Elizabeth Hazan
Region: Northeast
I paint imaginary landscapes that suggest nature off-kilter. The imagery in my work is a mixture of invention and personal recollections, often from childhood. I work from an aerial vantage point as if hovering over an empty farm field and play between looping, investigatory lines and floods of color. I employ a tilt-shift perspective so that the ground below rakes up to large forms that evoke trees and clouds, shapes I then play with to draw out their inherent oddness and strange beauty. I am thinking as much about how the lines guide the viewer around the piece as I am about evoking the light and air of a specific landscape, mining the fertile border between landscape and abstraction. The term “dream logic” feels appropriate, where there are elements and light, a charged atmosphere that feels familiar to the viewer, but things verge on the surreal. I want a degree of ambiguity that resists easy naming.
