December 2004
Eric Westbrook
Washington, DC
eric@ericwestbrook.com
www.ericwestbrook.com
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For me, painting a landscape is a way to record my emotional response to a place. Even more, it's a way to elaborate on that response--just as memory elaborates on experience.
My working method, which typically starts with on-site drawings and photographs, facilitates this process. As I begin painting--sometimes months after visiting a site--the act of piecing together these fragments of image and memory forces me to manipulate and invent. What emerges is the record of a new place--one which, though rendered naturalistically, has been generated as much by imagination as by impression.
By noticing and transforming little-noticed corners of the city, I attempt in my paintings to capture both the margins of the urban landscape, infused by the presence of man and nature, and the psychological landscape where those forces meet.
