Chris Weller

I make drawings to explore man’s relationship with the urban environment he has built, juxtaposed against his tenuous relationship with nature. I am intrigued by the unlikely beauty of urban decay and constantly search for images which convey this disparity both visually and conceptually. My goal is to create work which communicates the continual state of decay and reclamation by nature that i experience living in the city. I want to challenge the ideas of urban life being simply glamorous or decrepit and show the everyday, slow failings we constantly live with.

I make drawings to explore man's relationship with the urban environment he has built, juxtaposed against his tenuous relationship with nature. I am intrigued by the unlikely beauty of urban decay and constantly search for images which convey this disparity both visually and conceptually. My goal is to create work which communicates the continual state of decay and reclamation by nature that I experience living in the city. For me, the urban landscape appears as an endless grey-scale, influencing me to work with charcoal on paper. The sooty feel of the medium conveys a sort of fading corrosion. I look for opposing themes of beauty and ugliness, despair and hope. The inconsistency of allowing our created urban environment to decay leaves us without a place to be in the world, alienated from both nature and ourselves. The precise, detailed technique emphasizes the contradiction between our place in nature and the disintegration and gradual decline in soundness of the place we have built. My current work has grown out of the diversity of my own experience. Having lived near wilderness, in rural, suburban, and urban areas I clearly see the struggle to find a sense of belonging in the city. I want to challenge the ideas of urban life being simply glamorous or decrepit and show the everyday, slow failings we constantly live with.