The i55s.

Ran into this statement by artist Anne Madden on Ill Seen, Ill Said last week and thought the timing of it being posted and my exposure to it was a notable synchronicity. It really sums up a good deal of what I've been trying to wrap my own head around regarding my soon to be exhibited series of landscape paintings of the Stevenson Expressway (Interstate 55).

I am here before you, a visual artist, a painter with my necessarily-subjective viewpoint looking out from the landscape of my life. And this necessarily-subjective viewpoint is all that I can bring you, born as it is of my experience of being a painter, of seeing my way and trying to make sense of being-in-the-world, with the constant self-questioning that accompanies this.

I will give you some reflections on this experience. I imagine that most artists, whatever their medium, are trying to uncover or discover a reality beyond actuality, trying to make visible invisible aspects of the world, however they conceive or perceive them to be.

~ Anne Madden

Not exactly how I approached these paintings, but this makes a lot of sense to me.