For the past ten years, my approach in this series is to create psychological images utilizing the genre of landscape painting. I want to complicate the visual experience by supporting some pictorial conventions while undermining others, by having multiple visual languages concurrent within one image and by having areas of the painting in direct contradiction or conflict with each other. I’m interested in exploring the psychological space of holding simultaneously and contradictory beliefs or perceptions.

In the Abstracted Landscape series I use a plein air approach to find certain spatial relationships and then disrupt those relationships by using local color in a non-descriptive way to contradict the linear perspective of the drawing. Instead of looping back into realism, I have found that using known spaces and colors in a counterintuitive way creates a heightened psychological tension between what we expect and believe visually and what we experience.

This increased visual and mental tension I think comes from the echoes of the recognizable and how these cues encourage a greater subliminal belief in the landscape thus making the distortions more intimate.

Christopher Schade

Christopher Schade