With Night on the Dunes, footsteps walking down slopes of sand is the only audible, and moonlight is a gentle guide. The storm and the coming night and the mystery textures laid down like intermittent rainfall among the rocks and varnished densities. We watch clouds of turbulent color from the surrounding dimmed landscape, with which it will all shortly unify. No headlights beam in the distance it’s the dinner hour. Elevations here drain to lower lands, to the Devil’s Playground. Two Hills Darkening is likewise soundless. The optical twin is transitory, while the stark visual landscape underpins a sense of the gathering solitude. The contrasting light generates an afterimage, a double of the central yucca that flickers slightly to the side of and below its source. In the painting Ghost, the deep tones of backlit Joshua trees, Giacometti-like in their silhouettes, contort and twist in space against the backdrop of a yellow-gray Cima twilight. Miles reside in a single half inch of canvas closely related tones bring us depth at night. Distance and space are themes throughout much of the work.
The Preserve itself is twice the size of Rhode Island and has no services – gas and food can only be found in a few select spots along the perimeter. These are monumental places, outside our understanding of time. The enveloping silence leads easily to introspection, an awareness of how small we are in this landscape. Accumulation, containing the movement of both precipitation and slowly growing things, contrasts with the complete stillness of Snowglobe.
#Merrell violet storm series#
Color expands on these concepts throughout.Īll of the pieces in this series seek to portray the singular experiences I had while completing my residency in the Mojave National Preserve, and the work embodies the calm timelessness that was felt while spending time there. The deep dark foreground of Crescent Moon and Kelso Peak is a churn of thoughts plunging into night, while the idea of doubles in paintings such as Clones addresses the uniqueness of this environment. The land is the hero.įrom the diagonals and undulating topography in Mojave Storm to a wildly gesticulating Joshua tree in Antennae, action is contrasted with stability in the vertical palms seen in Water’s Edge, elongated and elaborated on through their reflections.
The distinctive terrain and plant life of the Mojave create an ideal template for these experiences by designing my canvases through composition, space, and color, I hope to construct some representation of that inner curiosity. “And in the end, the study of color is the study of ourselves.” – Joseph Albersĭrawing on the visuals endemic to the Mojave Desert, my work attempts to explore the psychological spaces that attend the physical, embodied in vast distance, silence and isolation.
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