ROUTE 66 | Paintings by Mary Anne Erickson: EXHIBITION PROPOSAL
Overview
ROUTE 66 | Paintings by Mary Anne Erickson, EXHIBITION PROPOSAL

Mary Anne Erickson has long been fascinated by scenes of the vanishing American roadside and the imaginary stories of unknown people and places.

Mary Anne Erickson is fascinated with the slow decline of American culture and paints elegiac portraits of what America used to be with trompe-l'oeil precision and an unironic eye.  The quiet rust of signs, the peeling of paint and plaster from whimsical statuary, and the long, lonely road that unites these relics are described with nostalgia and patience. By capturing these iconic hotels, restaurants and other tokens of the past, Mary Anne Erickson faithfully portrays wistful artifacts of post-World War II exuberance and enthusiasm for American car culture. 

 

A graduate of the Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, CA), Mary Anne Erickson is a landscape painter, artist, photographer, and author. For 20 years, Erickson worked as a graphic designer for major publications including The New York Times and New York Magazine, publishing houses, and record companies, and her love of visual storytelling is ever present in her work. She has long been fascinated by scenes of the vanishing American roadside and the imaginary stories of unknown people and places.  Mary Anne's visual arts career and portfolio can be viewed at www.maryanneerickson.com.

Works
Virtual Exhibition

I am fascinated by the boundary between what is man-made and what is natural. In the American landscape, particularly the West, there is a subtle edge where the built environment meets—and sometimes begins to dissolve into—the vastness around it. Motels, gas stations, roadside signs, and abandoned structures become markers of our presence in a landscape that existed long before them and will likely outlast them.

These once-familiar places and objects were created with an optimism about movement, progress, and the open road. Today, many occupy a kind of netherworld, still standing but increasingly disconnected from the world that created them. Some have become landmarks themselves; others rust, crumble, and gradually disappear.

I paint these places in a precise, photorealist style because that precision—the hard edge of a building or the geometry of a sign against an immense sky—creates an illusion of space and, for me, its corollary: time. I am drawn to that edge between permanence and impermanence, where the human imprint on the landscape is still present, but never entirely secure.

    - Mary Anne Erickson

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