I can remember when all I wanted to do was explore the drainage ditches that ran through my hometown. These concrete lined algae streams were veins of unharnessed “nature” flowing through the middle of small town America. My hometown was not big enough to have a zoo, or the museums and activities of a larger city. It was big enough to keep a kid, living a couple blocks from Main Street, and too young to drive isolated from “wilderness”. The ditches were my chance to explore and make discoveries “in the wild”. Once the childhood haze of imagination wore thin and the reality of my playground began to materialize, I found myself standing in an artificial creek. The algae parted to reveal the cement bottom to the stream and the meadows south of town turned out to be oil sludge contaminated buyouts where houses once stood. These revelations and the many more to come form the foundation of the work I now make.
The history of an environment or inhabitant can be represented through process. The multiple progressions and build up of varied layers of oils and minerals mesh and blend like the layers of an ecosystem. My approach to surface application allows me to use an assortment of heavily textured buildup through finer realistic rendering informed by my interest in past artists from the Ashcan School, Abstract Expressionists and Neo-romantics. Numerous printmaking processes, digital stencils and layered application of paint mirror the thinned biodiversity, litter, invasive species and residual chemical contamination, which are all part of our familiar landscape. I do not think of the images as being a looking glass into the future, but an introspective embellishment of the present.
Peter Hay - Reticulation - Ingredients - Rivers - Ex is T(h)ere - Unearthed - Commons - Almost Home - Painting - Mixed Media - Printmaking - Scientific Introspective - Interlude - Home