I began doing art cartography and cartographic art simultaneously, some fifteen years ago, when Google Earth was new and I was spending winters in an off-grid, mountain-ringed Mexican beach town that had no roads and thus no map. The “real” map I created for that place required me to invent the place on a square of paper, taking liberties with cartographic convention as a matter of course. It was then I began mapping imaginary places as well, experimenting with acrylic inks and substrates picked up used at an Oakland thrift store for artists, and creating land and sea forms by tilting liquids on tabletops and small canvases. I consider myself an artist who does maps, rather than a cartographer, because while the craft has exploded in possibilities with computer technology, it is more than ever constrained by rigid conventions such as north at the top. As with my fictional places, I tilt and turn the real ones as needed to frame them properly for a pleasing visual flow, taking artistic license as needed to bring a place to life in the viewer’s imagination.
Artist Category: Painting & Drawing
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