Western Landscapes

This series of paintings by Cathy Marc treats our relationship to nature and landscape, specifically, how we perceive it and experience it. In general, in modern urban life our contact with nature is second hand, filtered, for example by the nature programs shown on T.V., or partially obscured by our car windows as we travel through the landscape. The origin of this series on landscape painting is the idea that we have a vast visual knowledge of western American landscape through our familiarity with the western cinema genre. The western has rendered this landscape with its vast plains, sculptural rock formations, dense pine forests and the like, as famous as the actors themselves who starred in these films. The image of these landscapes has become mythic, synonymous with the epic confrontation between man and nature that was the colonization of the American west. In these films, the landscape becomes one with the action and the characters, to the point that it is now impossible to separate the landscape from these stories and their cinematographic contexts. Thus we do not see these landscapes innocently, but rather through the filter of our prior contact with them on cellulose.

The paintings in this series do not set out to depict these western landscapes in any way realistically because, in effect, the subject of these works is not nature or landscape specifically, but rather our filtered perception of it. For this reason, the paintings are rendered in a loose, wash-like style reminiscent of watercolour which is the traditional landscape medium. This allows for a light, gestural rendering of the landscapes because they are, after all, paintings of moving images. The depicted landscapes are reduced to codes of paint and colour which treat all uniformly: foreground, background – figure and landscape. This is done in order to break any hint of a realistic rendition of the image and to reduce all to landscape, even the props and characters in the scenes. The resulting merger of figure and background also flattens the image as though we were looking at these spectacular landscapes through the long lens of our a priori cinematographic encounter with them.