ARTIST STATEMENT
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The landscape is a potent source of meaning. It offers an opening into the vastness of the universal, it triggers a very personal, fundamental recognition.
When I travel to untouched parts of the world I am compelled by its patterns and structures, the skin and the bones of the earth. I want to observe how desert mountain slopes are overcome by slow drifting sand, to see how green valleys morph into arid flats, how crevices follow the direction of fault lines. I want to be able to move from the examination of tangled roots in wetlands to the epic, aerial view of a glacier field. I want to feel the updrafts and temperature changes that echo the contours of the earth.
People of the 19th century were deeply stirred by artists' depictions of places they had never seen, stirred in a way that scientific accounts and maps could not achieve. My hope is that others will feel the sweep and power of the earth’s phenomenal and fragile fabric, so they may pause to consider, as I do - what is the meaning of this place?
My paintings have a strong sense of place and yet they are not realistic. Although descriptive, they do not reproduce the visual record so much as the experiential one. They inhabit a territory that lies between abstraction and realism.
We all carry our own inner immensity. The landscape makes possible thoughts that we cannot and do not have anywhere else.
Freya Grand 2021