Friday Favorite: Jo Reimer

This Friday’s featured artist is Jo Reimer and her wonderful map paintings!

I love the way she experiments with her personal map collection to express ideas of travel, journeys, exploration and her own personal history. This was the first map work in her series:

Crossroads, acrylic and collage on paper, 22" x 17"

"Here I laid down strips of map to indicate a matrix of roads leading away from a city somewhere west, near the water," writes Jo.

She explains that one day she decided to shred an old map to see how she could use the strips creatively. "To me the strips of map are the roadway, the directions for how to get somewhere, the path I traveled, and because I make an effort to make art that refelcts my own life history and emotions it seemed appropriate to investigate where my map collection would take me on canvas and paper."

From Franklin to Oneida, acrylic and collage on paper, 22" x 17"

The painting From Franklin to Oneida "grew out of imagining the chaos of traveling through unfamiliar landscape, following a straight highway and suddenly coming upon a small town out in the middle of nowhere and wondering why people settled there in the first place."

Sea City, acrylic and collage on paper, 10" x 10"

"The design for Sea City came about from looking at an actual map of a coastal city and adding the main streets to the painting as strips of maps, though not cut from a map of this actual city."

Wetlands, acrylic and collage on board, 20" x 20"

"As I was painting Wetlands I imagined looking down on the landscape from above, seeing a small town nestled between the rivers and creeks that flow through a rather wet landscape. Homes and businesses were built above the flood plain but were controlled by the flow of water, while nearby the freeway soared above the landscape, bypassing the town altogether."

See even more Jo Reimers' series of map paintings on her art blog here!

TGIF!

Mary