This Land is Your Land

In the beginning of Schama’s treatise on landscape and memory he shows us a drawing manual from 1612 created by Henry Peacham, which lays out the first known actual recipe for a proper landscape, including all the necessary elements for a “moral corrective to the ills of court and city.” He cites nature myths that have persisted for centuries, from Plutarch’s essay on Isis and Osiris to the holy Gothic implications of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of the Pacific Northwest ‘cathedral groves.’  Early on, and most compelling to me, he quotes a former mentor who stressed that “our sense of place is determined by the archives of our feet.” Indeed, we need to know our origin stories to conjure a picture of the place, for the geographies of our ancestry are bred in the bone. 

I think about my ancestors and the myths and tales that have molded my own origin story, and it is the archives of these ghostly footprints that have led me back to a subject that has long dominated my consciousness, that of nature and memory. Two bodies of work have emerged out of this exploration, both dealing with the subject in very different ways, from the sky above to the mud below. 

One is a series of aerial landscape paintings based on photographs I took on a cross country flight back in 2021. They are illusionistic and romantic, small and intimate. In this post-truth environment, they also conjure up deep questions about the American landscape and Manifest Destiny. The other is a series of large vertical abstract plank shaped paintings based on the nature of nature – its forms, shapes, colors and behaviors. These two series speak to two very different ways in which we might experience the natural world through perceived information – the myths and the truths, as well as our senses, metaphor, and beauty. 

In German there is a word, “heimat,” that expresses more than the visual characteristics of a particular place. It encompasses an entire physical and social experience of reliable familiarity in the form of a homeland. My own experience of this has always been tied to the dry, scrubby hills of Santa Barbara and Laguna, where I honed my skills as a young plein air landscape painter intent on observation and fidelity. Only when I moved East in my late 20s did my relationship to that landscape begin to shift into something much deeper and more complex, into what Schama refers to as our own myths, memories, and obsessions.

Concurrently, I have continued to work on a series of paintings that explore landscape, geology and memory through abstraction. Shaped like planks that are wider at the bottom than at the top, their large expansive verticality presents like a performative experience caught in freeze frame, as the downward movement of the gesture and the paint suggest that all is still very much in motion. Unlike the aerial landscapes, the focus here is decidedly more on providing an analogous sensation to experiencing nature rather than on a disembodied picture of it. What is manifest in the folds and accretions of the paint is an instinctive call and response to the most basic and poetic properties of materiality, allowing the paint to follow its inevitable path of least resistance. What goes up must come down, calling to mind everything from the slow but determined advance of a lava flow to the rush of an avalanche or the piling up of driftwood on a salty shore. 

Between these two seemingly disparate bodies of work, I have continued to explore the concept of landscape and memory through both abstraction and representation, each time opening new ways of seeing and thinking about the world we occupy, the ways we inhabit nature and the legacies we leave behind.

Leslie Wayne

2024

First, the aerial landscapes. Encompassing 35 paintings in all, they are collectively titled “This Land is Your Land, From the Rockies to the Cascades, July 21, 2022.” The title is taken from Woody Guthrie’s iconic lyrics, which were written as a proud celebration of the American homeland and a cris de coeur for its bloody history. 

As I was flying across the Rockies, I found myself thinking of Guthrie’s song and the discord between Manifest Destiny and the wonder and majesty that the images outside my window imparted to me. I began photographing, and of the 47 photos I took, 35 became oil paintings on paper, each one mounted behind handmade frames based on the classic Boeing 737 window. In these paintings (the first observational landscapes I’ve painted since my 20s), I embraced both fidelity to the photographs and an approximation of my experience. Through the artifice of the work - the painting, the frame and the illusion of the double paned glass window separated by a gasket, I replicate that sense of wonder and awe that only a view from above can give us - a moment of transcendence beyond the cacophony of our everyday lives. The Renaissance window becomes the airplane window, allowing us to survey the horizon in ways that only in modern times do we have the luxury of beholding.