Places You Won't Be Going on Vacation, a series of landscape watercolors
I have a long love of maps and have done paintings based on my own aerial photographs that straddled abstraction and representation before. My work usually focuses on the beauty and spiritual connection I see in the landscape, even when heavily manipulated or damaged by humankind, and my sources are always my own observations and experiences. This series is different.
This series is painted from highly mediated, strangely artificial, completely detached, photo sources found in Google Earth. They are all “landscapes”, more or less loosely based on these images, which are of places we hear about in the media today, but would most likely not wish to visit. The choices I made in their production reflects the way we experience much of the world today; from a distance and through a heavy filter. They only reflect ourselves and our experience as the “consumer” of news. Neither these paintings, nor the original Google Earth images, tell us anything about the horrible human experiences or the devastation of the natural world that have occurred there. That is the whole conceptual “point” of these paintings. I wouldn’t dare tell someone else's story from these places and I don’t expect to jar an audience into action or shame their inaction. For most of us, we feel sympathy and horror but also feel basically impotent to help or affect change.
In the end, I hoped to merge two very different impulses that I usually keep separate. I hope to merge the urge to create and celebrate beauty, equity, the dance of fractal and Euclidian geometry in nature and an exploration of how we create meaning from visual stimulus, with the urge to participate, or attempt to affect change in the socio-political-environmentalist sphere. I find this marriage is usually awkward and severely compromises the goals of either the politics involved or the attempt to create powerful, timeless art. But I tried anyway.
Despite the disorientation of the extreme vantage point involved, I found something very beautiful and unique in each place; the subtle colors of the deserts of Syria, the lace grids of roads and structures in El Paso, the labyrinthine swirls and branches of the low land old river system around Chernobyl. I was fascinated by the friendly, candy dot like circles around Fukushima, 1,100 of them at last count, that are actually enormous containers to hold the constantly running ocean water used to keep three leaky, melt down damaged, nuclear reactor cores cool. Then there is the way a Brazilian river branches out in a pattern mimicked closely by the patterns of clear cut deforestation we are carving into the most important carbon clearing, oxygen producing, engines on the planet. I guess we can be optimistic and say humans can find beauty anywhere, but only as long as we don’t look too closely and can forget the destruction, murder and ruin we have inflicted there.
