April Miranda Raven O'Connor,
Painter

My paintings are super-simplified visions of large cities. They are composite images of metropolitan areas throughout the world, focusing on the poorest neighborhoods and their fragility. I think about slums, barrios and ghettos where housing is nothing more than what people can find and cobble together. There are also shiny new buildings next to the run down homes- representative of the charge toward to future with big money, often planted on the doorstep of those it's leaving behind. Somehow there is stark beauty in colorfully polluted sunsets silhouetting the wires, aerials, pipes and chimneys of these little cities. It's the allure of angles, shapes and lines in the context of ugly poverty and desperation.