Nature has forever been a primary source of my artistic inspiration. Nurtured as a child by family camping and backpacking trips in the Northeast, and later—in my young adulthood—by similar trips in the Sangre de Cristos mountains of Philmont, Cimarron and the Taos areas of northern New Mexico, a love of Nature has been a constant source for me of not only tranquility and solace, but rapture. Perhaps John Hains, in “On a Certain Attention to the World” said it best:

"Clearly. . . something has been lost in the art of nature study in this century; not simply curiosity, or even excitement, but a better word: rapture. It is an emotion that  comes, not merely from looking at things, but from seeing them with a kind of veneration, as if within these objects, these vistas of water and mountain, something of the impenetrable mystery might be sensed and named, and before which one might be, not designing or dominating, but quietly attentive. "

People are often curious about the striking vertical format of many of my landscapes. We have come to expect landscapes to be designed on the horizontal—widely expansive panoramas that seem to embrace the viewer.  Yet I have always been drawn to the vertical landscape.
I enjoy the way the vertical suggests a window into the landscape, or better yet, a doorway —a passageway; an escape. I also enjoy the fact that the narrow vertical seems to take on an almost human characteristic—tall and vertical, like a person, standing in the very landscape described. Not just a window from which to view nature, but a doorway by which to enter the landscape and be, perhaps, “quietly attentive.”

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dawn chandler copyright © 1998 - 2010
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