Marissa Textor

"Trouble in Paradise"  graphite on paper  18" x 16.5"

"Alone Out here"  graphite on paper  28.5" x 43"

"Bent Over Backwards"  16" x 18"

"Pony Swim"  graphite on paper  26" x 36"

"An Outlet For Pent Up Forces"  graphite on paper  11" x 14"

Marissa Textor offers up painstakingly realist graphite drawings that convey the power of nature, which is not always the warm comforting life nourishing force we like to anthropomorphise as a loving mother. Biology is ruthless. And nature is not just biology. It is geology and atmosphere and chemistry and all the forces that shape the world in which we find ourselves. These forces can twist life, bend it, break it, drown it, even snuff it out en masse in minutes. This is not to say that Marissa Textor's work is about destruction and catastrophe. But her interest in nature has more to do with it's vast and unsympathetic power than how artists' have traditionally treated it. She presents wonders. Not lofty hopeful wonders but relentless ones both large and small. And though her work is dramatic it is not the drama of human emotion. It's more staid than that, more clinical and objective. Though the work is clearly based on photography, her exquisite renderings have the same cold distilled alien beauty of electron microscopy.

Her work was featured in New American Paintings (#97) a while back but somehow I overlooked it at the time. That happens a lot I'm afraid. Anyway, check out more of her work at marissatextor.com.