Metropolitan Landscapes #3 Drawing

Born 1971 Norfolk VirginiaProfessional architect and successful artist. Concentrating on abstract 2D architectural art.Christian Culver is a practicing Architect. His passion for architecture and his dedication to creating inspiring architectural environments have fundamentally led him to question the way in which we see, view and process the visual world around us.Christian's visual artwork seeks to explore this notion of 'seeing', and questions our individual and cultural capacity to observe, decipher and absorb visual information.An extensive traveler, Christian's work draws directly on the city metropolis. Taking architectural photographs of specific places and buildings, Christian then collages them directly into his work, overlapping and contrasting them with opaque blocks of geometric colour and form."My work combines shape, color, form, and architectural, 'city graphs', the 'work' literally translates a 'physical reality' into a two dimensional 'constructed map'. A map as a vehicle for a phenomenological way of 'seeing'.Christian's use of varied and differential scale combined with the indicative placement of geometric structure creates a strong sense of direction and delineation throughout all his work."My attempt is to engage the viewer on two levels, one on a large scale, and secondly on a small scale. The large scale investigates the relationships of colors, fields, and the viewers' sense of place. The small scale focuses upon very detailed fragmented, yet linked 'instances' or 'discoveries' that as a whole create a relationship.Through the process of transformation, Christian examines the actual concept of 'vision' - the ability to see, and perceive and his work reflects the intensity of visual information which we are now bombarded with everyday."The contemporary Metropolis is a series of fragmented 'instances' that, when rarely visualized as a whole, become a series of blurred locales referenced only by shape, color, and image. The transformation from a three dimensional environment into two dimensions, or from an 'architectural environment' into an 'art environment', becomes the 'in between' through which my work is generated. "The process and transformation of a three dimensional architectural landscape, onto a two dimensional picture plane, not only helps Christian to further explore his own sense of 'seeing', but strives to make others view and see the world around them.