Touring the west with her band (she’s a songwriter and steel guitar player), Landry McMeans discovered the Sonoran Desert. “I fell in love with the landscape,” she says. “My inspiration came from the road.”
She creates images with her lyrics and continues the imagery in her two-dimensional and three-dimensional art. She creates three-dimensionality in her screenprints and hand-cut stencil prints as well as actual three-dimensional works in colorful cut cardboard in shadow boxes.
Open Heart, original handmade stencil print on paper, 30 x 60”
Joshua Tree, original handmade stencil print on paper, 36 x 72"
Her triptychs such as Joshua Tree, which measures 3 by 6 feet, allow her to create larger pieces more easily. Once she has adjusted a photographic image on her computer, she lays it on her lightboard and begins the arduous process of dividing the images into layers she cuts out as stencils. “The process forces me to simplify the design,” she explains. “I need to decide what feels like the most significant color contrasts and what will make the image more three-dimensional.” When she began she thought she would have, perhaps, three layers, but has found herself using anything from 14 to 16 layers. She applies her acrylic paint with a foam roller that creates more texture than a screenprint as well as more nuance.
“I love feeling I’m part of the landscape,” she says. As she becomes immersed in the scene she absorbs its details, as in the three close-ups in Bluebonnets. “It’s nice to find joy in something so simple,” she observes. —
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