Randy Garber, Painting: Cellular Landscapes

Paintings: Cellular Landscape

My Cellular Landscape Paintings are inspired by my fascination with visual information that is available only with magnification. To get raw material, I spent many months peering through a microscope in a pathology lab in a nearby hospital. The cytologists and I studied the same cellular material, but where they spotted danger— cancer cells—I saw the beauty in what was aberrant and different. The paintings are made organically, similar to the way cells grow, replicate and mutate. I begin each painting using sources from biology, cartography, astronomy and geography as well as from my sketches made in the lab. I then synthesize and transform this information into my own vocabulary by inventing patterns, marks and glyphs. Once realized on the surface, these marks grow into shapes and worlds of their own. In these abstract territories I hope to give viewers the sensation of looking at something that is—simultaneously —very large and seen from a distance and something that is infinitesimally tiny, seen only at a nearly impossible close range.

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