The Modern Landscape
Current painters don’t get enough credit for their innovation. Art is cyclical, after all, and patterns and narratives often resurface after each decade, leaving a lot of the public to believe that art is no longer about creation, but re-creation.
My answer to that?
You’re not looking close enough.
San Francisco based artist Darren Waterston is one of the contemporary painting elite that focuses his work on social influences and generational learning (as most creative people do). His work, as a man growing up in post-war decades, in a technology fueled and environmentally cautious landscape, is driven by experience. It is highly self conscious, and interestingly reads like a prophecy of the future of the natural world.
Waterston depicts creatures with a halo of light- usually placing rats, butterflies, insects, and birds within his foreground- and leaving the viewer to imagine new galaxies of the future with his glowing, glossy work on wood panel.
What is most interesting about his work is the fuel in which feeds his imagination. Apocalyptic imagery fills each scene, and a wave of foretelling hits the viewer each time they see Waterston’s fallen trees, restless animals, and sublime galaxies spinning in a world on their own.
Similarly, looking at the work of Kara Maria, a Berkeley based painter, we begin to see patterns in subject, though through a completely different scope.
Kara Maria, a proclaimed vegetarian and human rights activist, often paints in grid like formats, occasionally plops a piece of steak on the canvas, and constantly- consciously or not- displays a sense of protest in her work. Though of the same subject, Maria’s understanding of the environment and the future is entirely different than Waterston’s. Copying is of no issue in the modern landscape, for even if the same futuristic warning of natural discussion were the topic of each painter today, no hand will paint the same linear path twice.
There is a constant battle for creativity and originality in our modern age of painting. What must be considered instead of originality is personality- and that is what has and always will differentiate the modern Picasso from the Mondrian.
The modern landscape extends further than the stroke of one man’s paintbrush.
For more information on Kara Maria, visit www.karamaria.com
For more information on Darren Waterston, visit www.darrenwaterston.com
Recent works from both artists are also on display at Di Rosa Art Alive! Preserve in Napa, CA. Waterston is featured in a group exhibition entitled Altered States: The Collection in Context, from October 31, 2009 through January 23, 2010; Kara Maria is part of the permanent collection.
