3 minute read
An Artist at Work: Anne Rowland
An Artist at Work: Anne Rowland
By Laura Longley
When you go to Google Maps and search for a place or directions, what do you see in the satellite view? Roads, rivers, rooftops, parks?
Anne Rowland sees things differently—shapes, colors, possibilities for the art she creates by capturing aerial photos online and transforming them into images of Leesburg, Virginia, Emerson, Iowa, Lake Paiku, Tibet, and Sumy Oblast, Ukraine.
Washington, D.C.-born, Rowland earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the joint program at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, with additional studies at CalArts.
Her works have been included in countless group and solo shows, and she’s been awarded prestigious residencies and grants, including one from the National Endowment for the Arts. Not until she began visiting Loudoun and Fauquier counties in the early 2000s did she take an interest in landscapes.
“I’ve been making large landscapes since 2002,” explained the Upperville area artist. “At the same time, I started appropriating aerial views from Bing Maps’ “Bird’s Eye View” and Google Maps’ “Satellite View,” both providing imagery of the earth’s surface from airplanes and satellites, respectively. I began close to home, focusing on Loudoun, the nation’s fastest growing county, to show the breadth of development here. My interest expanded.”
So has her output, along with her mastery of the media and the sophistication of the works she calls simply “pictures.”
On a tour of her studio, Rowland detailed her artistic process.
“To create these pieces, I start by making hundreds of computer screenshots from the aerial imagery and then assemble them into a large, legible, and coherent digital landscape in Photoshop. This base layer serves as a foundation from which to extract and alter. It’s all completely improvised and unplanned.”
She shared her screen to demonstrate her basic technique.
“I mold and reshape the imagery as if stirring with a spoon with big, sweeping gestures, drawing with the geographic forms, painting with the imagery itself,” she said. “Because the aerial imagery available is just ‘capture’— processed through software and presented online, neutral—we see both the natural world and the human interventions made on it. There’s no foreground, no background. It’s like a giant flatbed scan of the world.”
To repurpose these machine-made images into something more expressive, Rowland scrolls around looking at random locations. A few early places, she admitted, were predetermined. Santa Clarita, California, which has been massively developed, was a must. So was a location just east of Corona, New Mexico, where the wreckage of a military reconnaissance balloon was thought by some to come from an alien spaceship.
“I mean how can one resist?”
Reviews of Rowland’s spring 2023 solo show at the Hemphill Artworks in Washington, D.C., connected her work to fine art.
“The artist’s energetic manipulation of the imagery evokes the artistry of painting and the way painting generates meaning,” observed Washington’s East City Art.
“Photos generally show us something real,” Rowland said. “There is a singular moment in time, an identifiable subject contained within the rectangle. Usually, there is perspective. These pictures function as a conversation between photography, software, and painting.”
