The works works shown are Highlands Ranch (shown top) and Five Parks, West Woods and Sunset Estates. All are 48"x48" Acrylic and Vinyl on Pane. Click on the images below to enlarge & view name.

Maureen Halligan, a local star, was born and raised in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Having traveled and lived all over the world, she studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and settled in the foothills of Santa Cruz where she can live, work, paint, teach, curate, and create.

Having experienced the abrupt altercation of familiar environments resulting from extreme suburban developments, in particular my childhood home in Colorado, these works live in a state somewhere among memory, present and the future. Using familiar color palettes of landscape painting as well as commercial communication, the patterns are meant to challenge recognition of traditional landscape imagery. The grids of suburban housing developments provide scaffolding of the landscape that grows into organic abstractions, addressing the expansive behavior and sprawl by creating new yet distinct forms from the patterns. The conversation of habitual patterns and the uncontrolled rate of growth in once familiar neighborhoods are at play through the work and pose the question to what extent does one find their environment familiar or disjointed from encounters with suburban sprawl.