Jane Culp’s paintings and drawings arise from direct encounters with the landscape. Working outdoors in demanding conditions, she responds to the shifting forces of weather, light, distance, and terrain with an energetic, modernist language of form and movement. Her paintings convey not only the appearance of a place, but the physical sensation of being immersed within it.

“I’m interested in the life and language of form,” Culp writes. “How form moves into space, how light and distance absorb and magnify it, and how rhythms in space release forms that split, swell, dissolve, and fall back again.”

Painting across the deserts and mountain regions of California and the American West, from the Anza-Borrego Desert and Joshua Tree to Yosemite Valley and Death Valley, Culp often works in severe weather conditions, sometimes strapping her easel to her knees against high winds. The intensity of these experiences informs the physicality and structure of the work.