L A N D S C A P E & B E Y O N D
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| Horse Rain Clouds by Gregory Hardy |
Doug Smith Gregory Hardy
& Mark England
· Landscape
as a conceptual problem of perspective.
·
Landscape as an endless reciprocal drama, exploring
how objects are situated in space, how they move around, how they interact with
human bodies, how they may be used and interpreted.
·
landscape as a rational field exploring all
boundaries between subject and surroundings.
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| Vibrant Valley by Doug Smith |
DOUG SMITH
Doug Smith’s paintings challenge
the limits of representation. A certain consciousness about the tradition of
the genre as well as the will to dismantle it exists in his work. Taking both
realism and abstraction into his work, Doug achieves a combination that evokes
the enduring themes of the landscape of the American West.
Landscape is a language: through
it, humans share experience with future generations. Our ancestors inscribed
their values and beliefs in the landscapes leaving as a legacy, a rich lode of natural
and cultural histories. Doug’s pieces illustrate this with his exquisitely
rendered farms, homesteads and houses in the landscape.
His pieces also show us how landscape is
interesting because it has a double identity. It is both a domain and scenery.
Domain is a place or region and scenery is an aesthetic of space. We look at
these farms and they are a place, yet they sit in an aesthetic of space.
G R E G O R Y H A R D Y
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| Heart of Summer by Gregory Hardy |
Greg Hardy
Greg Approaches landscape from the purest point
of view, without irony. Greg’s paintings are characterized by a powerful
sense of place and time, translated into loaded surfaces, full throttle color
and an urgent touch that seems like a graph of passionate feelings. For all of
Hardy’s hard-learned facility, his paintings are edgy pictures, slightly
uncomfortable or deliberately awkward in ways that make the viewer pay that
much more attention to just what the painter has done instead of simply
recognizing the image. Despite his apparent fidelity to specific places, longer
acquaintance with Hardy’s pictures reveals his willingness to compress and tilt
space, elide the middle distance, exaggerate things in the foreground.
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| United States of America by Mark England |
MARK ENGLAND
Mark England’s almost
overdeveloped sense of landscape, Deals with Lines drawn between self and
society, inside and outside. Rather than trying for that ever-elusive glimpse
of a landscape or history in its purity, Mark chooses to paint the perceptions
and impositions between us and a place we cannot know. England. Exploring
how objects are situated in space, how they move around, how they interact with
human bodies, how they may be used and interpreted is one of Mark’s fortes.
ROAD MAP TO MARK ENGLAND’S PAINTINGS
1.
The
potted plants and catci represent how we try to contain nature and mold it into
things we see as aesthetically pleasing.
2.
As
with many things in Mark’s paintings, the powerlines exist on a visual and functional
level. Mark is a very Linear person and he loves to draw, The lines are a
beauty not considered. They also represent lines of communication and broken lines
of communication and crossed wires.
3.
The
Spiral Jetty appears repeatedly throughout Mark’s work.
4.
A
reference to Richard Serra’s work- an art reference, but also a reference to
the earth.
5.
The
redwood trees of California
6.
A
reference to still life paintings
7.
Checkerboard-
A reference to the Mason Dixon Line and the integration of black and white.
8.
8.
Great Lakes
9.
A
reference to Domino Theory: you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the
last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have
a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.
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| Miniature Tree of Life by Mark England |
A few more
interesting tidbits:
·
The papers flying up into the sky are elements of revelation.
Again we have a communication element. Are they heard or are they scattered and
lost?
·
The potted tree here is also a religious reference. The Tree of Life
is prickly and difficult. Mark is questioning religious iconography and how we
always veil it or add an aesthetic layer, so it becomes “prettier” something
easy to deal with.
·
Mattresses appear in and out of his paintings as other veiled
oblect references. We spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping on them, yet we rarely
see the mattress itself. It’s always covered in sheets. When we do see them,
they are usually refuse in the land.
Mark says of
his paintings “Actually, all of them are a specific location. I don't do
fictional or fantasy art. I have very specific ideas and locations in mind in
all my art. Yes, they incorporate a lot of odd objects and distortions, but
they are meant to be grounded in place and experience.
The American landscape is
cloaked in cultural opacities and cluttered with human debris. I contend that
no one with a twentieth-first century eye can see through the layers of
artificial meaning and histories we have imposed onto this finally impenetrable
continent. So, rather than trying for that ever-elusive glimpse of a landscape
or history in its purity, I choose to paint the perceptions and impositions
between us and a place we cannot know.
In my paintings of Utah,
America, and other continents, I am far more concerned with representing and
questioning cultural and visual expectations than with illustrating a scene. In
a sense, my paintings and drawings are anthropological; in them, I often dwell
on the values, activities, and events of ancient and contemporary cultures,
"tracing" the traces they left behind. I am especially intrigued by
the events through time that tie seemingly unrelated people and events together
in broad cycles: large migrations of people, historic battles, contemporary
civilizations inhabiting the remains of ancient buildings, a
"promised land" inhabited by many self chosen peoples that either
prosper or suffer because of their activities on the land.
All of my work, in some way
or another, is about landscape and how we see ourselves through it and impose
our values on it. My paintings are both referential and highly interpretive,
depicting panoramic views of specific locations. They deal with our perceptions
of time, social and environmental history, and tend to look like maps, but my
"maps" are not accurate according to cartographic expectations. These
are maps of time, culture, dreams, perceptions, the future, and how we wish to
see ourselves and our history. They invite the viewer to become lost in them
and then to make conscious and intuitive sense of the perceptual environment. I
twist perspective, visually and historically. Because of the juxtaposing of
unrelated buildings and events, each scene could be hundreds of years in the
past, or in the process of being constructed, or in the future after everything
has been torn down, destroyed, or worn away. All objects, as well as
time, history, memory, and perceptions are present in these paintings. "
