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Constance Mallinson grew up in Washington, D.C. and received her BFA from the University of Georgia. For over thirty years she has been exhibiting her paintings nationally and internationally from her home in the Los Angeles area where she maintains an active exhibition schedule. She was the recipient of a NEA Artist's Fellowship and a City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship grant, as well as a Djerassi Foundation Residency Grant. Her work is represented in many public and private collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bank of America, St. Jude's Medical Research, and Los Angeles Airport. She was recently commissioned to do a large painting for the conference hall of new building of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.. Mallinson has contributed regular reviews to Art in America for the past 5 years and written for many art publications. Before being an adjunct professor of art at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California she has taught at University of California Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, as well as California State Universities at Long Beach and Fullerton, Otis Art Institute, and Art Center College in Pasadena.
For the last 25 years her large scale oil paintings have consisted of a unique painted "collage" technique in which she constructs panoramic landscapes from thousands of photo derived images via an Old Masters technique. In addition to expanding the traditional single view landscape to incorporate multiple views, perspectives, time frames, and narratives simultaneously, her paintings deal with the complex global environmental issues we are now facing. For example, beautiful pastoral imagery will be viewed at the same time as another area of the canvas which might depict an oil spill in Alaska or a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway. The Course of the Empire ( For Thomas Cole) (1990 )installed here at LAX is painted in homage to the great 19th century landscape painter and early environmentalist, Thomas Cole. Using the structure of one of his paintings, Mallinson has inserted recent mass media imagery ranging from ruins to skyscrapers, the Middle East to pastoral England. The painting suggests that we have moved beyond Romantic landscape representations to a global experience of landscape, and that one viewpoint no longer suffices to describe the complexity of living an and traveling through the land. As Cole used ruins to express his anxiety about the changing relationship with nature in the last century, the use of many conflicting and incongruous scenes within one painting field in Mallinson's work implies that nature is now primarily accessed through representation rather than directly. Such mediation impacts our contemporary attitudes about using resources, tourism and recreation, and development.
www.constancemallinson.net
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