CALIFORNIA Drawing

URBAN LANDSCAPES Through time, with different means (drawing, painting, engraving, optical objects), work is structured by an interior and geographical path. A bound develops with the exterior world. San Francisco is an attractive city because it is atypical. Forged on heights, wilderness, natural violence, haunted by the shadow of periodical earth movements, cleared by a tonic breath coming from the Pacific, it abounds in ceaselessly renewed energy. Its architecture springs from the fog, opens up: the sun and the winds of the ocean bring brightness, contrasts; color is more brilliant and stronger. Every hollow, every hill contains and gives away a vision - an unexpected space. Crossroads in suspension allow us to mesure the silence, the peace - a breath - before beginning a descent or an ascent. The existence of these small intimate areas composes with the high architectures of the center. Walking, travelling around the city helped me catch different visions, study the possibility of multiple structured compositions, understand the specific properties of these urban landscapes. Through memories, pictures I gathered, my work regurgitates and defines these characteristics into a personal idea or reaction to it; a way to apprehend an environment with personal codes. In order to access these memories, I need to express and use a duality between a sense of intimacy found in the arrangement of space, and a more estranged openness. I contaminate an exterior space with these sensorial particularities, coming from inside; in order to escape coldness, size, but also: recapture, tame these surroundings, and reassess perspective. A reconstruction, a reorganization of urban environment. Maria Bill