art is 3 letters

etsy shop: artis3letters
listing: West Virginia on a Stick No. 2
artist: Erik Maldre

I hadn't planned on profiling one of my paintings, but I have been fortunate enough to have my "West Virginia on a Stick" painting featured in the Etsy Storque Spotlight! Many thanks to mermaidclaire for writing the Spotlight article.

Here's my artist statment on the Maps on a Stick series:

There's a duality of represented realities in this series. The first such representational interpretation is that of maps. A single line deviates from the area of land illustrated by the respective form. Such a line implies a border line, road or any number of symbolic attributes associated with maps.

This series is painted in a manner suggesting antique surfaces. Such embellishments lends a sense of history to the series evoking notions of time's past assumptive sense of reality defined by inaccurate measuring resulting in fallacious definitions thus giving the oddly singular, yet curiously charming, line a further sense of invalidity.

The second reality is clearly defined by the title of each piece. "'Region' on a Stick No. 'X'" perpetuates beyond the representational notions of a map by suggesting that the represented region is a physical object unto itself. Ironically enough, the duality of representation comes full circle for the suggested physical object is still a representation of such due to its physically painted nature.