Climbing Towards Heaven - Acrylic on Canvas 40'' x 40''

Ruth le Cheminant's expressionist landscapes deconstruct breathtaking visions of nature according to a unique mode of composition. The influence of late Cézanne can be striking, but le Cheminant's aesthetic sensibility involves more radical dissections of pictures' constitutive elements. The scale of these deconstructions owes something to Australia’s sweeping landscapes, where she has spent most of her life and still lives and works. Sorting through vistas of brilliant reds, soft greens and crepuscular purples, le Cheminant uncannily emphasizes colors and forms while maintaining a sense of the greater whole.

She applies acrylic paints in broad strokes moving between measured precision and expressive scrawling. At these extremes, le Cheminant conveys eerily calm and frantically chaotic scenes. She generally combines the two modes of application, creating dynamic landscapes that are highly specific yet universal. Her work resembles that of a linguist: beginning with a fully formed and conjugated landscape, she disassembles it into contingent parts and presents these as the universal stuff that makes up our surroundings.  There's no mistaking the mythic scale, elemental sparseness and striking colors of the Australian outback and Blue Mountains in these stylized views. Still, Ruth le Cheminant pulls those places' features apart in such a way that they suddenly don't seem so different from the American Southwest or the Appalachian Mountains.

www.ruthlecheminant.com
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