Jean Arnold

I extract my artwork from the experience of travel - not of a particular place, but from the velocity of travel itself - its visual bombardment, and its alteration of spatial perceptions. While traversing the urban landscape via car or bus, this hyper-fluid viewpoint engages me. My obsession with my environs compels me to notationally sketch architecture, cars, trees, and urban clutter flowing by - capturing elements in a state of flux and removing them from their original context.

In my drawings and paintings, I invent ambiguous scenes and spaces by accumulating and compressing miles of space and time into one image. This process creates a dense layering of geography, reflecting the current condition of complexity, simultaneity and disjuncture in our lives and society. As traditional time/space barriers break down, the distance between us and our natural origins ever-accelerates. As the land is reconfigured to suit our ambitions, the environmental quandaries facing us are ever-accumulating.

I feel a connection with the 19th century tradition of the urban ambler, the "flaneur," aimlessly strolling city streets, most notably Paris. Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin were prominent among them - observers of the urban scene, writing about their experiences. Riding buses and continuously sketching different neighborhoods, parks, schools, warehouse/industrial districts, and strip malls - I delve into the drawing process while recording what I see.