Mark Bowers

Indigenous - Rumination "Stone" Resting on a Tripod, Poplar Wood Sculpture

2021

There has always been timelessness in the appreciation of landscape painting, and at times an almost visceral or spiritual response. However, the contemporary quotidian landscape seems striped of some of these earlier qualities—it is what I see and drive through daily. In this environment, I search for the critical possibilities, vignettes I can easily apply, stage, and manipulate as a diary. My work consists of small-scale highly detailed landscape paintings. They are inspired by the comfort, trepidation, and beauty found in the mundane Chicago Suburban existence. I combine nature, decorative house wares, municipal structures, and personal artifacts to hint at current life and future implications in the orchestration of these elements. Each work in the series is a portrait of a search for markers on a journey, an attempt to learn from what is palpable and to appreciate the intangible. The paintings are meant to suggest the truth in the un-idealized moment--the actual truth only exists off the edges of my canvas, off stage, and in the experience of the viewer. Drawing the objects in these paintings is like positioning characters on stage in a play, each adding to the dramatization. For example, the sky’s ‘role’ embodies a duality of expansive hopefulness and luminous foreshadowing; smoke is the symbol for the unknown, while water towers denote conjured romantic outcomes, as shadows lure the impractical. They embody the background and visual noise of an anxiety within the consolation of present day living.