Paper Towns #6

See Greg Skol’s work in WTP Vol. VI #6

oil on panel
6″ x 6”

My work is about evocation, not transcription. I try to speak to our human connection with our natural environment, through images that transcend specificity of place. As we are both a part of that nature and apart from it, all at once, that connection can become frayed and broken. Moments of connection can become increasingly difficult in a world filled with the noise of  both internal and external activity.

This series is about the human impulse to name and claim places. ‘Paper Towns’ refers to an old mapmaker’s ‘trick.’ When maps were drawn by hand, mapmakers would include a nonexistent town, to ensure that their maps would not be forged. If a map was a copy, the nonexistent town would be included in the forgery. Since those ‘towns’ only existed on the maps as fictions, they were referred to as ‘Paper Towns.’ The works in this series are a sort of ‘fiction’ as well. The map images used in these works are a mechanism to that end.” —Greg Skol