Brad Durham
ARTIST STATEMENT
While working on a series of landscape drawings (UNTITLED 3561 – 70) in 2017, a new, abstracted approach emerged that redirected years of my artistic practice. These new drawings focused on my vision of the primary forms, structures and motions within Nature. I had intended the works (on velum) as purely a reductive exercise: questioning the relationships of color and form in a minimally expressive manner while acknowledging the primordial spirits within Nature.
I had no expectations, yet these new works altered everything for me. It was like finding a new feeling. Building on these fresh insights, I started a series of large-scale paintings on panel. The new landscapes weren’t about representation but became a more intimate and emotive exploration. Leonard Bernstein once said, “Any great work of art revives and re-adapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world.” I hope to revive and re-adapt (by re-framing) landscape painting. My focus is on transforming the visual language of landscape painting from passive representation to one that expresses and responds to Nature with a focused emotionality. This is the world I want my viewers to experience / inhabit.