D Berman Gallery presents two Texas artists with contrasting views of landscape.

Katie Maratta's favored media are Graphite, ink, and Pastel. Her scenes taken from all over the state evoke a nostalgic sense of traveling through the countryside. She says of her work, "My subject matter is the Texas horizon. My pieces are typically 1 inch high and 4 feet long...Because the pieces can not be seen all at once, the viewer has to 'travel' the work. What I like about these pieces: They should feel cramped and crowded, but they manage to convey a surprising sense of space. They should be corny because they include elements such as windmills and cows and pumpjacks, but in this small scale the cliché becomes fresh again. They allow me to play with the notion of beginning, middle, and end in new ways. They are, in fact, a basic geometry lesson with the verticality of the viewer complementing the line, squares, and basic shapes of the horizon and the pictorial elements strung along it. They are powerful without being intimidating. They are satisfying to do and satisfying to look at. They share a quality with Chinese porcelain of the complete world that one can hold in one’s hand." Maratta lives and works in Austin.

Randy Twaddle's new work revisits imagery he first started using over twenty years ago - pole-mounted transformers and the distribution lines that run to and from them. In this new work, however, Twaddle focuses on the lines themselves, and eschews charcoal, a medium he used for 25 years, for the unusual and striking combination of ink and coffee. In these drawings, Twaddle pours and "steers" coffee over a light ink-wash ground, creating images that evoke tangled tree limbs or shadows of the silhouetted black ink distribution and telephone lines above. Twaddle describes his interest in the distribution lines: "I love to drive down Houston streets - especially at dawn or dusk - when the transformers and the distribution lines and telephone lines are in silhouette. I'm constantly awed by the variations of their unintentional beauty and lyricism. They have a strong musical association for me, like some trippy score that's been drawn in the air by an anonymous composer." Twaddle lives and works in Houston.

Preview Twaddle's work

Preview Maratta's work