Mood board – Open Call at NATIONAL gallery of art

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My proposal for the Open Call at the National Gallery of Art reinterprets Vincent van Gogh’s Green Wheat Fields, Auvers through the meadow landscapes, cultural history, and personal meaning of Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, Maine. For more than twenty years, Acadia National Park has been a place where I’ve returned to feel renewed and connected again. Its meadows have always felt like places where I can re-energize and reconnect with myself and the natural world.

My connection to Acadia deepened during my time there working as a Visual Information Specialist, where I engaged directly with the park’s interpretive mission, ecological systems, and cultural narratives. During that work, I learned about the Wabanaki relationship to the meadows and the cultural significance of sweetgrass, which is central to Wabanaki basketry and traditions. This past summer, the meadows took on an even deeper meaning for me, shaped by generations of cultural connection and stewardship.

Van Gogh’s Green Wheat Fields, Auvers struck me for its movement, the feeling of wind, and energy captured in paint. In the Acadia meadows, there are moments when winds sweep through, fog drifts above the grasses, and granite mountains sit quietly in the background. In my remix painting, I will echo the woven rhythms of the Wabanaki sweetgrass traditions through layered, impasto strokes that carry the same tactile energy and hand-shaped movements, both inspired by the land. By bringing these ways of seeing and practices together, my remix painting will illuminate connections between artists inspired by the natural world, and how one artist’s influence can shift and grow into something new, bringing fresh inspiration to new generations.