ARTIST STATEMENT
In the year 1073, Painter and theorist Kuo Hsi asked, "Why do people love landscape?" and answered, "Hills and gardens restore our nature (chi),
so we should visit them often".
Painting for me has always been a means of approaching and understanding the natural world both as we find it and how we apprehend and reconfigure it. The rational construct of the framing rectangle provides limitless interpretive space in which to experience multiple realities. I am particularly interested in creating work with the power to suggest experience rather than define it, where engagement is, in a sense, physical and one enters the painting as one might enter a forest or take the first step on a path. My current work focuses on the ephemeral nature of light as seen through the lens of an abstract painting practice that is at once critical and meditative, formal and yet deeply rooted in the seen. I think of paintings as places that one can revisit often as one would a favorite mountain, tree, garden, or building.
- Julian Jackson |
