Something gallery owner Mark Sublette said on his podcast, Art Dealer Diaries, resonated with landscape artist Jill Carver. “He was saying that in an artist’s lifetime, there are going to be a few really important pieces,” Carver recalls. Keystone pieces, she calls them, that portray some of best and most important work by that artist. 
Clouds Unfold - Canyonlands, oil on canvas, 36 x 40"
For the past year, Carver has embarked on several camping trips in the Southwest, gathering notes in the field and painting studies that inform her final studio works. The aim is to go bigger than she’s ever gone before, creating large-scale works at around 36 by 72 inches that truly envelope viewers in the landscape. Six new large-scale paintings, ones Carver sees as especially important, will be showcased in an upcoming exhibition at Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, Arizona.
“The motivation for [this show] was two-fold,” says Carver. “One is exploring how we view and take in larger pieces, and [the other is] Mark’s comments that we only have so many of those large keystone pieces in our gas tanks in our lifetimes.”
Saguaro Sunset, oil on canvas, 36 x 36"
Monsoon Rising - Canyonlands, oil on canvas, 36 x 72"
This new body of work, which will be accompanied by about half a dozen smaller works, embodies the energy and mysticism of the Southwestern desert through Carver’s eyes. She cites pieces like Clouds Unfold – Canyonlands and Monsoon Rising – Canyonlands as major works in the show that emulate what it’s like to find oneself immersed in those places in real life.
“If you scale up, the viewer’s experience is different because you can’t take it all in at once,” she says of the experience of viewing a massive painting. “When you’re out in the field, you also can’t really take in [the entire landscape] at once. Your visual experience is many [smaller moments] happening all at once…I wanted to replicate the experience of looking at a vast landscape and recreate that idea that the viewer can step into it.”
Towards the La Sals, oil on board, 12 x 12"
Portraying a sense of energy and movement was a primary focus for Carver. In Clouds Unfold, she explains, “you feel like the solid rock is tangible and in focus, and in other areas it’s softer and more abstract. The level of information in the scene is changing, and
I think [that’s more] engaging.” The clouds are dynamic as well. It almost looks as though they’re sweeping across the canvas. Carver continues, “We all think rocks are solid, but when you’re out there experiencing the desert and weather, those forces of nature—water and wind—are forces of erosion that show us that landscape is not static and solid at all. It’s transitioning all the time.”
This is the concept behind the title of the exhibition, which Carver dubbed Forces and Form. The exhibition opens at Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery on March 12. —
Upcoming Show
Up to 12 works
Opens March 12, 2022
Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery
6872 E. Sunrise Drive, Suite 130, Tucson, AZ 85750
(520) 722-7798, www.medicinemangallery.com
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