FORREST ELLIOTT
Painting the landscape challenges me to transcend the boundaries of my location and identity. I translate color relationships through observation and personal recollection in my work. Nuances of color and light are distilled to create essential forms, sometimes allowing the viewer to see just enough. Working within two distinct landscapes, coastal Southern Maine and the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, I blur many of their geographic qualities on the canvas. Specificities of a defined place begin to disappear. By stretching the boundaries of an exact time of day, the vibrancy of a specific season, or how light dances across physical planes of space, the landscape becomes ambiguous. Neither here nor there, somewhere in between. Observation, invention, and memory coalesce in my process. Each helps inform decisions I make when creating sensitive palettes, the quality of a shape's edge, or the compositional language of a painting. I revel in the notion that the electricity of a color or the sudden shift of the palette knife or brush across the canvas has the ability to alter our perception of reality. Painting, for me, is the act of translating the experience of seeing onto a two-dimensional surface. By doing so, I am creating a sense of place independent of a specific geographic location.
Instagram: @forrestkelliott
Painting the landscape challenges me to transcend the boundaries of my location and identity. I translate color relationships through observation and personal recollection in my work. Nuances of color and light are distilled to create essential forms, sometimes allowing the viewer to see just enough. Working within two distinct landscapes, coastal Southern Maine and the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, I blur many of their geographic qualities on the canvas. Specificities of a defined place begin to disappear. By stretching the boundaries of an exact time of day, the vibrancy of a specific season, or how light dances across physical planes of space, the landscape becomes ambiguous. Neither here nor there, somewhere in between. Observation, invention, and memory coalesce in my process. Each helps inform decisions I make when creating sensitive palettes, the quality of a shape's edge, or the compositional language of a painting. I revel in the notion that the electricity of a color or the sudden shift of the palette knife or brush across the canvas has the ability to alter our perception of reality. Painting, for me, is the act of translating the experience of seeing onto a two-dimensional surface. By doing so, I am creating a sense of place independent of a specific geographic location.
Instagram: @forrestkelliott