Suspect Terrain: Paintings of the Southern California Desert and Mountains
I am overwhelmed with the feelings of awe and amazement for the Western desert Landscape, where raw sculpted earth is pounded with intense unforgiving daylight, and where immense spaces attach to an ever-present horizon line of sight which sports caricatures of stubby balancing vegetation. An infinite black velvet bowl of starry night offers an antidote to this tortured taut skin of landscape… Nature is always more than it seems, it is suspect in that it requires detective work to see the particular story about how it is made, and that the unbelievable can be physically actual. In these on-site wilderness paintings, primal forces that push, stretch and crumple vast forms are brushed in a painted language inherited from Tizian, Cezanne and Soutine. Painting outdoors is a passionate process of all-out scrambling to find moving painted gesture that captures the manner in which my eyes and brain comprehend this pictorial drama in real space and time before my brain gets fried or the light cunningly reverses appearances.
Increasingly, the “unfolding events” that make up these perceptual landscape paintings can be reached only through 4 wheel drive. Like a strange morphed creature who lives within the sand and rock troughs of an ancient seabed, the distance between eye and beauty has narrowed and the visible world has become, once again, instinct.
Jane Culp 2014