Purple Dreamscape and Soft Green Haze

“Soft Green Haze” and “Purple Dreamscape” are two oil paintings on wood panels by Olivia Ross, a Studio Art student at Montana State University. In creating these two works, Olivia looks to examine how narrative and aesthetic choices draw a viewer into a piece. Olivia removed any indication of a clear narrative or recognizable spaces and instead relies on abstraction to prompt an audience to engage. Olivia found even with the absence of these the viewer is enticed to explore further, not only in physical proximity to the work, but in projecting their own ideas onto it. Olivia thinks that this inclination to create one’s own relationship with a piece when there is no clear narrative to grasp makes a nontangible, abstracted space that’s much more reactively powerful.