Chromatic Landscapes
Chromatic Landscapes began with my encounter with California light. Cobalt shadows, intensely green hills, saturated flowers, and the sharp clarity of the landscape seemed already heightened. I live within a visual culture increasingly shaped by screens, filters, and digitally intensified images. The paintings move between iconic California landmarks and quiet residential streets, places often encountered through photographs and screens as well as in person. Contemporary image culture has changed the colors we expect the world to contain. The images are built from discrete units of color—patches, strokes, and dots that remain visible up close and cohere at a distance. This language echoes historical techniques while reflecting a post-digital way of seeing. The individual brushstrokes are organized into ornamental rhythms. Rounded, single-color marks—resembling elongated droplets or embroidery stitches—repeat in lines, curves, and swirling bands across the surface. Their changing direction follows and reinterprets the forms and contours within the image, guiding the eye through the composition and giving the landscape a sense of movement. Juxtaposed saturated hues intensify one another through simultaneous contrast, creating a chromatic vibration across the surface. Together, the strokes create an ornamental field inseparable from the construction of the image: each mark functions simultaneously as a unit of color and a directional element. The paintings are not illustrations of photographs; they are reconstructions of perception. They ask: what does landscape look like when the eye has been trained by digital images? The answer is not a simple intensification. It is a shift in trust. Color becomes the structure of the image, and the act of painting becomes a way to examine how contemporary image culture now shapes our experience of place.
