2021 PETRA CORTRIGHT
Petra Cortright grew up on the water in Santa Barbara, California, and has always been enthralled by the vastness of the ocean and by the extraordinary colors of the coastal light. Her latest Seascapes pieces are twenty-first-century odes to the sea that combine the expressive potential of lyrical painting with digital photomontage techniques.
Cortright’s early Internet-based video pieces, such as VVEBCAM (2007), now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, had a visual simplicity and deadpan wit reminiscent of the work of Bruce Nauman and John Baldessari. Since then, Cortright’s work has become increasingly complex, visually and emotionally, and she has found herself engaging with the natural world with greater sincerity and directness.
Her Seascapes use Internet-sourced photographs of rocky coastlines and grids inspired by classic fill patterns from photo editing software. By overlapping these images and grids at multiple scales, the artist achieves astonishing illusions of texture and depth. She then paints with custom digital brush tools, pulling the colors of the background into the foreground, as if the clouds and waves and rocks themselves were as malleable and blendable as paint. Debunking the stereotype of digital artworks as cold and unfeeling, the Seascapes are full of passion and vitality.
Cortright’s energetic brushstrokes suggest the physical exhilaration of swimming in a choppy surf, as well as the contradictory feelings of restless joy and tranquility that her ocean scenes call forth. Over the years, Cortright has learned to use computer processing lag to generate specific distortions in her brushstrokes and to use those distortions expressively. “I like to leave some edges and artifacts, especially digital artifacts,” she tells me. “For it to be an interesting build of a world, and to keep some sense of humanity, or the artist’s hand or touch, I have to leave those traces.” Composing with intentionally imperfect, processed, and distorted elements, Cortright allows her painterly virtuosity to shine. Her compositions are the artifacts of performances as complex as the roiling sea.