ART CHARTOW

FINE ART
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Artist’s Statement

My current work focuses on the structures and artifacts of heavy industry that have shaped the American landscape. Power stations, factories, steel mills and infrastructure represent strength, industrial might, the ability to vanquish nature. Yet all such structures are, like anything else in this world, ephemeral, transitory, vulnerable to the vagaries of global economics and technological progress. These places are strange, sinister and forbidding; beautiful, fragile, sometimes abandoned and decaying. Such landscapes speak of loss, transience, the passage of time and the brave futility of human endeavor when set against the inevitability of change.

Four hundred years from now people will look at these paintings (or so one hopes) and puzzle at the strange structures we built; they will wonder what they were used for and what the people who built them were like, much as we wonder about what we see in a painting by Bruegel.

The ability of paint to express through contrasts, line and color the evocative power of light at a particular time of day under certain weather conditions never ceases to fill me with wonder. I try to use light as a key to unlock the emotions and memories my subject may hold, be it a steel mill, a rocky shoreline or a placid pond.