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The Birth of a City Painting

Esther Hoflick

Canada

Painting, Watercolor on Paper

Size: 8 W x 5 H x 0.1 D in

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Originally listed for $190
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About The Artwork

My practice investigates the conscious experience of place as metaphor for unseen or subconscious worlds. Through the juxtaposition of abstracted and representational marks, parallels between natural and constructed landscapes are delineated. Landscape, a direct representation of our environment, alludes to our collective state of being. My images are playful philosophical explorations into ideas of collective identity and cultural myth. Personal experience of contrasting spaces- wild, rural and urban- are a point of departure. Connections are outlined between organic forms and geometric motifs by likening them, also, to the natural and the man-made respectively. A vocabulary of marks are used to interwreathe the macroscopic with the minute thus creating images of imagined terrains that toy with and extricate perspectives. Contemporary landscapes are regularly punctuated by, often absurd, moments of human impact. Correspondingly, dream imagery will bring forward out of place ideas, difficult to decode. Considering Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, these contradictory moments of human impact may emblematically parallel the subconscious experience. I interject my landscapes with unexpected symbols in order to evoke the existential through play or jest. Moreover, I am interested in withdrawing from conventional forms and surfaces, in order to bring landscape painting into a contemporary context. The relationships between reality and fiction, natural and constructed, between waking and dreaming – are mischievously questioned but not defined. My art is about the experience of place and lightheartedly suggests that contemporary landscape may be a direct depiction of our collective subconscious identity.

Details & Dimensions

Painting:Watercolor on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:8 W x 5 H x 0.1 D in

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My practice is an exploration of re-enchantment and what it means, on a phenomenological level, to be human. The focus of my artistic investigations throughout my MFA has been centered around perception and our relationship to our physical world. My interest in perception is motivated not only by my fascination with the potential animism of the physical world, but equally by my captivation with the relationship between nonsense and meaning. Significantly for me, I see these relationships as chiasmic - as continuums, not bifurcations. Merleau-Ponty explains the chiasm through the metaphor of holding one’s own hand, the external sensations and internal perceptions are intertwined, inextricable. Further, I’ve been interested in theories which suggest that contemporary art discourses seem to be re-enchanted by an old idea of the kinship between art and a belief in the animism of the physical world. Ideas of animism and a chiasmic awareness of ourselves within our environment continue to be relevant today in relation to New Materialisms. New Materialist theories are environmentalist and feminist ways of interpreting the agency of the material world through language and scientific investigation. For example, these theories explain that the differentiation between humans and objects, or between words and meanings, are not simple dualities but complicated interrelations between internal and external sensations and perceptions. My paintings use the malleability of visual language to address the ambiguities of perception. Watercolour on plaster, reminiscent of fresco, evokes religious and spiritualist painting histories which were entangled in an enchantment or animism of the physical world. The absorbency of the surface speaks about the permeability of the veil between internal perceptions and the external world. The small found objects function as playful and ambiguous punctuation marks in a conversation that the paintings seem to have amongst themselves. The process of working with these materials is also enmeshed in metaphor. The ease with which I sand or erase the painted marks allows the integration of a comradery with uncertainty. It is a malleable decision-making process where the composition reveals itself gradually, where I can develop a sense of trust that the materials are working with me. It is almost as if the paint and the surface have some say, some potential agency equal to my own.

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