The Texas Prairie. Where does it exist? Did the city take it, pave it, and replant it? The very words conjure images of air, space, and unfenced vastness. Erika Huddleston is drawn to preserved prairies and what she can find there to draw and paint. Recently, she approached Flatbed about creating color lithographs that would explore four preserved prairies found in and near Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas. These preserved prairies are alive with native plants and yet they are hemmed in by the city. They are beautifully preserved tiny gems of the prairie that once carpeted miles and miles of land. Erika drew images directly from these prairies in plein air (outside on the site). The carefully drawn native plants she found there are contained within the site plan of each of the four Prairie Preserves. The sites are bounded by streets and sidewalks rendering the site plans into remarkable shapes. These lithographs are available as a suite of four or individually. They are showing at Flatbed’s annual publication exhibition, Holidaze, until January 9. Huddleston writes more about her work below.

"Particularly, I am interested in better understanding how perceiving changing natural processes in an urban park setting can affect human psychology.  Painting for long hours in park “urban wilderness” settings in cities around the world provides the means to stay onsite for longer periods of time for analysis and observation beyond a brief site walk. Painting provides a complimentary data-collection counterpart to digital mappings of landscapes and is a tactic for recording temporal change which is traditionally considered difficult to depict in plan. And, painting outdoors without an image or photograph is a welcome face-to-face interaction amidst my habits of texting and other digital interfaces." -Erika Huddleston