In their own way, these works celebrate nature’s unbounded spaces by framing its geometries, linear progressions and algorithms. By refining the basic elements of line, colour and texture from the West Coast landscapes around me, I distill nature’s complexities down to an appreciable moment of sublime wordless understanding.
My intent is to capture the pondering presence we get from nature, not as it appears but as it feels to experience: incomprehensible, indescribable, and often very chaotic.
Unconventionally constructed with various coloured fibers, metal foils, and glass tile, my painted canvases express the same underlying concept that I strive for as a cinematographer; Poetic narratives with kinetic energy.
Vancouver based artist Eric Goldstein honed his skills as a fine artist at Rhode Island School of Art and Design.
Having had collaborated on more than 100 film projects, Eric draws on the rich experiences of his 30 year long and productive career as a Director of Photography. His distinct cinematographic style has garnered numerous awards: including an Eastman Kodak Excellence Award; a Gemini Award and several BC’s Leo Awards, and has also strongly influenced the other art-forms he explores.
Striking the balance between careful planing and improvisation, Eric’s unconventionally painted art comes into being through an intricate and labour-intensive process of assembling, adding, subtracting and layering of materials thoughtfully selected for the way they connect to the subject, either by colour or texture, as well as for their archival properties.
As a cinematographer, Eric was reliant upon the alchemy of sciences, history, and technical skills all funnelled through a viewfinder and a lens to develop visual order out of the emotional narratives set before him.
As a mixed-media artist fluent in the contemporary language of art, Eric uses the same creative alchemy to share even more intricate stories playing out on our natural stage. In looking towards the natural world through a different lens, he observes the random beauty of light dancing through a hole in a trellis fence, notices the chaos that sunlight makes as it flickers along the forest path with its random flora colours, sees how either in sunlight or moonlight, the shore, the horizon, and the sky all coalesce and dance in the water as lines.
With visually mesmerizing effects, Eric juxtaposes organic tread and natural fibres, plaster, paint, metal foil and glass tiles to create abstracted landscapes that focus on kinetic energy of light and eloquently transposes on his canvases his internalized experiences of the way light moves and interacts with the physical realm over time.
Inspired by the our West Coast environment and graphically influenced with strong, architectural rhythms, Eric’s luminous works of art embody a parallel spirit of nature, architecture and interior design, while framing myriad distinct moments into visually and emotionally compelling narratives.
