Leland Bourdages

I am an artist/art educator living and working in Long Beach, California.
In 2004 I received my Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting and Drawing, from California State University of Long Beach, and have been keeping up with my art practice ever since.
My predominant body of work consists largely of 3'x4' and 2'x2' canvases, painted with flat, rejected latex house paint colors, the subject matter of which is derived from photos taken of suburban, Southern Californian architecture.
While being a far cry from straightforward representation, flat color silhouettes of suburban architecture dominate the fractured, layered compositions of my paintings. Always, within these otherwise generic houses, I am drawn to moments in which the geometry is interrupted, not by nature so much as by the innate flaws, yet persistence, of human effort. We design, attempt to progress, execute, build, create, fail, go back to the drawing board, attempt again.
On an individual and societal level, we play out this cycle again, and again.
We have been disillusioned by internal division, jaded by our history, made cynical by mistakes, and we have then forgotten them, and made the same mistakes again. But, after all, we carry on, attempting to progress, to find a modern, appropriate, workable definition of the concept of "civilization". This interplay between our folly and our promise, between our humanity and our divinity, and the reconciliation of these two opposing drives, is what this flawed architecture symbolizes to me. It is at once tragic, and totally absurd; profound and obtuse. Our attempts do not become any less noble, even for our repeated mistakes.