Bristol Art Museam
Artist Statement
Direct experience is the foundation of my art practice. Every work begins in the act of walking a landscape, attentive to its changing light, and rhythms – the water, wind, birds, terrain …. These walks are performative actions in themselves, immersive acts of being present. Using cameras and spectrogram recordings to capture traces of the experience, I translate these encounters into photographs, and spectrograms, often drawing and painting on them, and into large paintings, typically working with canvases on the floor. My gestures - pouring, scraping, reworking, recombining result in paintings that feel less like representations than visual remembrances of being in nature. Series such as Horseneck Beach–Gooseberry Island, Taunton River, and the Destruction Brook Woods emerge from repeated engagement with particular places. Each carries the trace of return, of resonance built across many walks. Viewers are invited to experience these works as visual records of time spent in landscape.
Biography
Chris Page is a painter and photographer whose work explores the intersection of nature and abstraction. For over forty years, he has created large-scale canvases and smaller work including drawings and \photographic sequences. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Conceptual Art, his practice includes projects such as Eyes Toward Heaven, an installation at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. Page has exhibited widely in New England, as well as in Brooklyn, NY, and Santa Fe, NM. His education includes time at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and U Mass Amherst. After decades in Western Mass, he now lives on the Southcoast, where his walking practice centers on being by the ocean.