Andrea Bartine Caldarise

New paintings inspired by visiting national parks and driving along Rt 66, the mother road.

My narrative landscapes exist on two planes: real and surreal. Using light, color, and perspective to bend time and reality, the work encourages viewers to question their environment. Examining personal and collective anxieties around climate change, historical land use, and tensions in public versus private space, the paintings are unfixed and appear to shift over time. My studio practice examines how a place contains our collective experiences and histories. Layered with happiness, trauma, and inequity, public spaces function as mirrors of our present emotions and energies. Through investigating various viewpoints--historical, personal, and imagined--we create empathy within our ever-changing world. The last 12 months have unleashed a cacophony of emotions: unique, collective, terrible, sad, at times joyful and new. The fabric of our social lives is being re-worked, our lived-in spaces are being re-imagined. These paintings are derived from my experiences within the social and physical landscape of Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and other cities. The way we as a community move through and experience environments is at the base of my practice.

Engaging with themes of love, loss, family, and healing. These works explore grief and new beginnings through the language of landscape. These artworks delve into how nostalgic spaces exist in a strange crossroad between the memory of and our imagined realities. Someone recently described my art using the phrase "...each space seems like we've just arrived at the scene of..." Encapsulated in this thought, is the role of the viewer. The viewer can use the painting as an oculus; these paintings utilize the language of landscape to reveal narratives and memories for others. The imagery may shift over time, to be adaptable and yet specific, like re-reading a favorite book about your favorite place that doesn't exist anymore

Artworks in the “Points of Interest” series are inspired by a recent cross-country road trip from Brooklyn, NY to San Francisco, CA, and back again! Realizing a goal of mine since childhood was magical and I’m grateful the stars aligned for me and my partner to take this opportunity to explore. It was a fantastic experience stopping off at many national parks and public lands to conduct art research. My sense of light and color has been inspired by the desert light, it's not something I'm used to, so clear and sharp. There were many vistas and scenic places to stop, and this body of work focuses on painting meaningful moments from the trip.

Snapshots, small works on paper capturing fleeting moments in the landscape.

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