![]() A key part of my childhood was escaping the city nearly every weekend with my family to a nature reserve on Long Island where almost all of my fondest memories took place. It was a rather slow evolution over a period of around six years before I fully committed to ephemeral land art works in nature. What drew you to land art? What inspired you to begin using the natural landscape as your canvas and natural pigments as your medium? When you paint at such a location your work can be painted over at any time, so there’s a rush to finish a large-scale piece in a day or two and then document it with photos and videos, a process that became addicting. To be more specific, my involvement with street art early on fell along the lines of creating large murals in legal graffiti spots, also called free-walls. ![]() How did this phase influence you as an artist?Īs mentioned, it changed everything for me. ![]() Your artistic practice was forged through your involvement with street art. ![]() Stumbling onto street art dramatically shifted everything for me. I was involved with a lot of sports growing up and knew that I wanted to participate in something more kinetic that allowed a level of exploration. That exposed me to plenty of art growing up-so much so that I went to a specialised arts high school in NYC and even majored in painting in college-however the lifestyle of sitting in a studio working on a painting all day didn’t appeal to me. I was good at painting and drawing growing up due to the fact that my father was/is a professional artist in NYC. Did you always want to be an artist?Īctually, I didn’t want to become a professional artist. (Answers have been condensed and edited for clarity.) In our conversation below (edited for brevity and clarity), the artist talks about his artistic practice, street art origins and why he left his native New York to move to Finland. As his friend and videographer Jean-Paul Mannon says, when Popa paints on location, the spray-can becomes part of himself, an extension of his soul. As he confessed in a recent chat with Yatzer, his fondest childhood memories are intimately connected with nature, which may also explain how the creation of every piece is also a deeply emotional experience. Unlike the pioneers of the land art movement though, who purposefully took their work out of traditional art spaces like galleries and museums to underline the commodification of art inspired by the tenets of Minimal and Conceptual Art, Popa’s background in street art attests to a more primal connection with the outdoors. For Popa, the ephemerality of his painstakingly painted pieces, which he evocatively captures through the eye of a drone, shines a light on the nature of our brief existence and the profound mysteries it holds. In fact, their transience is part of what drew the artist to land art in the first place. ![]() Like most land artists, and prehistoric cave painters, Popa only uses natural pigments found on-site such as charcoal, earth and ground shells, mixed only with source water, which means that his work’s longevity depends on the whims of mother nature-with some works having dissolved in a matter of a few days or months. Finland-based American artist David Popa takes this practice one step further by creating site-specific earth murals on even more challenging locations such as floating ice sheets in the Baltic Sea and crevasse-ridged glaciers in Norway. Land artists have always sought unspoilt natural settings for their works Robert Smithson found his way to the Great Salt Lake in Utah early on in his career, Michael Heizer ended up in the Nevada desert, while Richard Long’s peripatetic practice took him to the Scottish Highlands, Nepal’s forests and India’s tribal lands among other places. ![]()
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