Simon Ling

Painting en plein air and from memory, Simon Ling creates still lifes and landscapes with unexpected, jarringly unsavory elements: the stumps of felled trees, mounds of junk food on a dining table, and rooms full of plastic clutter. Ling’s highly realistic, large-scale works depict the detritus of human lives that occasionally infringes on otherwise wholesome pastoral scenes. Often, Ling’s imposition of a ruinous element is subtle, as in Gravity’s Garden (2003), in which a weed-covered slope is bordered by chicken wire. Elsewhere, the destructive human hand is made more explicit, such as the filled grocery bag hanging from a tree branch in a meadow in Untitled (2006). For a 2003 collection, Ling created one oil painting and a series of black marker drawings on the torn out pages of a small date book.