ASTRID PRESTON
New Paintings
Upside Down World
Exhibition: October 21 – November 25, 2017
Published by Astrid Preston on the occasion of the exhibition Astrid Preston: Upside Down World, Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California.
Softcover, English, 2017
Photography: Brian Forrest, Photo of Astrid: Jon Fauer
Design: Roseline Seng
Introduction
Craig Krull
For me, Astrid Preston’s work is always about the philosophy of perception, particularly with regard to beauty and nature. Is not beauty an abstract human concept that exists purely in our minds? Are we able to distinguish between the object and the sensation? Does our ability to think abstractly, an ability that we believe elevates us above animals, actually distance us from nature? Certainly landscapes do not exist in nature either, they are artificial and exclusive outlines. In fact, the pixels in Preston’s new work exemplify this by deconstructing beauty as an idea, and formally building a landscape. It is the persistence of these conundrums, and their exploration by the artist, that constitute the beauty of Astrid Preston’s art.
"There is no more to beauty
than pleasure miscast as an objective property
of what happens to give us pleasure."
- Walter Benjamin
"If Beauty does not exist in nature
Why is nature so Beautiful?"
- CK
Essay
Lita Barrie
Pixelation Breathes Life into Landscapes Painting
It takes a poet to express the truth about aesthetic emotion in painting. The great 19th-century English poet-critic, John Ruskin's trumpet call to young artists "to go humbly to nature" was based on his belief that "Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them." As an English major Astrid Preston is not afraid of emotional feeling (unlike some art school graduates paralyzed by the semiotic virus and she can breathe new life into the painting process by intuitively looking to nature as her great teacher-recalling Pollock's dictum "I am nature."
Artists removed from nature observation can only make random marks just as art critics removed from nature write words that cannot sing off the page, only reaching collectors who buy with their ears rather than their eyes because they have not learned how to feel the difference between paintings with no energy which are as dead as any cadaver and authentic art that composes space, light, reflections and shadows to create aesthetic emotion. As Cezanne said "A work of Art which did not begin in emotion is not art." Read more
