Places Near, Far, & Fantastic

I live to travel. As a tourist, I can see everything the locals have stopped seeing, and I absorb the energy and lights and sounds and smells that they’ve gone numb to. Being a stranger in a strange land turns even a mundane grocery run into an exciting, dopamine-producing experience.

 

During my travels, I absorb the energy of a Place. When I come home, I do my best to  bring it back to people through my paintings. I believe that by depicting regular places in the bright, vivid colors that their unique energy conjures in my brain, I can turn every viewer into a tourist themselves, whether it's in a truly foreign land, or in their own neighborhood.

 

In this show, titled “Places Near, Far, and Fantastic”--I have put together some of my works from four different Places. (You can view them in the Leslie Powell Gallery in Lawton, Oklahoma, from July 8th to August 26th. And after that--who knows!)

 

The first Place is my home–Wynnewood, Oklahoma. I moved there in 2021 with my husband and pets. We live in a house that my great-Grandaddy built. For nearly a century, my family has been on that land, and I get to paint in the studio that my Grandaddy, Thomas Dillard, once did. I enjoy the quiet beauty of small town life.

 

The second and third Places are Costa Rica and Iceland. I traveled to Costa Rica in 2012, and Iceland in 2018. These volcanic countries are a testament to what a few degrees latitude on a gigantic sphere can do to your climate and landscape. Both are beautiful places that have stayed with me over the years.

 

The final Place is an imaginary world, like this one… and not. The paintings themselves are ideas from sketches I’ve completed as far back as 2014, and my short story, “The Escape,” is what happens when someone with vivid imagination spends years devouring Susan Cooper, Garth Nix, Orson Scott Card, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and decides to give writing a shot.

 

I hope you enjoy touring these four Places as much as I did.

 

Happy travels!

Mad