Ann E. Coulter
Pastel Drawings
Artist Statement
My interest as an artist centers around the effort to give voice to nature within our current culture. I believe there must be some validity in re-connecting with the natural world around us, investigating its power and potential, and its role in our daily lives. There is a singular truth in nature that speaks to a moment, yet spans eternity. Through my drawings, I want to see what I haven't seen, and discover what I don't know; those elemental truths.
The imagery in these drawings moves beyond the predictably scenic, distant vista of the traditional landscape, searching for a new construct that is visually compelling and challenging. Confronting the viewer with extremely close-up, larger than life renditions of the weedy wayside, I try to question our assumptions and pre-conceived notions concerning what we consider to be valuable and what we consider to be dismissable, what we think we know, and what we really don't know at all.
The resultant pastel drawings, derived from photographs taken from my local surroundings, immerse the viewer in a tangled landscape, struggling to determine where they are and what is being seen. The physical effort to "see" these drawings, and to gain some sense of place, echos my conceptual concerns regarding our difficulty defining the role of nature in today's culture, as well as the challenge to understand the places in which we live.
The process of looking at these images also requires time: an extended, concentrated experience of sorting out the "thicket". Given our fractious, information-saturated world, investing the time to stop and examine all that is below the glossed-over surface seems a pertinent first step as we try to find our place in today's landscape.