Artist's Statement
I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses
— Cezanne
According to many prominent critics and painters (such as Robert Storr and Gerhard Richter), the biggest issue in painting in the last half of the 20th century has been the attempt to reconcile the abstract nature of painting with its representational role. This reconciliatory idea has been at the core of my own on-site landscape paintings in which the figure is the ground and the ground is the figure, and both are gestural marks and paint which look and feel like a specific place.
I am a perceptually based, plein-air (or on site) landscape painter who is trying to capture the character of seemingly ordinary, dense landscape in a way that reflects a passionate engagement with the scene and with the painting process.
I work on-site (Plein-air) because it is the only way for a painter to capture the multi-dimensional experience of a landscape, focusing in and out at various depths, noticing and trying to balance various relations among spatial elements such as color, size, shape and visual weight. The perceptual melting or push-pull that occurs when the viewers are continuously forced to focus in and out of my paintings parallels the experience of being in dense, tangled woods.
Moreover, by working on site I can achieve an expanded sense of time in the work. Monet famously remarked that he could notice the light change in a scene after only seven minutes, so his problem was how to capture the overall impression of a specific moment in so little time. Since he did not paint wet-on-wet, he could paint a little every day at the same time until finished.
For me, the passage of time is necessary for experiencing changing light, and hence color and forms. As the light changes in the scene, different features become highlighted, come to my attention, and are recorded on the canvas, not as a detail, but rather as an overall accent. In this way I see more than is apparent at any one moment. This is not available, for example, in a photograph, which only captures a single monocular instant. Our memory of places is much more like a summary of highlighted moments experienced at different times but compressed into one intense impression.
By creating the illusion of recognizable trees, I draw the viewers comfortably into what they perceive will be a conventional space. Up close, however, the images break down; the lush, gestural paint marks and occasional raw patches of canvas help to reinforce for the viewer the two-dimensional character of abstract painting as an activity as much as an end-product.
Lilian Garcia-Roig, 2004