Overcast
Date
2020-05
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Abstract
My understanding of nature is tied to my experience growing up by the ocean on the East Coast of the United States. Seascapes and landscapes became a part of my dialogue before I started making objects. I have learned through painting that based on your cultural lineage, personal surroundings, and experiences within the natural world one’s perspective is manipulated. To be clear, when I refer to perspective I do not mean the illusionistic space created in a painting or your emotionally charged opinions, I am referring to a physical experience in a space seen through your eyes: your point of view. A person’s point of view while looking onto the world and existing within its environments is inherited and learned, yet I feel throughout each individual’s life there is constant transformation, newness, and uniqueness brought to this scope through lived experience.
My initial investigation started by looking at American Landscape Paintings. This felt like the right path considering my origins and underlying interest in nature. Researching my predecessors’ lineage and trajectory of these Landscape Paintings led me back to Europe. Again, this followed logic considering my European descent and half of my time spent painting in Düsseldorf, Germany completing this body of work. My goal was to question the long history of depicting nature within the medium of painting, traditionally represented through cropped and framed illusionistic spaces using paint on two-dimensional surfaces, and how these images have been influenced as well as helped shift and shape how humans have learned to see and perceive nature. Why is it that the tradition of American Landscape painting maintains such a specific, straight forward frame, yet other cultures' points of view and depictions of nature may take an aerial or layered approach? This is still at the forefront of questioning within my practice. Further, I have come to realize that nature is the framework from which my paintings and my Being function and exist within. Essentially, I am interested in ways of seeing. Instead of building something up through my paintings I aim to break visual moments down. How can I produce an object or multiple objects that force someone to think about their peripherals or reconsider their point of view while surrounded by tall trees that narrow when looking up but expand when walking through?
Description
Thesis completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts degree in the School of Art and Design at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, NY.
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MFA thesis, Alfred-Dusseldorf Painting, landscape