Margot Spindelman’s paintings depict the physical landscape as an exploration of a parallel human, interior terrain. Color, muted or clamorous, and dashed or looping lines, interact with organic forms that enforce or subvert the horizon to engender seductive paintings that recreate the landscape as a painted, invented world.

The Hudson River School painters embraced the landscape that echoed the hopeful, idealized manifest destiny of their nation. In these paintings the idealized place is interrupted and transformed by stark bands of color and intruding shapes. Color, line and form create a dialogue between a romanticized vision of place and the disruptive forces acting upon it.

This series of work, “The Ocean and The Road,” is informed by Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” a post-nuclear depiction of a shattered world, and by the recent science writing that chronicles the accumulating evidence of the deterioration of the natural world. Sea level rise, ocean acidification, warming trends leading to species extinction are all consequences of systems gone awry, acting upon our already compromised utopia. The aesthetic intent of the paintings is to take what is diagrammatic in science and transform it into lavish visual experience.