This was a fun show, even if it did last only ten days before being shutdown due to COVID. The Phipps' Gallery 1 was a big space for showing off my large scale landscape paintings. Below you will find my artist statement for the exhibit and photos. Enjoy!
Statement:
New Landscapes Mark Granlund of Saint Paul, MN, is a painter. He received his MFA in painting and drawing from the City University of New York at Brooklyn College in 1988. Granlund paints in oil on canvases and panels that he makes, and in gouache on paper.
Granlund has exhibited throughout the Midwest and won First Place for painting at the most recent Minnesota State Fair (2019). He is represented at two galleries: Gallery 360 in Minneapolis and Dow Art Gallery in Saint Paul. For the last three years he has been the Public Art Administrator for Metro Transit in the Twin Cities.
His influences include Thomas Hart Benton, Lois Dodd, James Winn, Philip Guston and Milton Avery. Granlund's landscapes are created in response to the Northern Minnesota landscape. Granlund's regular visits to the Minnesota/Canada border, to explore the landscape of his father's childhood, have forged an attentiveness to its unique combination of water, rocks, trees and sky. In his paintings he is recognizing the energy patterns that are kindred between body and rock, thought and sky, feelings and water, all in the presence of witnessing spirits – the trees.
As the experience of Nature is a layering of sensory input, my large canvases portray the bodily perception through a progression of paint handling: washes, fields of color, impasto strokes, and glazing and scumbling. As the viewer stands before the canvases, the eye always finds another layer, another moment of detail or enhancement, taking them deeper into the experience of the art.
