My paintings explore the relationship between humans and our environment. These landscapes incorporate architectural elements and common signage text to question how we think about ourselves and our surroundings.
The constant barrage of symbols, images and other intangibles in our everyday lives makes it easy to forget that however much we build and virtualize, we remain products of the natural world. Although we increasingly control and abstract our surroundings, we are still rooted in and ultimately dependent upon the same natural processes for our existence and survival as we were millennia ago.
Even moments of surpassing natural beauty have been co-opted by our image-rich culture and its associations. Vivid sunsets, alpenglow, or shafts of light through clouds are still amazing phenomena, but attempts to represent them are often connected with sappy greeting cards or clichéd inspirational posters.
My current paintings attempt to both acknowledge and circumvent such connections by using the utterly mundane (text so ubiquitous we rarely consciously notice it) to bring attention to the sublime and place it back into the context of our daily world.
Tamara Stephas
2011