While the inklings of Iverson’s new work were a long time stewing, she had to undergo several dramatic changes in style before arriving at her current location. “Where this series really started was when I was out painting Seattle’s industrial areas, and doing plein air realistic renderings.”
Iverson recalls. “As I focused more on that industry, I got closer and closer in and it became more abstract—looking at the shapes, colors and lines. I just let it dissolve into almost non-objective work. Although I can’t really say they’re non-objective because you can always see the container in it. But I went on this journey from total realism toward really, really abstract, and then I sort of hit a dead end and was like, how can this be satisfying again? That’s when I picked up the drawing and collage and stumbled upon my new series.”
The new series is a combination of what Iverson calls “magazine paintings” and her own lush oil paintings on canvas, all heavily influenced by the Hudson River School, aka luminism—and the work of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Frederic Edwin Church in particular. In many ways these men, dead since the early 1900s, taught Iverson everything she needed to know for her current body of work.
“For the first few in the series, I copied Bierstadt paintings, scratched in my perspective lines and put the containers in,” Iverson says. “After I’d done a few and learned the vocabulary of that luminist painting school, then I started doing my own large landscapes in that style.” Like her predecessors, Iverson’s landscapes are marked by hazy light effects, aerial perspective and the tranquility of the natural world. From Puget Sound to the Grand Canyon, Iverson travels to each place she paints, using magazine images snapped from exceptional vantage points to guide her. Like a modern day pioneer, Iverson arrives in the national park or protected area and sets up camp. She takes photographs, sketches, breathes the air, experiences the light, drinks it all in. Then she brings it all home and begins to paint.
“Part of what’s so satisfying about my process is that experience, and that experience makes a more successful painting. I’ve tried to do them from stealing other people’s photos, but it never turns out the same as if I actually go there and experience the place. I think that’s what attracted me to painters like Bierstadt and Moran and Church—the luminists – because they were traveling to those places too. These painters, their job was to go to the frontier, record it and bring it back to the masses—what the experience of this grand, scary, frightening, beautiful nature was. What do they call it? The sublime. So to be doing that myself is really, really satisfying. I really find a connection with their work and experiencing the natural world.”
As loyal as she is to both the style and exploratory spirit of the luminists; Iverson’s paintings differ in several dramatic ways, the first, being the omnipresent network of shipping containers that act as the primary symbol in her work.
“In my thinking, the containers represent populations, economies, the state of the world and our consumer culture,” Iverson explains. “Each container becomes a marker for the growth of consumerism. When you see them en masse, stored in a port or on a ship you actually see it visually, the impact of that is bigger than if you just see the numbers on paper… As a teacher, I show my students what I do, my art, and I talk about the container. My students—these are college freshman, say, ‘What do you mean, what’s a container?’ And I say, ‘Well, you know about trains and semis, right?’ They say, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, what do you think is in there? Where do you think your Nikes came from?’
And they just go, ‘Wow! You’re right!’ The general population hasn’t put that together, that these containers are full of stuff. We’re not thinking about our impact.”
It’s like high school! It’s like who’s the popular country? It used to be the U.S.—we were the football players and everybody else wanted to be like us, and now it’s China and Singapore.”