Desecrated Landscape: Swat Valley/Pakistan Painting

I am an artist interested in social and political issues living in NYC and NJ. In 2003, shortly after the onset of the Iraq War, Grace Graupe-Pillard began working on a series of paintings and photographs entitled DISPLACED and INTERVENTIONS focusing on the horror and human cost of wars being fought in far-off places. Another series The photographs depict images of soldiers, car-bombings, ruins, explosions, and refugees, which are digitally embedded into the familiar streets and parks of New York City, Baltimore and the New Jersey wetlands. Using the computer and digital filters, the implanted imagery often borders on the abstract, with heightened color and kaleidoscopic patterns portraying the ordinariness of our everyday reality blown apart. INTERVENTIONS attempts to make visually evident the ongoing tragic repercussions of war in our own backyard, as well as the equally powerful manipulation of the electorate through the politics of fear. In a world where terrorism, and cultural upheaval have dominated the news headlines, these paintings focus on the devastating effect of war and its impact on the civilian population. Entitled DISPLACED, this series correlates the displacement of civilians in war-torn countries with a visual disintegration of form, evident in both the creative process and in the final painted product. In each painting, the chaos of cultural disintegration is symbolized by the fragmentation of the picture plane. With repeated editing, I appropriate images from journalistic sources, blowing apart the reality of the photograph so that the final result is distilled and disintegrated from its original context, and reduced into unpredictably flatly colored eccentric shapes further emphasizing the fragmentation of form and removal from its original source. The process of translating these manipulated images into oil paintings involves a change in scale, color and texture, portraying a seductive beauty that reflects the political "sanitization" of the horrors of war. In 2009 I began a series of DESECRATED LANDSCAPES Landscapes that have been desecrated by war and violence, but still retain their majestic beauty. The fissures and cracks are not always visible, but their history is embedded in the roots and ancestry of the land. "Wars have always been fought over pieces of terrain that become obsolete,...Hamburger Hill, Dunkirk, Gettysburg - at the end of the day none of that terrain really mattered after it was done.