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“Our contemporary environment is quite turbulent, often over-stimulating us to the point of being dulled to the underlying reality of each moment and every place. The “visual pauses” I create are a response to our routine lack of mindfulness, providing the viewer with opportunities to regain focus and to intuit the unfathomable in the worldly.” |
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“Our contemporary environment is quite turbulent, often over-stimulating us to the point of being dulled to the underlying reality of each moment and every place. The “visual pauses” I create are a response to our routine lack of mindfulness, providing the viewer with opportunities to regain focus and to intuit the unfathomable in the worldly.”
Nathan Abels, Lost to Sight, 2009. Ink and acrylic on paper, 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Rule Gallery.
What Lurks Beneath
Nathan Abels
I am from Indiana, currently living and working in Denver, Colorado. I got my Master’s Degree in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2005. Relatively soon after graduating, I moved to Denver where I did work as an aerial survey photographer. This point of view on the landscape crept into my earlier works about the suburban environment. My current work continues to be primarily made up of photographically derived representational paintings and drawings of landscapes and their inhabitants. Many of my recent works are nocturnes executed in a spare, muted palette and inspired by what Keats described as “straining at particles of light in the midst of great darkness.”
These high-contrast works often combine natural and man-made aspects of the landscape; a spot-lit waterfall, the light from a spelunker’s headlamp on a rock face, or street lights on the fringes of a Colorado wildfire. I am constantly hunting for images to incorporate into my work. Many of the source images in my works are my own, but some are based on found photographs, or combinations of photographs. The images I choose often explore the periphery or vignettes of the landscape with each image depicting a visual pause in an ongoing event. In some works, the pause may be literal – such as a camera-trap focusing on the movements of wildlife. In other works, the pause may describe a personal moment of stillness. Our contemporary environment is quite turbulent, often over-stimulating us to the point of being dulled to the underlying reality of each moment and every place. The “visual pauses” I create are a response to our routine lack of mindfulness, providing the viewer with opportunities to regain focus and to intuit the unfathomable in the worldly.
