The jetties along Rockaway Beach are one of my regular destinations when I can get out there. I grew up in a Coast Guard family and spent a fair amount of time around the ocean and surfing. I still like to get in the water and this is the first Atlantic-exposed beach on Long Island as you start to get out of the city. When it comes to the environment, constructions like these can be contentious things but they also make for a series of interesting surf spots. Its got a lot of New York metro qualities you might expect including the Subway making its stops a couple of blocks back from the water.
Chris Ballantyne’s work focuses on vernacular architecture and observation of the American landscape. Banal features of suburban and industrial zones are sources for paintings that highlight the quirky and absurd. Ballantyne states that, “Growing up in a military family and moving to different parts of the country, there was a certain familiarity to the kinds of houses and neighborhoods.
They were a series of suburban developments built in separate regions of the country, always on the outskirts of larger cities, at the exit ramps of interstate highways, and all very similar in age and design. My own notions of space developed out of this cultural landscape which was striving for an indidvidual sense of personal space, consciously economic, and somewhere between urban and rural.”
Dysfunctional structures are flawless in their strangeness, made beautiful through symmetry, simplified lines and flat, subdued colors. Ballantyne eliminates detail to emphasize the subtleties of the way we experience space and our attempts at containment. He extends these concepts further by expanding the imagery of his paintings beyond the picture plane and onto the surrounding walls.
“Most of my works involve combinations of various places, drawn from memory. As well, my own interests in skateboarding and surfing altered how I saw the use of these structures ranging from empty pools, sidewalk curbs, to ocean jetties in a way that tied in to my sense of this larger push and pull between culture and nature.”
With shrewd restraint, Ballantyne accentuates the antisocial effects of our built environment with a hint of humor and plenty of ambiguity. A curious emptiness permeates the work of Chris Ballantyne. Graphically rendered buildings, pools, parking lots, and fences take on new meanings and amplified significance, isolated on flat fields of color.