August Vance · No. 109

Terra

Terra is the most earthbound and physical work in the series. August Vance loads the canvas with terracotta and clay tones worked into heavy impasto, the surface ridged, trowelled and cracked like fired ground or a sun-baked wall, then accents the warmth with quiet passages of bronze that catch the light. The palette is primal and ancient — the colour of pottery, of brick, of earth turned and dried in the sun — and the sheer thickness of the material insists on its own bodily presence; this is paint as substance, as matter, not as illusion. There is something deeply old in it, a kinship with the first pigments ground from the ground itself and with the oldest worked walls, all set within a thoroughly contemporary abstract language. Vance lets texture do the work that colour and line do elsewhere, the relief catching shadow and turning the flat plane into something almost geological. Warm, grounded and intensely tactile, it brings a sense of weight, origin and permanence to a space. It is abstraction rooted firmly in the soil — a painting you feel as much as see, the earth itself raised to the wall.

An original oil painting on canvas by August Vance, painted to order — never a reproduction. Large-scale gestural abstraction — sweeping palette-knife strokes, plaster texture and gold-leaf veins in muted, architectural palettes built for grand interiors.

Artist

August Vance

Medium

Oil on canvas

Finish

Unframed, ready to hang or frame

Made

To order, by hand