“Ontological scapes “ My solo show along with ceramic collaboration with my brother @richardwmhudson opens in New York @palogallery September 9th Here’s a small section of text from the catalogue which is accompanying this exhibition. @alexjbacon “Since at least the Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th century the sublimity of certain natural views has captivated artists. Thinkers at the time, such as Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), characterized the sublime as the sense of first being subsumed by something greater than oneself, and then regaining control over the effect. This implies a distance from what is observed and for this reason is primarily a pictorial effect, even in nature. Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings are paradigmatic. For example, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), where the titular figure stands above an archipelago of rocks shrouded in mist, a position that centers him in the vista even as it also protects him from being consumed by it. Given the role the technology of the airplane played in Hudson perceiving the views that comprise the basis of the horizon line reliefs it is not surprising that he starts the reliefs on the iPad. Hudson uses the tablet to manipulate images he has taken while airborne, rendering them into a sketch of sorts that he and his assistants use to guide the production of a relief. Acknowledging both the inherent abstraction introduced by the distance of the airplane as well as the history of art since the 19th century, whose tendency towards abstraction has been encouraged by the abstracting nature of technology, Hudson makes a nod to the legacy of color field painting with his luminous gradients, here centered on a bright blue hue common to all the works in this group.”