A Landscape Reclaimed
This series is a very personal look at Manitoba, a visual diary of rural landscape that is honest, sensual, and self-reflective. Drawing on memory, photographs, and the internet as source material I use a painterly method informed by reduction and abstraction where the image can sometimes become subjugated to my primary tools of colour and paint. The landscape is generalized to basic forms and an expression of a place. The abstract aspect of this work, the ethereal boundaries of horizon and prairie sky, and blur of built structure overgrown by prairie weed and bush, illustrate human endeavor and natural environment interwoven to a point where there are no clear distinctions.
As a series Remnants marks the devolution of abandoned rural spaces it explores a prairie landscape of deserted sites and forgotten structures. The images recollect my encounters with derelict spaces populating the prairie landscape. I am particularly interested in declining homesteads, town sites and once cultivated or grazing fields that have been abandoned. What becomes apparent is that as man made objects and spaces are enveloped in natural re-growth, they combine to make a new space that is both natural and man made. These sites can neither be considered pristine nature nor urban-rural landscapes; rather they provide a new perspective illustrating a state of harmonious decline and re-growth.
Oil on canvas
142cm x 76cm
2007