Rodney Buxton

As a Baby Boomer, Rodney's early memories of family vacations to national parks consisted of many long hours driving to the park, getting out of the car for ten minutes to ‘view’ one site in the park, and then being herded back into the car for another long drive to next destination. Consequently, those early memories were shaped more by the vivid postcards of the period that became an index of having ‘visited’ a national park, rather than the park itself. Over the years, those distant memories have lingered, fueled, in part, by further exposure to photographs by John Muir and Ansel Adams and the paintings of Claude Monet, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keefe, Mark Rothko, widescreen technicolor films of the 1950s and the poster artists of the WPA, in addition to those initial images from the postcards. It is the memories and influences that now shape his approach to creating art about national parks, monuments and forests.As an award winning artist, he has been capturing photographic images of his travels to U.S. national parks and monuments for the past fifteen years. Drawing on previous experience as an associate professor in film and television studies and production, his interest in using photography as the basis for his digital art has evolved since early 2014. This interest led to the creation of the business On and Off the Road: Creative Images by Rodney Buxton. He has expanded on many of the more advanced techniques in Adobe Photoshop to creatively manipulate original digital photo images for expressionistic and dreamlike purposes to create his vision of these national parks. What previously had been strict photographs are now photo-illustrations, painterly images growing out of his emotional reactions to travel sites that are transformed into vivid memory images.

These photo-illustrations capture the vanishing presence of geological formations, flora and fauna in several U.S. National Parks, as they struggle against the effects of climate change, threats of industrialized exploitation and commercial over-development. Presently, an experience within any national park can change relatively quickly as external, non-natural forces impact the landscape in a short span of years rather than over centuries. This intersection of my fleeting experience and the parks’ vanishing presence forms the basis for my own sense of neo-nostalgia – the recognition of the tenuous present, steeped in vibrant, almost hallucinogenic saturated visual tones as my attempts to appreciate and capture various national parks through my transient experience in them.