As a kid, I was always fascinated with atlases and geography books. It wasn’t just the maps and their inherent sense of possibility and mystery; it was the detailed diagrams exhibiting earth science and the natural landscape that excited me.
Looking at a monochromatic continent littered with dots, stars and foreign names that was edged by an equally dull blue mass certainly inspired a sense of wonder. But the visual image was still so bland--lifeless and insipid. Tracing lines with my finger, surveying borders and imagining physical features, never set my mind reeling quite like a cross-section of our incomprehensibly giant planet, split down the middle like a halved apple. Or a slice of the rainforest, cut cleanly from the wilds of Brazil and illustrated with detail and clarity. Here, I could see the layers of the earth, the mantle confining the molten core. I could examine the strata of a jungle, the canopy teeming with just as much drawn fauna as the floor. There were solid blocks of ocean (surface to bottom), the water, sediment and sea life contained by invisible walls, where I could consider the levels and depth of the Pacific and how the change in temperature and light affected its ecosystem. Diagrams like these weren’t just visually stimulating; they helped me contextualize a map. The scale and scope of the dioramic graphics, often given a quarter-turn to show more dimension, could be applied to the featureless surfaces of the maps, making them more lively.
And so it was with great pleasure that I stumbled upon Josh Keyes’ work in an art magazine. He is an Oakland-based artist who paints almost exclusively in acrylics. His pieces recall those same vintage-science-book diagrams, hyper-realistic but with a mysterious and sometimes unsettling juxtaposition between the natural world and the man-made landscape. Conclude what you will.
Looking at a monochromatic continent littered with dots, stars and foreign names that was edged by an equally dull blue mass certainly inspired a sense of wonder. But the visual image was still so bland--lifeless and insipid. Tracing lines with my finger, surveying borders and imagining physical features, never set my mind reeling quite like a cross-section of our incomprehensibly giant planet, split down the middle like a halved apple. Or a slice of the rainforest, cut cleanly from the wilds of Brazil and illustrated with detail and clarity. Here, I could see the layers of the earth, the mantle confining the molten core. I could examine the strata of a jungle, the canopy teeming with just as much drawn fauna as the floor. There were solid blocks of ocean (surface to bottom), the water, sediment and sea life contained by invisible walls, where I could consider the levels and depth of the Pacific and how the change in temperature and light affected its ecosystem. Diagrams like these weren’t just visually stimulating; they helped me contextualize a map. The scale and scope of the dioramic graphics, often given a quarter-turn to show more dimension, could be applied to the featureless surfaces of the maps, making them more lively.
And so it was with great pleasure that I stumbled upon Josh Keyes’ work in an art magazine. He is an Oakland-based artist who paints almost exclusively in acrylics. His pieces recall those same vintage-science-book diagrams, hyper-realistic but with a mysterious and sometimes unsettling juxtaposition between the natural world and the man-made landscape. Conclude what you will.
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