MIXING MEDIUMS

My recent works are made with soil, stones, and paint on canvas.  They reflect the colors and textures of shale, clay, and sandstone collected along trails or along the roadways near Big Basin State Park.  For the past 12 years I've divided my time between San Francisco and Boulder Creek, California.   I have also collected soil and stones while traveling further north in the Lassen and Trinity forests and south in the desert near Las Vegas.

Recent works also include dust and charcoal drawings and photographs.  The charcoal is from the bases of burned redwoods near where we live in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I did not study art formally but was a student in theatre. I started out in set design and graduated from NYU School of the Arts. After college I designed sets early on and then continued as a theatrical lighting designer while pursuing art at the same time. I built my first studio in the backyard of our home in San Francisco in 1977, and then in the early 1980's rented a larger one.  

At that time I liked trying out new materials like fiberglass and foam and developed a series of large wall sculptures with crumpled paper hardened in resin.  They accidentally resembled landforms, which interested me.  On and off I also continued drawing and making mixed media works.

Over years the sculptures grew in size and so did the drawings which evolved into large-scale land works 500 feet or more in length and breadth.  These site-specific public art projects were akin to ancient landscape drawings and also the Earth Art movement.  By the late 1980's I realized that my main interest was exploring the forms, textures, and uses of the natural landscape.

In the 1990's I decided against working with toxic chemicals and switched instead to found materials.  My studio was in an industrial area of San Francisco located on a landfill.  I collected scrap lumber nearby and made wall sculptures by stacking. The finished works reminded me of worn versions of the striped color field paintings of the 1960's, or buried landfills.

In the late 1990's I began spending more time away from the city, in the country hiking, camping, and living at our place near Boulder Creek. The change in locale led me to using natural pigments.  I like the fact that the recent works are simpler and lighter, and that they grew out of my surroundings as many of my previous works did.         

John Ammirati, 2012