Concentrations: Todd Carpenter

LAUNCH Gallery is proud to present two exciting and unique perspectives on contemporary landscape painting presented by local artists Deena Capparelli and Todd Carpenter.

Todd Carpenter continues his monochromatic exploration of contemporary natural and urban landscapes with oil paint.  These meditations are inspired by the recent pandemic and world travels while his deep understanding of light and visual interpretation were honed in Southern California and its spectacular vistas and inspiring light.

These paintings are concentrations: reductions of reality, attempts to extract the essence of what it is like to experience landscapes. With these paintings, I attempt to examine the features that characterize landscapes. The depicted scenes are simplified to emphasize components that are instrumental in invoking their subject, components such as texture and pattern, gradients and shading, or even the angles of lines. These are the characteristics that might cause the infinite parts to settle into a single idea. With these paintings I am looking for the essence that condenses the details into something singular.  Ultimately, the unifying element is the viewer: the infinitesimal point at the center of the sphere of perception. The viewer's mind makes the parts of the scene resolve into something meaningful. These paintings merely concentrate on those traits that will help the mind to imagine. Thus these paintings are concentrations.

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About the artist:

Todd Carpenter is a Los Angeles based artist who uses black and white paint to explore the perception of space and beauty. Carpenter's formal education is in science - he holds a MS in Neuroscience from UCSD and a BS in Psychobiology from UCLA - and he brings this background into service when making art. His paintings explore the mechanisms of perception and aesthetics, examining among other things how the depiction of light can impart realism and convey emotion. Like his paintings bridging art and science, Carpenter's career has similarly straddled the two fields, and he has taught subjects ranging from neuroscience and environmental science to photography and painting.