TitleKind of Blue (for EM)
Artist
Leslie Wayne
(American, b. 1953)
Date2006
MediumOil on panel
DimensionsOverall: 75 x 98 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, May 3, 2017
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of the artist, 2017
Object number2017.10
Label TextArtist's statement on painting and the nature of landscape, 2010:My relationship to landscape is rooted in memory and the particular light, colors and geography of the West where I grew up. Inspired by the 19th Century Romantic Landscape painters, I think about how I would articulate my reverence for nature but as a secular abstract artist in the 21st century. Rather than paint pictures of landscapes, I capture the corporeal essence of nature - the alchemical wonder of natural phenomena: compression, subduction, morphogenesis - so that the narrative passages are packed into the interstices of each successive layer of paint, testing the range of Richard Serra's famous "Verb List" by pulling, scraping, folding, cutting and collaging the paint as form.
In the large horizontal multi-paneled pictures (a nod to Elizabeth Murray and Mary Heilmann) I create spaces that, while far from illusionary in the traditional sense, are nevertheless frontal compression of movement of time. Generally read from left to right, they express the forces of moving water, shifting tectonic plates, and our toxic impact on the environment.
I think of these paintings more as visual manifestations of physical forces rather than images of landscapes, which are meant to inspire a sensation that is analogous to being in the natural world. By eliminating traditional narrative as a mediator, I can capture the compression of time and history through abstraction and metaphor.
Kind of Blue (for EM), 2006 was directly inspired by Elizabeth Murray's Painter's Progress, 1981. I used Murray's composition of multiple panels tilted on their axis to create a large-scale painting in multiple parts, using the same angle to tilt the paintings in the direction of the image of flowing water.
