Week One - #2

Patricia Cain

Nullabor Landscape II, 2021

Mixed Media

Patricia Cain’s work interests me because it seems like an impossible task to create a landscape without any concrete images. This painting looks almost like what the artist has left over on their smock after painting a different painting. She clearly interpreted the landscape through a chaotic lens, and I wonder if that had anything to do with being produced during the pandemic. I think that the colors she used make it so unique because they are very industrial and concrete, and the landscape is not at all cloaked in green and blue tones of the real earth. The negative space is also a very important part of the painting, there is nearly half of the painting missing from both the top and the bottom unlike any other landscape. This gives the illusion that you don’t know where to walk in this landscape and whether you are going to walk off into the sky or into a hole. It’s quite anxiety producing but the repetitiveness of strokes also has a calming effect.