Beau Carey

My landscape based work focuses on liminal spaces; spaces that look at the ambiguous line between what is manmade and what is natural; spaces that lie between as they transition between one thing to the next, from farmland to a housing development, from a housing development to a vacant lot, from open space to a designated wilderness. I use the assessable language of landscape painting with the knowledge that landscape is always cultural, always present, and a process that bears with it a history that shapes the way we see and use the space around us. 

My work has always dealt with the question of how to represent landscape in a way that is both visually engaging and critically aware of important issues concerning land use.  I am compelled towards simplicity in a world that so often chooses needless complexity and thus I have found that a simplification of compositional elements, a series of horizontal bands, subltly shifting, layered color, or compositions of a few lines to create space, all have the desired effect of creating contemplative spaces that question how we use and perceive land.  We are separated from what we are seeing not just by a space at the bottom of each canvas but in how we actually relate to the larger world around us.  In my newest work I am employing the metaphor of a square lake or square reflection that intrudes into the landscape.  These twilight images are again transitional between human made and natural, attractive yet ugly, uneasy yet peaceful.  They flirt with the Narcisiss myth; a reflection of the fiction of human control over the land.