Lorraine Cooke

I use 'landscape' as a subject to explore aspects of the human relationship with the environment, addressing the importance of landscape painting within contemporary visual culture; centring on notions of ‘inscape'. The term 'inscape' has been applied to aesthetically varied artworks but commonly conveys some feeling of representing the artist's psyche as a kind of interior landscape and so emphasizes the human condition.

My process involves developing a language through painting and drawing that communicates different types of narrative; to create a family of marks and forms that are characteristically my own and remain open to interpretation. I respond intuitively and directly to the landscape - an intensive re-perceiving of the landscape at work - shaped by changing light conditions. 

My drawing processes are responsive to landscape through the combined variety of lines and marks made in the creation of imagery to include; the printed, scratched, erased, scissor-cut, and painted lines/ marks and the spaces between them. 

Aside from the ideas, thoughts, transformations, and experiences of landscape that we amass, our interpretation and understanding of ‘landscape’ is conditioned by what we bring to it. We perceive the landscape through a complex lens charged with impeding memories, meanings, and illusions collected throughout our existence. Landscape is much more than a view, it is a reflection of our consciousness. 

Image details: 'Vista II', Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 79.5 x 99.5 cm.