Marianne Bland

My paintings consist mainly of two bodies of work- urban landscapes and mixed media abstracts.

For my cityscapes, I create realistically rendered scenes using my own reference photographs in acrylic & oil. Imagery depicted often includes street scenes from San Francisco, featuring a few figures amidst vibrantly colored architecture. In addition to bright color, I often employ slight blurring effects or rough charcoal lines to express the gritty, fast-paced magnetism cities hold for me. Recently, I’ve been focusing on night scenes. The heightened contrast emphasizes the sense of “looking in” and invites the viewer to contemplate the boundary between intimacy and voyeurism- a line growing increasingly fuzzy in a digital, de-personalized society where privacy rights are constantly on the decline.

In my mixed media pieces, I arrange vintage elements to create modern allegories around themes of memory, social constraints/expectations and nostalgia. Many of these paintings are constructed with layers of old sewing patterns, snippets of text and illustrations from children’s books, dictionaries, literature and vintage tomes on odd, general topics like public speaking and housekeeping. I combine the paper elements on canvas with acrylic paint, watercolor, pastel, charcoal and small 3-d objects, such as sewing notions. I am intrigued by the mystery of the materials themselves and their histories, but I am more interested in the ways these seemingly disparate bits can be reassembled and reinterpreted by a modern viewer to refer to current issues. I believe that humanity is reaching a critical stage in evolution where we must choose to work together and lay many existing patterns to rest so that we can build new ones that serve everyone. In this context, I present compositions that are sometimes humorous, sometimes sentimental and often personal.