Green Night

A web exhibition by William Pura

This series of works developed from my earlier work with the urban landscape, but the images moved into a slightly different direction with the reliance on secondary sources, that is video, television and the internet for most of the subject matter.

The genesis of the works came from my browsing through images from the 2nd Iraq war and noting how many of them were filtered through the technology of night vision electronics. As well, there were aspects of the air-attacks that created images which were very reminiscent of the Nocturnes of James McNeill Whistler, where with the scattered lights in the nocturnal landscape the vague outlines of man-made structures were revealed and obscured by fireworks, street lights, and other natural sources such as the stars and the moon.

But where Whistler's landscapes were generally concerned with elegance and tranquility, the images from current media sources, while just as provocative and possibly seductive, were often concerned with violence.

Many of the paintings and photographs that I have created in the past used the landscape to imply possible narratives, and with the new paintings I also chose to develop images that alluded to several possible readings.

Many of the images are dominated by shades of green derived from the night vision technology, altering the normal way of viewing the subject matter and draining it of the identity that would be normally revealed in a white-light environment.

I have also experimented with scale and surface, moving from large works to works that are much more intimate, from works where the paint surface is quite aggressive to images where the paint is smooth and barely tactile. At this point the paintings are created using the traditional medium of oil paint on canvas. Other images are in the planning stage that may involve works on paper or possibly mixed media.

For more information and works by
William Pura visit WilliamPura.com

Click here to read the full artist's statement.