Boom
Offramp
Offramp (detail)
Lynne McDaniel
Artist Statement
Lynne McDaniel’s work uses the language of the landscape to explore current events, as well as the sometimes-surprising beauty of urban existence. Her current body of work is inspired by Chinese hand scrolls, creating landscapes on paper using not the traditional ink and brush, but charcoal and oil paint. The work engages the scroll paintings in a dialog, using the same elements of panoramic format, monochromatic colors, and atmospheric quality. But rather than the dreamy, idealized scenes of the Chinese paintings, the work depicts the environmental and ecological changes caused by natural disasters, human intervention, and the passage of time. Often using news photos as sources, she paints the landscape then disrupts the image to indicate the place where things go wrong. The incursion can be a subtle dash of color, or a more violent stroke or erasure. The mostly black and white palette evokes the memory and nostalgia of vintage photographs, while small touches of vermilion echo the bright red seals on the scroll paintings. The destabilization or interruption of what is happening in the paintings reflects the artist’s growing uncertainty about what is happening on the larger canvas of our world.
Pastoral