linda hodges show




stmts

2015
Salt Crystal:
A reference to Northern Utah where I grew up. Looking down from the foothills of the Wasatch Mtns, you can clearly see the great, flat, open surface below formed by an ancient salty sea. Enormous swatches of land turn into triangles and a distant sky is the only thing soft enough to identify the scene as a landscape.  

These paintings are based on a diorama box that was constructed with simple landscape characteristics in mind: objects, flat planes and atmospheric space. The box is a controlled film set where the scene can be rearranged and illuminated in any way. I also work with models rather than from nature/life because of a practical need to remove emotion and sentimentality while I work. When a thing has just been created or arranged, I have no attachment to it. I don’t care if it looks recognizable and that is very freeing to the drawing. It’s a sterile subject that doesn’t influence my hand and ability to be harsh with the painting. I’ve always felt like I owed the geographical place or human figure I’m working from something; to respect it and make it look as beautiful as nature has but when I work from the model there is no distraction.



2013
Favela Salt:
Using a grid again. I’m not trying to make pixels here. I’m slowing down my drawing and working in a piecemeal fashion because otherwise I would make some gestural/emotional nonsense. Square by square, I’m trying to make pictures of places I’ve known somehow or other. I’m not sure if I drove by something similar once or if I’m remembering a landscape from a movie but all of these images are familiar to me. So I made little models of them and then I made those into flat ptgs because they are much easier to hang on a wall.


2012
hotel art:
I worked in hotels a lot of my life and always hated the pictures they chose for the lobbies/meeting rooms, etc. vague decorative gibberish, randomly placed triangles and squares or fuzzy hills and trees. When I started this series it reminded me of those paintings.
Instead of directly rendering an object or view from observation, I'm painting my memory of the flat parts of places I've seen, of the parts that if isolated with say, a viewfinder, would not look real or identifiable.  
Later, I built a little diorama box. working in what might seem like an opposite order, the diorama referenced the paintings and then was used to inform their completion.

These paintings are about places and what I assume are places.  I wouldn't call them abstract because they are how I imagine everyone would render these kinds of postcards: foreground/things, background/world.



2008
salt planes
Painting from constructed set designs (dioramas) where objects and planes are used to mimic memories of the sublime, my intent is to create a formulaic depiction of idyllic landscapes – suggesting distant horizons, solitary homes, stoic trees, and divine beams of light. The grid configuration allows for an exploration of space and the hierarchy of objects within each scene. The black viewfinder, which surrounds the paintings, serves to contain the imagined ideal place within a vacuum like space.


The salt plane series came from an interest in building dioramas reminiscent of theatrical sets, and projecting these created scenes onto expansive two-dimensional surfaces. I was thinking of the influence of cinematic mediums on our collective notion of natural beauty and pastoral landscapes.