Artist Statement

 

   My paintings open onto landscapes that feel at once remembered and imagined — places suspended between memory, dream, and myth. Rolling hills, clustered trees, solitary houses, vast skies, and reflective waters recur as archetypal forms, distilled into their essential geometry. These motifs act as both setting and symbol: the house as solitude, the trees as resilience, the horizon as possibility.

 

   Each work is less a depiction of a place than an evocation of interior space — a meditation on stillness, distance, and the tension between permanence and change. The land is pared down to lyrical curves, while the skies churn with layered color and light, suggesting forces greater than what can be contained by earth. In this balance of grounded form and restless atmosphere, I'm attempting to capture the moment when the outer world becomes a mirror for inner states of being.

 

   These compositions exhibit a deliberate restraint. The minimal details enhance the symbolic significance of each element, such as a vast sky or a group of cypress-like trees standing firm in a void. The repetition of forms throughout the series creates a visual language that becomes increasingly enriched with each variation. Like recurring characters in a novel, these motifs accumulate meaning over time, allowing viewers to move through the works as if through chapters of a larger narrative.

 

   My practice engages the long tradition of landscape painting but transforms it through abstraction and reduction. My surfaces are textured, layered, and luminous, inviting close inspection, while the horizons stretch into infinity, drawing the eye and imagination beyond the canvas. In their quiet power, these paintings suggest both the vulnerability of solitude and the resilience of form, evoking spaces where viewers may recognize not only a landscape, but also a reflection of their own interior landscapes.

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- Eric Coan