My name is Connor Rothe. I’m a multidisciplinary artist from Waterloo, Ontario currently in my 4th year of Drawing and Painting at OCADU. My current work explores rural Southern Ontario landscapes through a dissociative lens. Growing up in the age of technology, I’ve never felt connected to my environment. Despite living almost my entire life in Southern Ontario, I feel like a stranger to it. I seek to describe this disconnect between me and the landscape through my murky and blurry depictions.
I approach the landscape in two modes: one on-site with flexible mediums (pastel, and watercolour), and the other out of my studio with airbrushed acrylic. The pastel and watercolour paintings are more meditative. These are done to capture a moment/environment that’s more immediate. My acrylic paintings are more thematically focused; they describe memory and personal perception. In these airbrushed paintings, there is no physical connection between me and the canvas. The lack of physicality both in the process and effect of airbrushing relates to my described themes of disconnect.
