empty mountain Painting

My practice examines the inner workings of the romantic landscape. I am fascinated by visual clichés such as alpine vistas, Desert valleys and forest idylls, and the influence that such tropes hold to this day. Extracting and focusing on key elements of these landscapes - a lone tree, a pile of rocks, a patch of ground - I then begin to explore the gap between our perception and the reality of these archetypal places. 'hollow' is based on a lo-fi physical model: a crude facsimile of a fallen, empty tree trunk, created quickly from paper, glue and paint. Depicted subtly with little overt gesture, my aim is to open up space fore the viewers interpretation - a quiet act of defiance against the spectacular and the sublime. The process acts as a dual commentary on our unrealistic expectations of these landscapes and that of the artifice of painting itself. Like the back of stage set, a fibreglass tree in a. theme park, or a mountain scene painting on a concrete zoo enclosure, they have delusions of grandeur but ultimately fall down.