Contemporary image culture has changed the colors we expect the world to contain. The 'Chromatic Landscapes' series 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 reimagine this landscape from within a contemporary visual culture shaped by Pop and post-Pop aesthetics, screens, filters, and digitally intensified imagery. The paintings move between iconic California landmarks and quiet residential streets — places often encountered through various media as well as in person. The paintings in the Chromatic Landscapes series are built from discrete units of color — patches, strokes, and dots that remain visible up close and cohere at a distance. This language recalls Post-Impressionist 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 reconstructions of perception rather than mere illustrations of beautiful scenery. The series asks: What does landscape look like when our visual expectations have been shaped by the visual and chromatic intensity of post-Pop and digital culture? The answer is a recalibration of perception, not just an intensification of color — a shift in what we have learned to recognize as natural. Color becomes the structure of the image, and painting becomes a means of examining how contemporary visual culture shapes our experience of place.
