Paul Paiement

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://www.paulpaiement.com

City / State: Long Beach, CA

It’s an exciting time to be alive. We live in a period that is reminiscent of the Romantic era. Our fast-paced, controlled, ordered, synthetic, technologically driven culture has created a deep desire to reconnect with the vast and ever-changing natural world. Like Henry David Thoreau in Walden, we seek a slower, more deliberate life. Though seemingly separate from nature, we are, in fact, nature. My paintings hybridize the inorganic or “manmade” synthetic elements of culture (in the form of architecture) with the organic elements of the natural world. I attempt to reconcile these binaries through the visual languages of linear/atmospheric perspective, representation/abstraction, and the technique of layering. The landscapes I choose to paint lack any specific identity or location. I use atmospheric perspective to create a naturalistic scene that is vast and infinite. The airbrushed plexiglass overlays are flattened architectural drawings. Though flat, they are drawn in perspective and create a geometric abstraction that contrasts with the detailed representation in the landscape. A hybrid is the result of a comingling of nature and machine.