ARTIST STATEMENT
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The act of standing alone in the silence of a remote place - both as a human being and as a painter - is essential in fueling my work and in resetting my sense of well being and connection.

The wonderful writer Helen MacDonald (in her book of essays, Vesper Flights) talks about how those moments open us to a glimpse of forces that are too large, too complex to comprehend.  We sense the unknowable and we feel the unpredictability of things that are beyond our reach.  As humans, we are deeply wired to respond to both the terror and the beauty therein.  This potent source of meaning is our link to the universal.  

I am compelled by the patterns and structures, the skin and bones of the earth.  I want to observe how desert mountain slopes are overcome by slow drifting sand, to see how crevices follow the direction of fault lines.  I want to be able to move from the examination of tangled roots in wetlands to the epic, aerial views of a glacier field.  I want to feel the updrafts and temperature changes that echo the contours of the earth.       

People of the 19th Century were deeply stirred by artists' depictions of places they had never seen, stirred in a way that scientific accounts and maps could not achieve.  My hope is that my depictions of both the visual and the experiential memory of being where I was will cause others to consider, as I do, the beauty and fragility of our earth.

We all carry our own inner immensity.  The landscape makes possible thoughts that we cannot and do not have anywhere else.                                               

Freya Grand  2024