Artist Statement
I am attracted to the spaces between things, the unnoticed marginal spaces in the urban landscape. Likewise, as a painter I like painting in the unsettling place between abstraction and naturalism. My PROSAIC commonplace subjects have included big box store parking lots; pedestrian crosswalks at urban intersections; webcam traffic footage of midwestern freeways; and the landscape as viewed through municipal security cameras. My paintings are empty of human activity but filled with brilliant color and recollected light, uplifting the banal subject and granting it majesty. Merely recording the natural world does not interest me. I am moved by the internal logic of the paintings themselves, a world where things make sense somehow. Where everything lives and breathes in tension held together by beauty and paint.
Pavement dissolves. Is it concrete or is it grass? Is it land or is it water? Landscape as we know it is mutating, disappearing. Climate change has added anxiety, poignancy and grief to the traditional concerns of the landscape genre. I am committed to the transformation of the urban environment even as I long for the consolations of nature.
Susan Maakestad
Memphis, TN
Pavement dissolves. Is it concrete or is it grass? Is it land or is it water? Landscape as we know it is mutating, disappearing. Climate change has added anxiety, poignancy and grief to the traditional concerns of the landscape genre. I am committed to the transformation of the urban environment even as I long for the consolations of nature.
Susan Maakestad
Memphis, TN