Lane Williamson
Painter
About the Work |
An artist friend of mine and I were
talking about why we paint what we paint. He recalled being a child
looking out the windows at night into the woods he had been in during
the day and being grateful that he was now tucked indoors. I confessed
that at that same age, and at that same hour of night, I used to
climb out my bedroom window and run to be in the woods, listening
to the deep sounds, smelling the sweet decay beneath me. I am sure
my world view and my work reflect the belief that trees breathe,
rocks weep and the collective listens eternally.
I look for the out in the open secrets in nature: thick atmosphere, the patterning of a forest, flat light, wetness, charged air and color that layers itself endlessly on objects. Earth has its marks and these are the muse for my own marks and for my work. A winter thicket covered at dawn with hoary frost or the underside of an ancient tree uprooted in a damp forest challenge me to focus on what at first might seem insignificant: the oddity of a moment in portrait, the land as still life. My landscapes are portraits of an instant and they are self portraits as I paint my own direct experience of nature. They are still life as any mosaic of earthly detritus is for me. I strive to create a suggestive spiritual atmosphere in my work: evocative views of nature and the land’s mark. As I restructure nature’s architecture I tempt the viewer to reorganize their own assumptions about the visible world. In current work I challenge myself to iteratively
render objects – to
push and pull through space, developing forms from the bones out.
I penetrate flat space, exploring light, mass, color and texture
to re-imagine the familiar elements of the landscape. I use my
own mark and the physicality of the medium to establish a decided
psychological
edginess, purposefully developing highly textured passages. |