LandE scape
Joanne Gravelin
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
source of inspiration is traveling. And specifically road trips and train trips throughout the US. I’ ve taken a bus by myself from Portland, Maine to Atlanta, Georgia. I’ ve been on a train for two weeks straight, traveling across the US landscapes. And have recently been up and down the west coast a few times seeing the gorgeous scenery of California and Oregon. What enthralls me in travel are the moments in-between. The mundane places that are neither here nor there, but entirely familiar. The view from the side of the road with vast open fields, little tufts of shrubbery and trees and a line of telephone poles leading to the horizon. That’ s what I like. I am much more focused on the journey and the feeling of being neither here nor there.
These scenes are my contemporary landscape. In my paintings I’ m highlighting that mundane yet sublime beauty that is today’ s landscape. In painting a nature scene with little bits of man made lines and poles scattered throughout the same way one might paint a lakeside sunset I want the beauty of the everyday to shine through. There is a beauty in the way I see the world while passing through.
When showing clear references to perceptual reality, your paintings convey a subtle abstract feeling that provide with dynamism the representative feature of your canvass. The way you to capture with an universal kind of language quality marks out a considerable part of your production, that are in a certain sense representative of the relationship between emotion and memory. How would you define
in your practice? In particular, how does representation and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work?
The balance of abstraction and representation definitely impact how you view the landscapes. The places are always some kind of recognizable landscape simply through creating distinct horizons, plant life, even buildings in some works. And with that as a footing in reality I feel it is my color scheme that adds a lot of the abstraction. With the addition of unnatural and neon colors I achieve a dreamlike quality. I use a lot of pastel colors to paint hazy skies