Slipping and Sliding in the Anthropocene
Statement for John Davis Gallery show April 2016
Holed up in this desert, I have become a hopeless anachronism within our dominant “weedy” species. Here I have the rare opportunity to investigate the surrounding wildlands trumpet call: it’s geological time clock viewed through the character of place. The challenge is to reveal through the language of painting dynamic tensions that form landscape wilderness order in all its perceptually diverse and palpable glory. To make it all present. My backpack of art knowledge and skill is never enough to get the job done.
Working along the naked flank of the eastern Sierras, and among the strange forms within the desert badlands, which the geologists call “an upside-down Grand Canyon”, I see millions of years of time stacked up in colored layers of sediment, tilted and compressed by tectonic forces, sculpted and polished by wind, rain and sun. This very physical, visual history of the earth forming itself is reassuring. And so is the act of painting which puts me in touch with the sense of a present kind of eternity. Because in my short lifetime we have come to realize that our human cusp of planet history is cause of a Sixth Extinction. Science fiction is no longer fiction; disregarding the web of life, our legacy is to add still another layer to the sediment.
But hope takes wing. There are my colors, my paints that can communicate the wonder of those strange earth forms with their air and light, talking to me, reaching out from the canvas while making their own space. My painting is about wonder, physicality, and the welcome hard work of process.”
Jane Culp