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The abstract works of Japanese painter Yu Kawakita capture both the rhythm of nature and the event of creation between artist and media. She makes them by applying paint or ink onto a thin layer of water covering a primed surface, then blowing on the liquid to create patterns. When the water evaporates and the paint dries, the process is frozen in time and the work is complete. "There are......read more
With a deft hand and a quirky sense of humor, Brooklyn-based artist Chris Ballantyne highlights the desolate emptiness of American landscapes. In his paintings and murals, graphically rendered structures are isolated on flat fields of color, underscoring the anti-social effects of our built environment. “Growing up in a military family and moving to different parts of the country, there......read more
Sometimes, like with records or Polaroids, old media is fetishized and revered for having qualities that new tech can't replicate. But usually obsolete media is forgotten and condemned to the trash heap. Floppy disks land squarely in the category of unlucky ones. London-based artist Nick Gentry gives floppy disks a new lease on life, resurrecting the discarded technology to make canvases for......read more
Using photographic source images, Brooklyn artist Alex Roulette creates realistic paintings of fabricated landscapes, depicting private moments in male adolescence. "The invented landscapes arise from archetypal citations of past and present cultural influences," he says. "Placing figures into these landscapes is an attempt to take advantage of the viewer's natural ability to......read more
Judging from these meticulously crafted mixed media works, Amy Eisenfeld Genser is one patient lady. For each piece, the Connecticut-based artist rolls up colored paper into hundreds of tubes, then adheres them to painted canvases. The results are stunning, polychromatic pieces of art that resemble undersea reefs. In fact, the natural environment inspires all of Gensler's work. As......read more
Amy Casey's most recent crop of paintings are noticeably devoid of people and creatures, but there are plenty of signs of life. Her depictions of houses and factories resting precariously on stilts, or connected in mid-air by a tangled mess of cables, offer an anthropomorhpic interpretation of city buildings. Amy has conjured a fantasy urban landscape where the humans have left and the buildings......read more
In the region surrounding Joseph Smolinski's childhood home in Minnesota, farms have been displaced by strip malls and suburban housing. Those land use changes and other environmental shifts inform his work as an artist. Working primarily with paint and pencil, Smolinski documents a global environment in flux. "I am interested in addressing the human effects on the landscape, such as pollution,......read more
With a few notable exceptions, landscape painting and abstraction operate on separate planes, and ne'er the twain shall meet. Brooklyn-based painter Benjamin King ignores this illusory boundary, with raw and expressive interpretations of natural landscapes. The works on canvas distill the feelings and sensations of the nature scenes -- without accurately depicting them. As he explains in a......read more
Denver artist Nathan Abels creates majestically muted landscape works that combine manmade and natural elements. Existing somewhere between the real and the imagined, the paintings depict what Abels calls "visual pauses," or snapshots of some unknown event or narrative. "Our contemporary environment is quite turbulent, often over-stimulating us to the point of being dulled to the......read more
Growing up in Alaska, Leslie Shows' playpen was the natural world. Now based in San Francisco, the artist draws on her upbringing to makes hybrid paintings to conjure hallucinatory landscapes filled with black icebergs, blazing skies, and reflecting pools. The quasi-abstract works combine polymers, pigments, paper, and -- in an act of recycling -- pieces of metal and other material......read more
