush and if i learned from her that sense of true creativity of making do with what you have in and out dealing with those limitations and possibly through those limitations becoming more unique it created a painting that had a stylized version of me and there is an angel like figure that whispers something into my ear that painting he is very much again about the struggle within myself of making imagery that was somehow socially responsible or making imagery that i felt was being truer to myself and to my own personal experiences and the slow angell white figure was coming in and whispering to me do what you know is what you're supposed to do

so that painting was a very powerful transitional period for me to try to collect things that are a part of the landscape that i grew up in the leaves that fall the wildflowers and even as a child in alabama i used to be in the yard in mind broken pieces of finally i don't consider that i wore sentimentally and what's more interested in as john roberts called want us and that has to do with fighting wife kathleen live life and death time passing searching for things in your life that given a stronger sense of how to spend their lives to use the city of that is available to us

it's b i was named for my grandmother on my father's side that she had a daughter named frances white long and she died of a brain to knows who is going to end as a child i was very orlando that i was nine or almost more so than when my grandmother and i had this sense that on that i was supposed to be the person has continued her life and when i turned eighteen i was so preoccupied with that that i was actually becoming older at that point than she had an uncanny i suppose that data was also generated his thoughts about this

equally i'll do a combination of several large pieces from like a flower as a fairly large subject on the cameras and then i'll do a little painting on wax paper and slap that onto the canvass several times in order to create a pattern saul have this combination of undulating mind and the repetition of a pattern i like to listen to music and remain requiem warming is something that i find something very suited to my thought process is a fight to fight really enjoy also listen to the show fan is not a chance

physicians seem somehow dark but i've always enjoyed getting a slow vision through the darkness a slow you of something is that emanates from the darkness and i guess that's what they are for me they're places where where ideas can come off on this heavy heavy move in the last couple of years and started making these cultural jury even a lot of the same subject matter of the platform's landscape forms of patter name on that i utilized my paintings and i've really enjoyed having a different nia to work with so that sometimes a break from painting i can explore ideas in in a very different tactile corn during periods of time when i worked with the female figure in the

paintings i was really dealing with early mid life issues and i thought that they were very poetic and when i would exhibit them that people interpreted them as being very violent i was looking for a way of of expressing deep feelings that i can but through other visual means because i didn't enjoy the misinterpretation on the edges when any may gray died it happened to be all so i gathered up a grocery bag full of dried leaves and i painted these leaves many times larger than life size that i selected leaves for the paintings that tom suggested pay a human figure old image and i really felt like these were not morbid but

making very beautiful statements about the greatness of the individual and it gave me time to unsettle him to thinking about not just any mayor that all of these people who have been very much a part of my foundation i want the painting to have several different layers in the same way that you might hear an orchestra so that regardless of where you look there'll be something new something different something that engages you we see a tree with multiple layers and i translate that kind of visualization on to the campus in a division this technique of applying separate strokes of green that might be layered over another color such as brown or overblown as he

with the elites against the sky and allowing the viewer two optically mix the color the division of strangers that i'm the most familiar with are from france answer audie is the most famous one although he's usually referred to as a pointless but the vision is an endpoint wasn't are really essentially saying i've tried to combine and my paintings this divided or division this application of paint and stroke with spontaneous drawing gestures in the houses that i grew up in various a layering of time layer in the personalities so layering and fragmentation is something that i think has been a great influence on me and really fascinating that sense of time

it's captured very intrigued by the combination of not just time but to different personalities service created the dialogue i think it relates to the idea of the quills all of these fragments together became something stronger smarter and greater individual genes it's almost as though you're looking through rain when you're looking for the result because of gravity affecting the collapse it has an elongated chord and that's something that i've been really trying to work out an application a paintbrush were and the downward for also i think is

something that can convey melancholy and a melancholy i think others been something wonderful and i think it's perhaps a stage that we as north americans over and overlook three there have been arrests but we seldom considered melancholy place frequent i like to listen to the cello creating that because for me that that creates a real inwardness isolation that it's just you at that moment with your thoughts and i try and my work to maintain some brains of consistent theme odd but but also i do recognizably paintings have a limited to finally realize that

self and on and in each painting a tide of the very sensitive what that might be there they are i do duggan about foreign policy and the interaction between the two mediums now than it was in flint are painted and then bank and was influenced by photography in these bison were sent to the point that you can read separate the center were as the law was mine anymore he has recently become interested again in and plant forms and so we've actually ended up dealing with some sign subjects' but treating them very different ways

of working in the situation room or three years that moment literally like two socialist by the juices and became stiff in his approach to me to my own that there let's travel is to live it everyday particular struggle is is not for me a negative thing an end and thinking again about the struggle within the landscape it's not negative that happens constantly ends and still regenerate itself we look at the landscape of the year both of us so it is a very complex and

find the authentic these things may have fallen apart but all of these small fragments together and make stronger connections something still lives takes on in life than it's been in clinton's to go on her lap