artists. I´m passionate about both, individual creation and developing conceptual works in teams with other artists and disciplines. For example, I am building an objectual artist's book that investigates internal and external spaces, the link between subject, nature and culture based on the Lacanian concepts of extimacy and topological space, a compositional set of photographs and paintings. Also, I am painting a new series of landscapes in different sizes, a kind of game between the minimum and the maximum. And, finally, preparing a live performance with musicians. I wish to share all this art very soon. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Samanta Masucco Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Mary and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.marystgeorge-art.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training: after having earned your BA of History of Art from Connecticut College and your BFA Environmental Design from Parsons School of Design NYC, you nurtured your education with a Diploma in Architecture, a MA International Education and you later attended an advanced course in My recent work focuses on the subject of abandoned buildings in Portugal. With a background in architecture and art I always gravitate to this theme. There is plenty of mystery and history in decaying buildings and gardens. The textures, colours and sense of materials merging into the undergrowth is evocative. Sometimes there is an element of rebirth when new buildings and their surroundings emerge to beat back the undergrowth and establish themselves again in a new format on the land. I have found that a combination of collage and photo transfer are my preferred media. I dye transparent papers, occasionally find appropriate magazine cuttings and work to splice and glue them together. Sometimes I draw and paint. I work on paper and canvas. I also make videos and have made one that relates to this theme called ‘Trespassing’ where my artworks are integral with the short film. In 2020 I produced a book of watercolours entitled Watercolours from a Lockdown / Aguarelas de um Confinamento. This book is partly about my observation of the natural beauty of the Serra de Sintra, a world heritage site in Portugal where I live. It is also about an evolution of a personal watercolour technique inspired by my surroundings during the time of Lockdown. I wanted to capture the feeling of the place which is always changing in terms of weather, temperature, texture, colour and light. My dog and I go almost daily into the Serra to walk and sketch. I am delighted to have collaborated with a Portuguese poet who added Portuguese texts which I interpreted freely into English. Recently I have had the pleasure to collaborate with a pianist. She improvised music to go with my more recent watercolour sketches. We plan to do more of this collaborative work. I include our first collaborative video here. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Mary St.George Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal
Painting and Etching: how do these formative years influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum address the direction of your current artistic research? Mary St.George: My earliest educational background gave me a grounding in History of Art from a mostly western point of view. As an elective study within a liberal arts course it was exciting and eye opening and probably gave me a good basis for appreciating architecture and art from the 19�� century onwards. My Parsons Course on Environmental Design was a step in the direction of design and architecture which I then followed up on with a Diploma in Architecture. I had at this stage decided I wanted to be an architect as I loved drawing and designing and solving design problems. I had no interest to be an artist at this stage. Many years later and after having moved from the UK to Portugal I started to consider teaching art and design in a secondary school. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of encouraging students to see they could draw and paint as well as work in various media. After teaching when I was nearly already 50 I started to think I would like to be an artist. Although I could draw and paint I had not actually gone to an art college so took an Mary St.George scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Looking Out Looking Out
advanced course in painting and etching. This took me into a new phase of my life. Gradually I moved into mixed media and in particular collage and photo transfer. The subject matter of architecture continued to attract me which comes from my architectural work but also from something else to do with decay and renewal. I am fond of old buildings and their process of aging and mutating into something else suggesting loss, history and a mystery. Your recent artistic production is centered on abandoned buildings in Portugal and the body of works that we have selected for this special edition of LandEscape —and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article — has at once captured our attention for the way you draw inspiration from direct experience to create such evocative images rich of vibrant and at the same time thoughtful tones, able to blend the real with the imagined. When walking our readers through your usual setup and process, would you tell us how important is intuition for you? Mary St.George: Intuition is the most important ingredient I feel in my work as although I start with something seemingly concrete I really do not know what I am going to do with it. Saying that I make little preliminary sketches in pen or pencil and often refer to them although the final outcome happens from the constant thinking, looking at the work as it develops and very importantly not trying to do it too fast. I need to digest my ideas, thoughts and possible ‘interpretations’ over many days if not weeks. This has become more scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Mary St.George scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land To the Hairdressser
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Mary St.George scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land apparent to me in some recent work I am doing at a scale of 90 x 1,80cm. Intuition comes in many forms. Creating a narrative which is always imagined. Trying to integrate colour, texture, balance and surprise. It cannot be predictable. Each work takes its own storyline and direction. I suppose this is what makes it interesting for me and sustains the whole process. With their Casa da Serra and Ruina da Fonte Velha balanced sense of composition, your works seem meticulously structured and marked out with unique combination between rigorous sense of geometry and precise choice of tones, able to provide your works with recognizable visual identity. How does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in your artworks and how do you develop your textures in order to achieve such unique results? Mary St.George: I often use phototransfer for my architecturally inspired artworks. This is a technique I have developed where I glue different images to a canvas or paper support and rub off the paper on the back with a damp cloth. I take photos of buildings, details such as windows and interiors or exterior shots. I realise how important this is as I am very much linked to reality as a starting point and I do not want to spend time drawing the buildings but working on integrating them into an imagined landscape or narrative. The textures are largely related to the building surfaces and vegetation. I am very experimental in the choice of materials besides photos. I frequently use magazine cuttings, transparent paper that I dye, old
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition recycled watercolour painting or printing scraps, netting, cloth or burlap. Sometimes I need to make up a new batch of materials if I don’t have the right colours or tones. One very important early decision is to decide the background tone or colour as that helps set the scene or character of the artwork. We definitely love the way you draw Zezere Musicians
Mary St.George scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Rua do Tojal
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inspiration from the specifics of the environment to create such evocative images rich of vibrant tones: how do you select your subjects? Mary St.George: Living in a beautiful area, the World Heritage site of Sintra, I am fortunate to have stunning views of the Serra, the ocean and the coast. In addition Mary St.George scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Amorzinho e Coyote
there are many historic buildings, palaces, castles and gardens. I walk and sketch almost every day behind our house in the Serra. I mentioned earlier that I produced a book of watercolours entitled ‘Watercolours from a Lockdown / Aguarelas de um Confinamento’. Then I easily find many abandoned scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Exteriors (work in Progress)
buildings on walks through neighbouring villages. Lisbon and Cascais are also close and are full of old buildings in various states of decay. With their essentiality on the visual aspect, Wall, window, sky and Rua do Tojal seem to unveil the bridge between the real and the imagined, inviting the viewers to scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Mary St.George Land
appreciate all the beauty that surrounds us. Scottish painter Peter Doig once remarked that even the most realistic paintings are derived more from within the head than from what's out there in front of us, how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination, playing within your artistic production? Mary St.George: I would agree that the most interesting artworks (paintings, drawings, prints, etc) provide more than an accurate rendition of some reality. In my abandoned buildings series the actual building or buildings are a vehicle for the start of a journey. The journey is of course into an unknown space or series of spaces, landscape or environment. Knowing when it’s finished is also important and sometimes I return to scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Interiors Trav. 25 de Abril Azoia
Cascais casa
Rua 1 Decembro
works to simplify or develop them further. Your works show a keen eye for colors able to create such unique atmosphere that unveils the connection between mystery and history. More specifically, Amorzinho e Coyote reminds us of the concept of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc Augé, for the way it expresses such resonance between the subconscious mind and its surroundings: how do you consider the role of direct experience as starting point for your artistic research? In particular, how do you select specific scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Mary St.George Land Rua D Antonio Maciera
locations and how do they affect your creative process? Mary St.George: This really touches an interesting nerve for me as prior to my abandoned buildings / Trespassing series I selected approximately 25 monuments in Portugal to use as backdrops so to speak for artworks on 30x30 cm canvases entitled ‘Music and Monuments’. This was partly inspired by my singing in an amateur choir which once sang at the Convento Cristo in Tomar where we stayed for a week in 2013. The artworks started with a specific setting to which I added imagery to do with music (opera, fado, etc) which I mixed with other imagery I felt appropriate. This process blended analog collage with digital printing using phototransfers and other imagery I found online. I would print the final piece and transfer the image using a different photo transfer process where you apply several layers of photo medium to the image, remove the paper from back after it is dry. At this point you have a clear film to glue to the canvas. I think it might be worth having a look at this kind of work on my site to get a fuller picture of what I have worked on. https://www.marystgeorge-art.com/musicand-monuments scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Ruina da Fonte Velha Lisbon
Mary St.George scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Wall, window, sky
On the above link you will see that I also took these small canvases and reinterpreted them onto Perspex sheets where the layers I had created on the canvases became separate layers held by a block with slots to hold each layer at a 1cm distance. I became fascinated by the possibilities of assembling the layers differently, placing them with natural and artificial light. It is a project I may return to one day. You are a versatile artist: your practice encompasses Drawing, Painting and Video, as the interesting Trespassing that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/593861185: moreover, as you have remarked once, you have found that a combination of collage and photo transfer are your preferred media. What does direct you to such multidisciplinary approach? Mary St.George: I think it is inevitable that artists will experiment and it has fairly recently occurred to me that combining art with other artists and other creative disciplines can only enhance the results. My finding a Portuguese poet for my book of watercolours really was important to me. I wanted to share my ‘view’ with a poet who specialises in imagery. It was a natural collaboration and I think brings life to more viewers. I live in Portugal and I want to appeal to more viewers. The fun was taking her texts and interpreting them freely into English. You have also collaborated with a Portuguese poet as well as with pianist Liz Allen that our readers can view at https://vimeo.com/703188289. It's no doubt that interdisciplinary collaborations are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields meet and collaborate on a project: could you tell us something about the collaborative nature of your work? Mary St.George: This collaboration happened naturally and spontaneously. I had made a reel of watercolours on Instagram and she was intrigued by it and improvised one or 2 short pieces inspired by it. At that point I thought it would be better to actually make a proper video of about 14 watercolours. We agreed on the music we thought best and then I created a video with title and credits. In fact we have started on a second one which will be longer and probably have a more sustained musical input. This is really fun and exciting and although early days I really want to carry on with it. You are an established and awarded artist. Over the years your works have been showcased in many international exhibitions, including 14 solos: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? As the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram https://www.instagram.com/maryst.georg — increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? Mary St.George: This is a question I am not at all sure about. I think I have reached a time in my life that ‘success’ in art is not Mary St.George scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition measurable in sales alone. Of course everyone wants to sell their work and feel appreciated in this way. To be honest an artist needs to feel that they are doing something worthwhile for themselves and when stretched to the limit of their creativity that is something valid. Again the social platforms like Instagram and facebook and even linkedin cannot truly measure an artist’s achievements. I have not really decided if the obsession of posting and liking is the right way to find an audience or improve one’s art. I do however like to look at other’s works and can find a good deal of inspiration this way. We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Mary. What projects are you currently working on, and Estuary 1, collage, painting and drawing
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Mary St.George Land what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Mary St.George: I also want to thank you LandEscape for giving me this opportunity to do some self-analysis and examine my work and the reasons behind it. Not always easy to do this but really important. At the moment I am working on a large canvas entitled ‘ Exteriors’ which is very much related to my abandoned buildings / Trespassing series. I include a photo. As I mentioned above I intend to continue to collaborate with my musician friends to see how we can combine and enhance our two creative approaches. I am actually thinking that my abandoned buildings will likely produce a darker and perhaps more powerful musical element. I want to return to my printing as I have an etching press and have not done that for a while. Equally I want to make more films and mix my artworks into them.
Hello Thomas and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate on your artistic production we would like to invite our readers to visit http://thomaspickarski.com in order to get a broad idea about your artistic production, and we will start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training: you hold a BFA in Painting and you later nurtured your education with an MFA in Performance Art, that you received from Arizona State University: how do these formative years influence your evolution as an artist? Thomas Pickarski: Along with painting, I studied Modern Dance Performance and Choreography in college. This opened the door to my creating time-based performative and sound works. Although I currently have 2 photography-based solo exhibitions touring The day I moved to a desert as a teenager, someone welcoming me to the area said, “Look how big the sky is!” I became intrigued with how landscapes that are void of most vegetation can strikingly portray the illusion of vast spaciousness, as well as allow for a direct experience with the raw forms, colors, and surfaces that might otherwise be obscured by grass, moss, or trees. For this body of work, I traveled extensively through the treeless arctic deserts of Iceland, the world's driest desert, Atacama of Northern Chile, the deserts of the American West, and the mouth of the ice fjord in Greenland where the most productive glacier in the Northern Hemisphere surrenders to the sea. I've created a series of landscape photographs that offer a glimpse of the most remote corners of the world, while also addressing the climate crisis in unique ways including through a spoken-word short film that is set in an imagined future. These natural and sometimes fabricated fantasy-like settings invoke the beauty and drama of fairy tales when long-ago giants and elves walked the earth. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Thomas Pickarski Lives and works in New York City, USA
the U.S. I’m also emerging as a filmmaker and performative storyteller. For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected Snow, Sand, Ice, a stimulating project — and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article — has at once captured our attention for the way it address the viewers to dive into the dreamlike dimension, helping them to discover its connection with reality, highlighting at the same time the uniqueness of the viewers' response to the work of art. When walking our readers through the genesis of Snow, Sand, Ice, would you tell us something about your usual setup and process? Thomas Pickarski: I’ve always been fascinated with the bizarre landscape. Places that don’t look like they’re of this world. But such settings are not easily stumbled upon. So I travel to the corners of the world in search of these fragile and weird-looking places. I go alone, and the travel takes me into very isolated areas, which I absolutely adore. The seclusion is a perfect balance to living in New York City. Landscape photography can involve a lot of waiting for the light and atmospheric conditions to be just right. Especially in the Arctic where the weather is often severe. It’s my favorite place to visit. I often camp right in the setting I’m going to photograph, so when I wake up, I’m there and ready at first light, which is the most spectacular. A stunning example of this is Landscape no. 42. I was in the uninhabited highlands of Iceland in late August. As I was going to sleep, it started snowing. I woke at dawn, and the setting before me scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Icescape No.44 (Greenland)
was spectacular beyond belief! One side of the rock and sand mountain was in first light, illuminating the yellow-green moss on the steep slopes. The other side was in shadow and covered with a fresh dusting of snow. Add a black sand foreground along with an Thomas Pickarski scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Landscape No,21 (Iceland)
eerie dark gray sky, and it was truly one of the most spectacular settings I’ve ever stood in. Brilliantly shot, Snow, Sand, Ice features sapiently structured sense of composition and keen eye for details: what were your scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Icescape No.51 (Greenland)
aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens? Thomas Pickarski: Composition is my starting place. That involves the spatial arrangement, balance of the components, and sense of foreground, middle ground, and background. Light, I have no control over, except to wait for it to change or go back to the place another time. Landscape no. 21 is a good example of how I worked out a lighting issue successfully. I call this setting one of my secret spots. I could have easily missed it as it’s only partially visible from the dirt road in a part of Iceland that is very difficult to get to. Once there, I was thrilled to see only a few footsteps in the soft volcanic sand, indicating few people would ever actually see this place. It’s a spectacular naturally occurring composition. But the first summer I found it, the light was hopelessly mundane the day I passed by. I struggled with the photograph in editing but just couldn’t seem to breathe life into it. I intentionally went back to the same spot the next year, planned for first light, and wow! The golden light on the moss as fall was approaching brought out the richness of the yellow-green and red-orange moss while casting spectacular shadows. I even went back to this place a third time the next year, thinking I would explore different compositions of the same setting, but nothing further materialized. As far as my camera choice, 15 years ago when I started I traveled twice a year for month-long adventures days away from anyone, and camping in a little tent, I was on a bicycle. I carried a small pocket camera, Thomas Pickarski scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Landscape No.9 (Chile)
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition never anticipating the photographs I was making would hang in galleries. Over time I felt the art I was making was compromised by my mode of travel. I’d stop to photograph a setting I was passing by but my priority was to carry on with bicycling as I needed to maybe get out of torrential wind immediately and then get to a grocery store within a few days. So 10 years in I upgraded. Conceptually, I decided I would travel for art’s sake first. This means now I’m in a rental car with a topof-the-line digital camera. With their unique aesthetic quality on the visual espect, your works seem to be laboriously structured to pursue such effective and at the same time thoughtful visual impact: how important is intuition for you? Thomas Pickarski: Intuition is a guide, like an inner compass. I have a good sense of what’s working and what’s not the moment I step foot in a setting. Sometimes bells even go off in my head, like when my little boat in the Disko Bay of Greenland turned a corner around an iceberg and revealed the towering blue-green facade of Icescape no. 51. I knew instantaneously it was one of my best finds ever, and couldn’t wait to see it in a gallery. As you have remarked once, the natural settings of Snow, Sand, Ice invoke the beauty and drama of fairy tales when longago giants and elves walked the earth: how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination, playing within your artistic production? Landscape No.18 (Iceland)
Thomas Pickarski: I start with what is real. Fantasy is just a slight distortion of reality. Perhaps this is a good place to mention I’ve made a new short film titled The Silken City, which is part of the Snow, Sand, Ice exhibition. Thomas Pickarski scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Landscape No.26 (Chile)
The film is an essay narration paired with old B&W found footage. The story is set in an imagined future after Earth’s last glacier has melted and the Gulf Stream changes direction fueling an atmospheric phenomenon known as Spider Rain. After scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Landscape No.27 (Wyoming)
just the first few sporadic incidents of fuzzy 8-legged creatures dropping down on Manhattan, the elite relocate to the new beach-front plastic floating cities off the coast of Alaska. The mass exodus leaves a setting ripe for creativity and equality, with its remaining residents absolutely certain it was the collective consciousness of interesting people that summoned the spider's assistance to co-create this utopian society in the first place. Although spider rain usually occurs in Australia, just as I began researching this phenomenon for my story, I found news articles predicting it highly likely that billions of spiders could rain down over the entire east coast of the U.S. in the summer of 2022. I realized the imagined story I was creating could actually happen! Snow, Sand, Ice mixes unsparing realism with details that we dare say to consider surrealistic, able to walk the viewers through the interstitial point between reality and imagination. We have really appreciated the way it stimulates the viewers' perceptual parameters and allows an open reading: how important is for you to trigger the spectatorship's imagination in order to elaborate personal meanings? What do you hope your spectatorship will take away from Snow, Sand, Ice? Thomas Pickarski: I hope to open a door inside the viewer to the possibility they see the world both somewhat the way I see it, but also different than they normally would. Perhaps challenging their references to what is real and awakening them to what is fleeting. And of course, there’s a touch of Thomas Pickarski scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Landscape No.59
sadness, as icebergs will indeed become extinct. At least until the next ice age. We have been impressed with the way your works ore especially — The End of Nowhere and The Middle of Nowhere — capture the idea of non-lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc Augé. Drawn heavily from the peculiar specifics of the environment of Iceland, Northern Chile, scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Landscape No.42 (Iceland)
Greenland and the deserts of the American West, Snow, Sand, Ice captures such insightful resonance between the landscapes that you captured and states of mind: how do you select the specific locations and how do they affect your creative process? Thomas Pickarski: I like the atmospheric qualities of places with volatile weather, like scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Thomas Pickarski Land