Caren Hyde
Paintings

Artist Statement

Painting for me is a way to consolidate and connect emotions, perceptions and memories with the experience of seeing and working with art materials. I choose landscape as the vehicle for my images, as it is something I strongly respond to and find a deep sense of connection with.  Recent travels in and around Iceland, together with current concerns regarding the climate crisis and a melancholic sense of loss, appear to have deeply affected my sensibility and these themes and motifs will frequently enter my work. I strongly believe in the power of landscape painting to connect with the viewer's internal world of feeling, imagination, sense of life, and concerns. The recent resurgence of serious, contemporary landscape painting points to the enduring quality of the subject.

"Landscape can never become a cliche. It is just too big, too much, too diverse, alive,  too raw, too soft, too dreamy, too cruel, too contorted. Too beautiful. The cliche does not reside in the land, but in us, in our ideas."  - Jon Kalman Stefansson (2021)

My process for making paintings went through a change about 8 years ago when I stopped using only brushes due to a worsening hand tremor. During that time, I developed a method of using printmaking equipment - rollers, rags, squeegees etc., as well as household items, to layer and pull away paint from the surface. There’s a lot more chance involved in this process and I welcome what may “just happen” as the image evolves. I also started "painting with charcoal", using cloth and eraser instead of the more traditional drawing approach to the medium. A painting is finished when the image gives form to a sense of a place that evokes mystery, or perhaps nostalgia; somewhere that is not fully describable, but known and felt on a truer, deeper level.