ivy hickam
2013
My landscapes explore my relationship to place and time. So, if I return to a place and it has drastically changed, I feel alarmed, violated. With climate change and the current state of the world my feelings about my work have shifted towards an anxious necessity to paint, to grasp the beauty in a fleeting season, day, moment, life. The last few years I decided to escape to the woods in my studio. I’ve gone bigger in scale and obsessively look at the minute details of nature while embracing its chaos.
Plein air painting is an integral part of my practice. The immediacy of this looking and thinking influences the large works in progress in my studio. I can see its influence on the work in painting speed, movement, feeling and color. In all the work, I naturally condense the space for composition, and this yields tension. Painting from life on excursions makes the work fresh and brings me back to the source, the reason I make the work. Answering the question of why paint a landscape at all.