Brian Scott Campbell

Lives and works in Denton, TX

Artist statement

My painting practice is rooted in landscape and in the ways external environments become internalized through memory, experience, and invention. Combining everyday signs and symbols, these landscapes suggest leisurely scenes of distant mountains, suns, and trees, but pushed through a cartoonish sieve, as though quoting directly from Mickey Mouse. Drawing, an important gravitational point and central language for these paintings, accounts for their preference for flatness and immediacy. Rudimentary lines and simple geometries are employed as easily grasped building blocks. And yet, each careful arrangement suggests an evolving but fragmentary narrative. One senses that these paintings do not depict any one environment or lived experience, but instead touch on archetypes and conventions of looking and representation, hovering somewhere near hallucination. Nature is permitted to collide with architecture and figuration, where a tree might insinuate a column, a sailboat a nose, or a field a mere outlined triangle. Like a garden, the spaces I am interested in are both portals to a physical world and entirely artificial. They are constructed sites where landscape and human intervention are inseparable. In this sense, the paintings operate much like memory itself, where fragments of reality and fiction coexist without resolving into a single, stable place.

Artwork