Sophia Heymans
These paintings express the personalities of places, and of the
people who engage those places in the hopes of developing a
meaningful relationship. They are part of a new project in which
I am making one painting per month for twelve months, each
inspired by the area around my Minnesota home. In terms of
style, I think of my paintings as layering the figurative narrative
of American folk art and the textural assemblages of abstract
expressionism.
Even though my landscapes respond to my surroundings, they are
imagined, based mostly on memories. The plants and landforms
in my works are characters of equal importance to the persons
among them. Within the crowded scenes, I paint the people
very small, portraying them in leisurely activities. These pieces
embrace our comic relationship to nature, separate from our
twenty-first-century technological existence but not as some sort
of escapist delusion or romantic fantasy.
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