Vistas

Greg Kucera Gallery

Seattle, WA
April 4 – June 1, 2019

The show’s title, Vistas, refers to the panoramic views offered by Waterston’s fourteen recently painted oils on panel and fourteen new watercolors on paper. The paintings drift mysteriously between recognizable landscape and an otherworldly, fluid space as flora and fauna are integrated with spectral apparitions. Horizons dissolve into shadow behind layered veils of mist and fog pulling the viewer into the netherworlds between land, sea and sky.

Waterston says about this work: "Throughout my artistic career, I have always held an unwavering interest in the early history of landscape painting. I have appreciated its origins as an independent genre and the strangeness of its imagined spaces, both physical and psychological.

The paintings that comprise Vistas bring forth motifs and pictorial constructions which reference the inventive and very peculiar landscapes of the 16th century, in particular the paintings of Albrecht Altdorfer and the Flemish Primitives. I use landscape as a point of departure for other painterly explorations. Panoramas, expansive views and hovering perspectives give way to calligraphic gestures and painterly flourishes, all hinting at a natural world gone awry.

The works are both earth-bound and cosmological in their approach, creating somewhat heady, destabilized pictorial spaces. I often describe in my work the relationship between that which is recognizable and then the unknowable: unsteady, tenuous worlds, both beautiful and, at times, monstrous."