Lindsey Douglas
Artist Statement
“...Earth is indeed a kind of living body and can therefore be expected to echo the structures of our own anatomy.” -Philip Ball
“My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates. They’re not nature per se, but a feeling.” -Helen Frankenthaler
Creativity constrained by physical and chemical forces is natural. Any creativity is bound by the laws of nature. The first thing that comes to mind is human creativity. I choose to see humans as an extension of the Earth: if Earth falls into patterns, we must do the same.
My work is in dialogue with nature. It is considering what we know, but thinking there has to be more behind the reasonings of the natural world; something adjacent to natural philosophy. I think there is an eternal truth or reason in the recurring patterns we see in nature. The Earth, for instance, has a sort of “inevitability of form.” It is a self-organized and constrained body that uses the repetition of forms it finds best suited. We see the manifestation of this in the similarities between human veins, tree branches, neurons, and river deltas.
Often in my work, I use maps, images, and explorations into nature as a means to discover the underlying forms of topography. By exposing myself to repeated imagery, I recognize the similarity of form, as they are all of the same Earth-based system. In uncovering the repeatability of form in the natural world, I am able to reveal a sort of inherent order. A version of this is the fractal, a common pattern that nature repeats at various scales. However, I seek to mimic more subtle and less specific patterns. Not ones with a planned order, but ones with a hint of structural familiarity.
I am thereby fascinated by the prospect of “forming nature into art.” In my paint woven “landscapes,” I explore the workings of the natural: chance, nuance, and depth. I collide paint with surface to create layers of luminosity. I stumble across my own natural order through the paint; the act of pouring and the process of evaporation. I become an extension of nature, a vessel, carrying out the Earth’s rhythms, enforcing only a small semblance of my own curated touch.
Quintessential of my work is the process of pouring onto the surface from above. The serendipitous moment in my work is discovering how the laws of nature have chosen to blend and later evaporate the paint. Recently, my work seems to evoke the forms of clouds in the expanse of the sky; sometimes clustered, distinct, and dense, yet other times wispy, blended, and light. Much like rain hitting the Earth, my surfaces remain fluid; ever changing, eroding, washing away, and evaporating. In some ways, the paintings are predetermined by nature’s inherent order. I react to them and they to me.
