Paintings > Contemporary Romance

Romantic Landscape With Oil Geysers
Romantic Landscape With Oil Geysers
oil and enamel on panel
4 by 8 feet
2007

This painting uses the traditional bisection of some landscape paintings of the 19th century. These paintings were split in half, composed in a juxtaposition between a side influenced by humans, showing man made objects, and a side that represented the wilderness, showing only animals and plants. Many of these paintings also showed the effects of deforestation by depicting tree stumps in the foreground. I have tried to update and exaggerate these ideas by making oil shooting out of the ground. Instead of man being depicted literally, I represented the human influence with a sweeping white mechanical blob with tracings of man made objects. The white sweeping blob opposes a desert on the other side, also a reference to the expanding deserts around the globe.