Arts and entertainment

April 6, 2011

Altered landscapes: Art professors work crosses disciplines

Philip Govedare is a professor of art, but when the American Association of Geographers convenes in Seattle April 12-16, hell be there making a presentation. What Govedare has in common with geographers is an interest in landscape. He is particularly interested in portraying landscapes that have been altered, either directly or indirectly, by human intervention.

This isnt the first time hes attended a conference centering on geography. At the suggestion of Kathleen Woodward, director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities, Govedare was part of a symposium in 2007 on geography and the humanities.

“Geography was in the title, but it was actually a range of scholars,” Govedare said. “Barry Lopez [an author who writes often about the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture] was there as the keynote speaker, and I was able to have dinner with him and some other people. It was really an interesting opportunity.”

Appropriately enough, his presentation at the symposium was titled “Altered Landscapes.” An essay of the same title will appear along with a reproduction of one of his paintings in a book due out this month, Geohumanities: Art, History,Text at the Edge of Place.

Govedares paintings arent what we usually think of when we think of landscape painting. They arent representational. “When you are drawing or painting,” he said, “you are selecting aspects from an amount of information that is so overwhelming that you cant say everything, and if you did, it wouldnt be very interesting. The process, the filter you go through, what you choose to take, make the drawing represent your experience — not necessarily the description of the place.”

He actually started out as an abstract painter. Over time, he said, his work started to be framed around the idea of landscape, but he was working from memory. Then he decided that he needed to get out of the studio and work from life.

“That brought up a lot of questions,” Govedare said. “Where would I go? What would be of interest? I didnt want to paint the ‘ideal landscape. I think today, its difficult to think about landscape without being aware of the human impact on all sorts of ecosystems. Its certainly something Ive been aware of because of my own interests and reading.”

He finally decided to go to the Duwamish River and do a series of paintings. The area is a Superfund cleanup site because of industrial pollution, but Govedare said he wanted to go with no preconceptions.  “Im not necessarily interested in conveying a political message, but I see the world through a lens of what I understand about our predicament in relation to environmental concerns.”

He went out and did drawings and studies, then came back to the studio and executed a series of paintings from the Duwamish — different places seen at different times of day.

Govedares paintings give the impression of being aerial shots, but that doesnt reflect where he was standing when he made his sketches.

“I manipulate perspective,” he said. “I locate the viewer at a position that is well above. So you get this perspective of being small in relation to what youre seeing and also elevated from a birds eye view. You can see things at that point which are not visible from a point of standing on earth.”

Last spring Govedare had a Royalty Research Fund grant to go to Utah and paint in remote canyonlands — in some ways the opposite type of place from the Duwamish. Yet, he said, although the area is currently a national park, it once was the site of uranium mining, and even today one can see traces of roads — an alteration he said would take decades to disappear.

It was also last spring that Govedare participated in an exhibit, Critical Messages: Contemporary Northwest Artists on the Environment, an exhibit that he helped to initiate.

His presentation at the American Association of Geographers meeting is titled “Art and the Politics of Landscape.”

“Im starting out with this idea of how we as a culture and as a society think about the landscape and how it is valued,” Govedare said. “Then Im going to run through different artists who respond to landscape through the lens of environment in different ways — do an overview of that and then talk about my own work.”

Govedare says he doesnt intend for his paintings to make a political statement, but he does want them to provoke questions. This excerpt from his artists statement sums it up:

“For an informed person, it is no longer possible to experience landscape without some sense of regret and foreboding. No aspect of our natural environment or location (including the most remote corners of the globe) is unaffected by development, technology and modern industry. I believe that to fully experience contemporary landscape through painting today, one must take into account this predicament directly or implicitly.”