Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Anderson, Kim

Keywords

Oil Painting, Landscapes, Digital Images, Church, Frederic Edwin, Cole, Thomas

Area of Concentration

Art

Abstract

Through the traditional mode of oil painting, I create virtual landscapes based on digital images of nature found on the Internet. Removed from their external location, and further removed from reality through manipulation software, these paintings present an unsettling, disorientating, and alien nature, which resembles the glaring, artificial media screens we now inhabit. My work does not seek the sublime in nature, but in the structures that have destroyed it: technology, globalization, and capitalism. This sublime pull—a combination of seduction and revulsion—is represented in my depictions of nature as placeless, outside space and time. The seamless division of physical reality and virtual representation marks modern experience. My depiction of twenty-first century landscape is both-- and neither— a critique of capitalism and a capitulation to it. This is in contrast to the sanctified imperialism of nineteenth century American landscape painters, including Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. This exploration is meant to provoke contemplation on the current interactions of technology, land, and vision, as well as the possibilities a universal, multinational, and global landscape might offer.

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