Steam Cloud (Blue Lines) Painting

This painting is on paper, unframed. It is painted with oil paint, thinned down to create lucid layers. I paint on paper as a way to think through the hierarchies of painting, and what it means to create a piece of artwork. My work both celebrates and challenges the masterpiece, looking towards the turbulent landscape paintings of art history and modernist discussions of sincerity; it sits in its own space trying to work out what it all means. This work is an imagined landscape, zoomed in beyond obvious recognition. I like to create familiar but ambiguous shapes which could represent a number of different things to the viewer. You might see a cloud of steam, an explosion, or the thrashing plunge pool of a waterfall; you might see none of those things at all.