Ashley Lathe

Region: South

Website: http://www.ashleylathe.com

City / State: Charlotte, NC

My background in graphic design, and particularly my preference for conceptual design, provides the framework for my approach to art. Design is meant to manipulate oneís perception, to draw in the viewer. Good design allows the viewer to submit his or her own interpretation. It becomes then an individual experience. This objective I seek to achieve in my artwork. My focus is the recognition and celebration of that which is ignored, invisible, and overlooked in everyday life. As relics and symbols of the American Myth, and in the tradition of the realists, they are thus acknowledged. In painting, drawing, and printmaking, I build layers, through images, context, and/or color, to this point of realization.

In the Kansas series, I attempt to capture the awe that is inherent of the American landscape. The immensity of the moment, contained within a square, is meant to both contradict and exaggerate the notion of the banality. The common exists within the sublime. Each painting is essentially a color field image, but watercolor allowed for layering of subtle color gradations necessary to capture changing time, space and direction. Watercolor, as a medium, not only depicts these elements, it creates them. This series is in essence a vague narrativeÖit is what I viewed and experienced from a single bus ride across the land; a series of images, one after another. The view never changed; one building simply became another, with subtle variation in the color of the sky as the day passed.