Matt Higgins

Palm 3, Contemporary Landscape Painting

2023

In Summer by The Water, Higgins captures the essence of a summer landscape with a delightful blend of shapes and colors. The composition reveals a harmonious balance between flat pla...

In this piece, the intense use of negative space highlights each individual marks character, weight and texture. The painting explores various types of mark making and paint application inspired by elements of the landscape painted in various thicknesses, intensities and with a variety of different tools. Each mark is calculated and responsive to the one that came before it, creating a cause and effect relationship across the surface of the canvas. Restraint is a key element of this new body of work from artist Matt Higgins and the option to go further is always there. However, the excitement and spontaneity of the piece would therefore be sacrificed. Done in one session of intense meditative focus, A Place We Can See depends upon the exact moment of creation...

Excerpt from the Palm series 2023 - Present The artworks presented here depict palm-like plants in mostly nocturnal and enigmatic settings, often against mountainous backdrops and o...

Originally conceived as an abstract piece, this painting gradually morphed into a recognizable landscape scene. It depicts a landscape in an uncanny yet familiar setting, forming par...

InThree gets its name from jazz improvisation and musical timing. This painting was created using three different mediums oil stick, acrylic paint, and collaged material. The actions...

This painting shows the horizon in its silent and mysterious grandeur, separated by a thin strip of pink paint and a division of two colors. The painting was created with washes of h...

"All the Pretty Faces" is an oil on canvas painting made by Shara Hughes in 2019. The artwork size is 36 x 30 inches. The work is signed verso, "Shara Hug...

Divide by artist Doug Freed is a deep blue contemporary abstract landscape oil on canvas painting that measures 72 x 96 and is priced at $18,000. Doug Freed attempts to capture the mystical light found in natural atmospheric effects: the haze in the distance on humid summer days, the overcast gloom of winter skies, and the softness of landscape bathed in fog, and the quieting mood of approaching darkness. In his luminescent multi-paneled oil paintings Freed tries to find the gray area between traditional landscape painting and its abstraction into color fields. Artist Statement For nearly twenty years, I made non-objective grid structured paintings. I started to see references to landscape in these works. I've literalized those references by painting oil landscape vistas of horizons, clouds and bodies of water. These paintings consist of two or more vertical panels. Usually one panel is landscape imagery. The adjacent panels are often atmospheric voids with vestiges of recognizable landscapes. I try to capture the mystical light found in natural atmospheric effects: the haze in the distance on humid summer days, the overcast gloom of winter skies, and the softness of landscape bathed in fog, and the quieting mood of approaching darkness. My intent is to create paintings imbued with a meditative, spiritual presence suggesting issues about time and ecology. I do this by softly modulating color, tone and value. The color varies from quiet, monochromatic works to fully orchestrated chromatic ones. By blending from one hue to another I create color which makes its self gradually felt, weeping forth. In this manner, I create illusions of mysterious emanations of light, places where ones eyes and spirit are invited to linger. I try to imbue my work with a monumental presence, epic in both size and scope. I do this by orchestrating the separate elements of color, texture and structure into a harmonious whole. I seek a somewhat reductive image rich in value and contrast. The surface of the work is devoid of textural incidence. I don’t want anything to distract from the illusion of depth so I deny any marks which would hold the viewer on the surface of the painting. In my luminescent multi- paneled oil paintings I try to find the grey area between traditional landscape painting and its abstraction into color fields. The compositions are about ambiguities of form and void, foreground and background and surface and deep space. My roots lie in tonalism, color field painting and minimalism. However, my work contains an ever-present awareness of the dramatic use of light of the post-renaissance chiaroscurists. It combines a classical awareness of structure with a romantic use of color always in combination with a unique sense of ambiguity. My work continues in its evolution of style the search for an abstract means of probing the ambiguities of physical and spiritual experience of light, and its power to foster a more intense life of the spirit through profound emotional experience of form, color and composition. SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS K.U. Medical Center, Wichita, KS Museum of Art & Archeology University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri Hoecht Marion Roussel (Commission), Kansas City, Missouri FBL Financial Group, Des Moines, IA Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Wichita Center for the Arts, Wichita, Kansas Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, Missouri The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Missouri Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Steinberg Collection, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas College of Architecture and Design, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas Fort Hays, Kansas State University, Hays, Kansas Memorial Union Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri Norman R. Eppink Art Gallery, Emporia State University,, Emporia, Kansas Hutchinson Community College, Hutchinson, Kansas Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas Lincoln College, Lincoln, Illinois State Fair Community College, Sedalia, Missouri Hallmark Cards Inc., Kansas City, Missouri Sprint Corporation, Kansas City, Missouri MacGraw Hill Publishing Co., New York City, New York Pioneer Hybrid, Des Moines, Iowa Pella Corporation, Pella, Iowa Fort Smith Public Library (Commission), Fort Smith, Arkansas Deloitte & Touche (Commission), St. Louis, Missouri Publishing Enterprises, Inc. (Commission), Sedalia, Missouri Parks & Recreation Department, Columbia, Missouri United Telephone Systems, Inc., Kansas City, Missouri American Family Doctors, National Headquarters, Kansas City, Missouri DST Corporation, Kansas City, Missouri Crown Center, Hallmark Art Collection, Kansas City, Missouri Hewlett Packard Corporation, St. Louis, Missouri Emerson Electric (Commission), St. Louis, Missouri Mark Twain Bank, Creve Coeur, Missouri Boone County Bank, Columbia, Missouri Landmark Bank, Madill, Oklahoma Septagon Industries (Commission), Sedalia, Missouri KEO Building Corporation (Commission), Sedalia, Missouri D & W Leasing, Sedalia, Missouri 1st National Bank, Rockford, Illinois Mark Twain Bank Shares, Ladue, Missouri Bank of Olathe, Olathe, Kansas Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Missouri, St. Louis, Missouri Cessna Aircraft...

oil on canvas Kristen Garneau lives in Northern California and has spent a lifetime with the inspiration that comes from ever-changing beautiful landscape – forest, mountain and ocea...

Pastel pink, blue, and purple toned Venice Canal abstract impressionist landscape by American artist Jane Peterson. This painting depicts what seems to be an early morning scene feat...

Signed "E.B." in a cartouche panel in the upper center, which is repeated on the verso. Includes 19 on the left side and 62 on the right side. h: 33.2 x w: 19.5 in / h: 84.3 x w: 49...

Simon Ledson is a surfer, artist and graphic designer whose work is an experiment that investigates the way the rhythm of the ocean connects with the artist’s body and charts the imp...