Linda Kunik

STATEMENT

The land has always been a reference and source of inspiration for my art. My first paintings were watercolor landscapes. But wanting to work more conceptually, I began to ask questions regarding issues that combined formalism, globalization and those concerning the environment. These queries led to using both abstraction and representation in an attempt to bring an awareness of the earth’s profound beauty, as well as a realization of how truly fragile the land is. This work led to a discovery that all of these paintings describing environmental disasters also had a human parallel.

Wanting to concentrate in a more positive vein, I decided to switch gears and do something proactive. This led to a four-year gardening project; one that fed artist/gardeners and built community within a community, and then there was the garden, itself, becoming the “painting,“ its planting, sowing and harvesting an ever-changing composition.

The projects that followed began my investigation of perception. At this point, I began to use photography in my work, but always viewing it from the eye of a painter. Photographing the garden, I created close up images of the heirloom tomatoes and their insides.

Then began my experimentation with process and perception. The first series realized a life-long dream of combining painting and photography in the same image. Using photographs of walls and natural objects from my travels, the images posed the question, what’s the photograph and what’s the painting? The second series experimented with emulsion, releasing the translucent image of a photo from its paper background. Current work uses this emulsion process to juxtapose the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi Indians with the hi-rise dwellings of Denver, Colorado. Future projects will experiment with the emulsion process and the painting/photograph combination.

Linda Kunik
lindakunik@gmail.com
www.lkunik.com