Iowa artist Matt Pulford’s solo exhibition of paintings, drawings, and mixed-media pieces, I’ve Told So Many Skies About You, opens at the CSPS Main Gallery in Cedar Rapids on Friday, April 3, at 4:30 p.m. The exhibition, which runs through April 26, primarily features work exploring the landscape of rural Nebraska along the Platte River, where Pulford recently spent an artist residency.
“There’s a very comforting serenity I feel when surrounded by our wide-open prairie,” he says. “As Midwesterners, we’re often on the receiving end of ridicule. . . . But I’ve always felt incredibly tied to the open landscape, and I have somewhat of a therapeutic bond with the land.”
As an extremely shy child who didn’t talk much until second grade, Pulford found summers exploring his older half-siblings’ farms to be a beneficial escape. In college, as a visual artist, he “realized it was important to further investigate the Midwestern landscape and this power it had on me.”
Now, as a mid-career exhibiting artist who’s spent part of two summers in rural Nebraska, Pulford feels like he’s hit his stride. “I still find being immersed in the land, with no one else around, to be incredibly invigorating,” he says. “It’s like there’s a heightened awareness of the sensory stimuli around me in nature. The smells of certain grasses or damp ground, the sound of the wind in the leaves, and of course the visual beauty, such as the undulating waves of tall field grass in the wind—all these are components of an experience that brings an acute clarity to me.”
Pulford also feels that the extremely rural parts of our land have ties to folklore and mythology. “The natural spaces of our land can be frightening, or even violent. Walking around the artist residency in the pitch-black darkness, with evening life buzzing around me, was quite an experience. I think there’s a lot of exciting territory to explore artistically when it comes to these darker reflections on the landscape.”
He uses light and color as artistic elements in his work. Many paintings feature undulating horizontal bands of color that coil around the base of a tree or highlight the edge of a field against the horizon. He has become a big fan of tinted pastel hues, because the soft, gentle mood they evoke reminds him of when he was a new father with two young girls.
“These are abstracted landscapes,” Pulford explains. “There’s a freedom to use formal elements in ways that don’t make logical sense. I’m not interested in achieving some sort of artistic mastery of these formal elements; it’s more compelling to use light and color in a playful, or even weird way.”
He finds inspiration in the ephemeral nature of light and color, paying attention to the fleeting moments to be found when he slows down and truly observes. “I can enjoy clouds that have almost supernatural pink glows. I can experience that weird yellow-green sky prior to a storm, and how pregnant it is with oncoming rain. Or there is that steel-blue light that can permeate everything during an intensely cold January morning. Natural light and color in these situations can carry an emotional weight, evoking feelings ranging from a warm-and-fuzzy nostalgia to a lower-brain fear of a seemingly impending doom.”
In addition to paintings, Pulford’s exhibition features minimalistic drawings of sparse clusters of grass blades rendered starkly in graphite on white paper, often with unexpected accents of color. Pulford is not interested in creating hyper-realistic facsimiles. Instead, he wants to “create pieces that focus on the beautiful interplays of wispy line work found in nature, when untouched by the human hand. I find these drawings really challenging and fun to work on.”
Pulford’s titles feel deliberately poetic. He explains that some titles are nonsense words or a combination of words that have a nice ring to them. Others are word strings taken from books or songs he finds deeply moving.
“It’s my hope,” he says, “that the titles, even though they often veil or disguise overt meaning, do give viewers an entrée into the artworks,” whether it “hints at a sad longing or a joyful elation.”
He feels this exhibition reflects his ongoing process of better understanding himself and the world. “I think a lot of the inspiration relating to these wide-open spaces and the clear thinking it allows opens me up to pondering the big things—love, friendships, change, taking chances—all that big stuff that artists, writers, musicians, and others investigate.”
Pulford hopes his work will inspire viewers to think about the “idiosyncratic ways they investigate their own life journeys. I hope they have their own uniquely weird rituals. . . . I’d say bringing forth any self-reflection like that would be a fun little success I would celebrate.”
CSPS Hall is located at 1103 3rd St. SE, Cedar Rapids. Hours are Tuesday–Sunday, 12–6 p.m. See CSPSHall.org.