Recent Painting Selections
My current work reflects the often volatile nature of metropolitan life. This reflection of volatility, seen particularly in the abstract foundational cloudbursts which fill my canvases, derives also from my longtime fascination with volcanic activity. I utilize impressionistic overlays of metropolitan architectural renderings inspired by my visits to Japan and my reaction to the compact urban environment of Tokyo and other major cities there. My paintings are redolent of the tension between man-made urban structures and the forces of nature and also expressive of the way they manage to coexist. These often ghostly images combine fine detail with broad sweeps of near abstraction in vibrant color. Questions arise through the unsettling nature of the imagery, are these images of the present, past, or future? Are they warnings? These temporal questions lend themselves to the ambiguous nature of the work.
The possibility of visualizing energy and time in an artwork is something that intrigues me; to play with the interchange between color vibrations and allowing the viewer to become the synapse between painterly elements, completing the energy wave. Mixing line, shape, and surface variation with highly saturated color, and spatial imagery, the tension and disparity causes a viewer’s brain to jump the gap to figure out what he/she is looking at, this becomes the spark that contains energy.
Noah Landfield
October, 2010
