Elisabeth Condon
Above: Night Stars, 2008
Having lived in or traveled to Los Angeles, New York, Tampa, Miami, Hong Kong, Australia and China, Elisabeth Condon enjoys how the landscape form layers time, place and memory. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees for painting at the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Now as an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of South Florida, she divides her time between Tampa and Brooklyn. Her itinerant mode inspires her "to reconsider space through the simultaneous perspectives of traditional Chinese painting."
Double Fragment, 2010
Statement
The multiple perspectives and time-lapse compositions of traditional Chinese scrolls make perfect sense in a landscape defined by movement, frequent travel and global culture. I adapt them in my paintings of fictional landscapes. Beginning with poured paint on canvas fuses trauma with release in a historically grounded gesture that continues to resonate. From the compositions these improvisational shapes create I offset areas of intense detail with expanses of open canvas. The shift in transition compresses space into layers, like a Rolodex.
Sketches I've made on my travels form a vocabulary of trees, pavilions, explosions, webs and stripes that appear and reappear within fields of translucent color, approaching form as peripheral. The imagery, palette and climate of where each painting is made evolve a unique pictorial logic so that making a painting becomes like taking a trip.
Theorist Francois Jullien's concept of blandness in Chinese painting "not as the absence of defining qualities but as the harmonious union of all potential values - an infinite opening into human experience" liberates content as form into gesture. This frees imagery from the natural world to metamorphose into abstract marks and pours, as if materializing the imaginary wanderings of the 14th century painters Wang Meng and Huang Gongwang through paint.