Ocean & San Carlos |
Nature as shaped and redefined by human hands is the focus of Ross Penhall’s captivating yet enigmatic paintings. His work depicts enchanting, manicured, urban landscapes – groomed lawns, shaped shrubbery, pruned trees – all arranged in eye-pleasing symmetry that speaks of a serene, orderly world.
Drawing upon the influences of such notable painters as Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O’Keefe, Grant Wood and Emily Carr, Ross Penhall has taken his own turn enhancing the enhancements. He flattens, stylizes and simplifies forms, embellishes colors and exaggerates contrasts. The result is a make-believe, somewhat unreal landscape that although compelling, serves as a gentle reminder that nature is never static, and man’s imprint is transitory unless vigilantly maintained.
Penhall often employs a path or tunnel that leads to an opening, a way through the scene into whatever unknown magic lies just beyond the horizon. His impeccable feeling for composition leads the viewer as effortlessly through his paintings as a child through an enchanted forest.
Each painting is exquisitely arranged so that every shape, every angle, enhances another form elsewhere in the image. Take, for instance, “Hole in the hedge,’ in which a lone tree is the perfect complement to a similarly configured gap in a towering wall of greenery. Aside from supplying a fantastic degree of visual tension, this interplay works strongly on a conceptual level as as well: man carves out a space for himself and plants a tree of equal size nearby, as a sort of compensation for having cut nature out of the way.
“My paintings are about people; there are the lamp posts, sidewalks, paths and hedges, but I could never put a person in a painting. Its’ just not part of my thinking.” -Ross Penhall