A series of abstract landscape paintings

These sketches were created as preliminary ideas for a series of abstract oil refinery landscapes. My study has been focused on abstract landscape painting and the relation between human culture and the nature within its landscape. The large proportion of sky, seen from Janaki Lennie’s paintings, assisted me in deciding the overall composition and layout of visual elements. However, unlike her realistic representation of the landscape, my landscape scene was realized in the French Cubist and Precisionist way, which I admire. I used the works of Julie Mehretu as another visual source to produce my own visual elements. The smoke from the oil refinery is somewhat realistic and is dissolved to the vast, empty sky as a transition of human industries and the nature. An architectural element is added to each painting in order to give the viewers a hint on the viewing points and involve them actively in the landscape scene. The architectonical structure, however, would be hard to digest for many viewers in that it is fractured by the Precisionist handling of paints. It was my intention to make my painting simplified and abstract.