In this virtual curation, Drew Wallis, Joe Karlovec and Laurén Brady each explore landscape in innovative and thoughtful ways. Their unique approaches offer new perspectives and highlight the beauty of the ever-changing natural world.
Drew Wallis
Drew Wallis, a UK artist currently based in Canada, creates playful paintings inspired by his travels through North America.
Wallis uses irregularly shaped panels as the base for his quick and heavy brushstrokes of highly saturated colour. Both the palettes and the shapes echo the location they are based on, with cool blues reflecting the cold temperatures of the North West Territories and the peaks of pigment mirroring the lush mountains of British Columbia. Wallis' longing to capture the essence of the land he depicts pushes the work beyond their aesthetics and they come alive with the physicality of the paint and shape. While most people take photos of their travels, Wallis' work goes beyond the still image to convey the feeling, movement and natural textures of the land, and they also act as an object to hold his memory. These 'roadside landscapes' allow the viewer to reflect on what it means to appreciate wilderness while passing through a place.
Drew Wallis explores landscape painting through his traveller's lens, offering his findings to us in these thoughtfully considered works. We feel inspired to explore new landscapes and appreciate the nature we pass through in our own landscapes every day.
Joe Karlovec
Florida based artist Joe Karlovec explores the intersection between collage and painting in bold and innovative compositions.
Karlovec layers sharp photographs of idyllic costal landscapes onto thick and shimmering metallic paint, offering a sculptural environment to envelop each for each image. The conflicting visual cues of crisply cut paper and bold, buttery paint forces the viewer to negotiate the characteristics of each medium, bringing clean digital language alongside tactile painting traditions. In a time where nature is often experienced second-hand through digital technology, the reproduction of a landscape in a printed image completely strips away its true essence and furthers Karlovec's portrayal of a constructed environment.
Joe Karlovec's work combines two media to offer a new perspective on the natural world, pushes the boundaries with the un-natural paint hugging each image photograph in an paradoxical embrace.
Laurén Brady
Michigan based artist Laurén Brady offers a thoughtful approach to landscape painting that celebrates the emotional attachment we connect to locations and memories important to us.
Brady pushes the boundaries of traditional landscape painting through a wide range of mark making techniques including a soft wet on wet effect, textural dry brushing, and sharp, scraping linework. Moments of pictorial clarity create reference shorelines, trees, and fences, offering the viewer clues to each location being depicted. The small scale of these paintings allows them to draw us into a moment in time, offering a travel-sized souvenir or memento of the memory. The installation of these paintings as interactive, stackable objects on a wall echoes the display of a photo in a frame or a sculptural object laid on top of a bookshelf of prized possessions, adding to the tender moment of reverence and reflection.
Laurén Brady's paintings are full of playful brushstrokes and bold colours that celebrate our day to day environment by capturing and reflecting upon a memory to make it more precious, something we can all be more mindful of achieving in our lives.
