“Land Structures”
Don Wass – Artist Statement
When I was fourteen years old, I was given a book about Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses. Architectural, archeological, and geometric shapes have influenced my work ever since. With hard edges against a background of loose form and color, and paint that fluctuates between ragged-edged and raw, to hard-edged and refined, my work is primarily an exploration of how color, texture, and composition work together in a translucent space, and how the architectural or geometric elements hold the compositions together.
The “Land Structures” paintings -- acrylic on Arches watercolor paper -- combine overlapping forms of hard and soft edges but with a shallower depth of field and more transparent layers of color than in earlier works. “Land Structures” explore above- and below-ground elements as examples of archeological stratification, and reflect on the ways in which human activities, like fracking and the burning of fossil fuels, threaten our planet.
