Here is my contribution to the lovely limited edition book produced by David B.Smith Gallery for Gregory Euclide. Some copies are still available at the gallery.

13 x 9 inch landscape | 96 pages, 119 color images | pencil signed and numbered by Euclide | hardcover edition of 500

Written contributions from Michael Chavez, Michael Cina, Amy Gilman, Leanne Goebel, Brooke Grucella, Molly MacFadden, Denise Markonish, Don Myhre, David Pescovitz, Sarah Tanguy, and Justin Vernon

Published by David B. Smith Gallery, 2011
Printed and bound in the United States
ISBN 978-0-615-53226-4

Some see landscapes flowing from crumpled paper, diminutive dioramas, and relief paintings. But the art of Gregory Euclide is not about landscape. It’s about small realities and visual misconception. It’s firma chimera, an experience of place, the authenticity of that experience, and something impossible to achieve. It’s about exploration, vast and unpredictable, not knowing what might be uncovered around the bend or peering at the work from another angle, seeing where the fake and authentic collide, merge, and then come apart. The human enters a natural world, the natural world becomes human, the topography shifts back and forth, real to unreal, gilded and baroque to simple line as symbolic gesture. The viewer is a giant observer looking down onto the land, focusing closer to see the trash and smell the fertilizer and whirl among the fake trees and human-less human structures. To capture and pull up what earth cans of paint-like-glue can grasp. To transform dirt, pond water and melted snow into formalist art materials. Euclide’s art creates a new world, one of rhythm and beat, a visual soundtrack. It’s not landscape in the image of man. It’s landscape in the image of layered melodies and tones, something pure, creative, and endlessly complex. Nature’s music made visible.

Leanne Haase Goebel

Independent Critic and Curator

AICA-USA