Works by Alli McKee

2009-04-28T04:36:00.000-07:00

Sunrise in Monument Valley 2009 48" x 60" oil on canvas. This painting comes from my trip out West last summer, during which I drove out the Monument Valley for sunrise. This scene is from my return to Kayenta after the sun had risen on the red rock valley.

2009-04-28T04:35:00.000-07:00

Jenny Lake Storm Clouds 2008 48" x 60" oil on canvas. This is a scene from my hike around Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park this past summer.

2009-04-28T04:32:00.000-07:00

Vondelpark 2009 48" x 48" oil on canvas. The trees in Amsterdam's central park are beautifully knotted and twisted, much like the city's personality.

2009-04-28T04:29:00.000-07:00

Saturday in the Park 2009 48" x 48" oil on canvas. This spot in Regent's Park is particularly special to me, as I passed by it on my way home every day in London last summer.

2009-04-28T04:26:00.000-07:00

Firenze in Fuego 2009 48" x 48" oil on canvas. This is a view of Florence from the Boboli Gardens. I worked from both photographs and memory to recollect the experience.

2009-04-28T04:19:00.000-07:00

My painting is closely intertwined with travel. I am interested in the idea of capturing a time, a place, an essential experience of travel and manipulating it until the painting becomes a new experience in itself. My motives for travel reveal the motives for my painting, as well. I travel to escape the mundane, to plunge myself into the new, the unfamiliar, the challenging. I travel to take home something new; to reawaken the spontaneity that my tightly wound schedule suffocates. I travel, and I paint, to push myself past the ordinary, to learn about myself so that I may shape myself.
I am interested in self-expression through landscape painting, in which emotion amplifies the forms and colors of the landscape until they become an exaggeration of nature’s reality. Color’s ability to intoxicate, to stimulate a loss of control, a loss of focus, and a loss of self fascinates me. It is the state of not-self the hyperbolic landscape induces in which I am interested.
Travel also induces a state of not-self, as it is both an escape from reality and enables an amplification of identity –because it lifts the boundaries of reality. The freedom of creating myself anew in a new place is seductive to me—the ability to remold my character, my appearance, and my self to fit my desires and my needs in the present moment. I paint landscapes of my travel experiences because both travel and painting offer me a state of complete self absorption—a state of not-self that is exhilarating and freeing for me. Painting gives me this intoxicating freedom that I crave.