JANE CULP
EATING STONE, WILDERNESS PAINTINGS
May 18 to July 7, 2024
Reception for the Artist, Saturday, May 18, 4 – 7 pm
Oils and Watercolors painted on site from the rocky deep and dry spaces of Southern California
es of Southern California
Reception for the Artist, Saturday, May 18, 4 – 7 pm
Imagination and loss of the Wild is at the heart of this desert landscape painters show. Jane Culp is a painters’ painter. She is deeply concerned with the essential elements of building a painting, and furthering the language of painting evolved through centuries of Master painters. Her on- site expressive paintings are wed to the landscape she calls home- the high and low deserts of Southern California.
Culp’s deep space wilderness landscapes use surface tension and color to create drama- monumental earth forces forming living rock and mountains under tumultuous skies, painted heavy forms pulling in and out of space. Outdoor painting within the demanding elements of the wild possesses its own guru just to get by.
In this show of late work, Culp is inspired by the poetic writer and gutsy naturalist Ellen Maloy. The title “Eating Stone” is from Maloy”s book following the endangered desert Bighorn Sheep for a year- camping out with them close to their habitat; the remote, rocky vertical cliffs overlooking terrifyingly deep space . Culp feels an affinity with this sheep landscape. She lives within a wilderness area. Her drawings and paintings do a visual jumping and climbing over ledges and edges, fall into deep space ,even as the mountains thrust up ,up ,and further up!
A fortuitous loan of a Bighorn Rams skull found within a lions den below Culps studio yields a fascinating series of drawing and painting studies of the skull and his “Rams Skull Story”.