I don’t hide the fact that I tend to gravitate toward representational painting, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the exploration of pure colour, line, and texture on canvas. Â For example, I can definitely appreciate Marie Martin’s explorations. In fact, I recommend you visit her site and do some exploring of your own.
I wouldn’t normally consider suburban landscapes to be fascinating and beautiful, but Rebecca Silus has changed my mind about that. She manages to show many perspectives (often within a single painting) of her chosen subjects, revealing intrigue where there previously appeared to be only bland homogeneity.
Rather than freezing time, Michael Thompson seems to have found a way to slow it down; each painting seems to represent a living moment occurring so slowly as to last a lifetime, not a holding of breath, but rather a breath drawn out for eternity.
Hermann Mejia is one of those rare and enviable visual artists who can work in just about any medium and produce astonishing work. It is definitely worth spending some time on his site to explore the various directions he travels.
If the walls between our reality and an alternate reality began to break down, causing the two realities to bleed into each other, I think it would look a bit like an Andrea Mortson painting; beautiful yet disquieting. Â If I had to choose between the two, I’d take the paintings every time.
I spent some time this morning stumbling around the internet looking for something amazing and wonderful. I wound up at the Sarah Bain Gallery site, and there I found the amazing and wonderful work of Michael Brown. His paintings are populated with animals, bugs, and creatures of all kinds, often lingering in a darkened void. The beauty of his textures and contrast first pulled me in to his work, but the glare of these beings looking back at me is what has my mind locked and fixated. I needed more, so I went looking for a portfolio site and came up with a MySpace page. Then I dug a little deeper and discovered an incredibly revealing and in-depth interview with Mr. Brown over at Erratic Phenomena. All in all, it’s been a good morning.
On his bio page Shawn Zents states that he believes the most important quality of naturalistic painting is light. This is a redundant statement once you see the incredible works of art on his site; the quality of light in his paintings shifts and changes from canvas to canvas, but is always a predominant and powerful element of the work.
Incredible use of negative space, compelling compositions, beautiful use of colour…what’s not to love about Angie Renfro’s paintings? Go there now, and enjoy.
The beautiful images of natural landscapes created by Ivy Jacobsen are almost hypnotic. Â I want to step into these scenes and live there for a while, and because of her extensive layering process, I feel like I could do just that.
There is a great deal of life and energy infused in Andy MacLean’s realistic portrayal of the natural world. Â Simultaneously, he keeps the painted nature of the work at the forefront by allowing brush stroke textures to show through, and by giving his subjects flat backgrounds against which to stand. Â This contrast in approach means that I get to consciously admire both nature and Andy’s talents at the very same time.
