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Transmuted Chromatic Force

Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 14:47:00 +0000

Transmuted Chromatic Force Dr. Thalia Vra… October 25, 2026 - 10:47

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Itinerary 11, 2024, Korean lacquer, Gel stone, Hemp cloth on Wood Panel, 20.9x17.9 in.

Young-Ae Kwon: Against the Grain of Time
Asian & American Art Foundation, NYC

In reimagining the trajectory of abstraction, Korean-born artist Young-Ae Kwon, in The Aesthetics of Grain—her inaugural New York solo exhibition at the Asian & American Art Foundation—proposes a transformative form of abstract painting based on the monistic principle of gyeol (grain). The metaphysical gyeol is reinterpreted as material texture in Kwon’s works. Seon (aka Zen) philosophy, as seen in master Sahn Seung’s writings, channels non-dualism best expressed in his statement: “Their names and their forms are different, but their substance is the same.”

Ultimately, gyeol functions as the unifying substance that dissolves false dichotomies. By embedding handwoven ramie fiber—a craft historically gendered as domestic "women’s work"— within framed painterly fields of ottchil (traditional Korean lacquer) and gel stone, Kwon transcends the division between decorative handcraft and fine art. These polychromatic, vibrant surfaces, recalling the incandescent palette of Orphist experiments, transmute the intimate memories of labor into an elemental whole that speaks quietly of spiritual unity.

Rooted in childhood memories of her mother’s domestic labor and the pervasive presence of hemp in daily life, Kwon’s artistic practice translates these recollections into a meditative exploration of time. To construct her distinctive painterly surfaces, she meticulously adheres coarse hemp cloth to wooden panels before building up the ground with successive layers of gel stone, pigment, and ottchil. Developing slowly through patient, alternating cycles of controlled drying and natural curing, the works allow time itself to physically accumulate within the substrate. Rather than imposing ornamental complexity, this iterative process strips the surface down to its essential beauty.

Yet Kwon’s minimalism is infused with a vigorous intensity. Positioned in a territory between Gerhard Richter and Barnett Newman, her work rejects both the Epicurean, chance-driven randomness of Richter’s colors and the vast, overpowering monism of Newman’s monochromatic fields. Formally, Kwon operates against the grain of our times by refusing to succumb to the prevailing conceptualism of today’s contemporary art market. Instead, her practice remains uncompromisingly centered on color; not as an outburst of chaotic expressionism, or a monochrome infinity, but as an architectonic, almost cubistic configuration of the physical surface.

Resonance of Grain 3, 2026, Korean lacquer, Gel stone, Hemp cloth on Wood Panel, 20.9x17.9 in

This chromatic intensity is paradoxically sustained by the tactile weight of Kwon’s physical technique, as seen in her piece Itinerary 11. Rather than flattening her surfaces into mere optical planes, the hand-dyed hemp fibers and gel stone build up a substantial impasto, creating a heavy, high-relief substrate. Far from remaining static, this thick, sedimented texture vibrates outward into the viewer's space, generating an active spatial resonance that echoes the materiality of raw haute pâte. Crucially, a textured slit cuts across the middle of the canvas, creating a prominent horizon line that effectively slices the artwork in two. This horizontal division interrupts the composition, allowing the vertical fields of color to act simultaneously as cubistic architectural structures and optical thresholds. Together, these elements pull the viewer into a deep horizon of interiority while pushing the physical, highly tactile plane aggressively forward into the gallery space.

In a sense, Kwon constructs a rigorous architecture of color and tactile matter, synthesizing Western modernist spatial strategies with Eastern metaphysical monism. Kwon’s Renaissance of Grain 3 depicts intersecting planes of coarse handwoven hemp (rendered in cool slate blue, deep charcoal, and rich, earthen umber) juxtaposed against a bold and sweeping crescent of vermilion in a textured field of burnished umber and gold. The fabric’s coarse warp and weft create a tangible physicality that pushes outward from the panel. A wedge of midnight black anchors the upper right quadrant, providing a void that heightens the luminescense of the adjacent orange and gold forms. While the compositions operate through sharp angular geometries and intersecting diagonals, echoing the hard-edged structural vigor of Western avant-garde abstraction, this geometric dynamism is ultimately reconciled through the Eastern principle of gyeol.

An interesting point of convergence exists between Kwon’s practice and Vicky Colombet’s exhibition, Memory of the Surface, presented at Norr Cohan. Inspired by Eastern philosophy—specifically her engagement with Buddhist mindfulness—Colombet similarly tackles questions of time and memory through heavy materiality and tactile electricity, allowing dense minerals and thick pigments to build immersive, almost three-dimensional surfaces. Yet, while Colombet’s abstractions leave time to appear as a fractured trauma, collapsing across the linen like shattered glass where memory exists solely through rupture, Kwon’s work achieves a far more profound artistic resolution.

Itinerary 5, 2024, Korean lacquer,Gel stone, Hemp cloth on Wood Panel, 28.6x23.9 in.jpg

Kwon operates through a rational architectonic principle that structures her colored abstract fields, aligning closely with Adolf Behne’s concept of Architektonik. Unlike Vicky Colombet, whose works surrender to pure chance and traumatic fissures, Kwon constructs an internal composition governed by a monistic search for unity. Rather than treating memory as a passive archive or a site of decay, she understands it as an active, entropy-resistant framework; one that binds disparate temporal fragments into a coherent architecture of the self. By synthesizing these fragmented moments into a unified, structural geometry, her canvases turn the traumatic friction of existence into a durable form of inner endurance, moving explicitly against time and its all-devouring irreversibility.

In The Aesthetics of Grain, Young-Ae Kwon succeeds in organizing the volatile streams of pure color into an indivisible and structural reality. By geometricizing these dynamic fields through gyeol, she transmutes the chromatic force into an abstract, living grain of the self, transforming the canvas into an enduring sanctuary of non-dual consciousness. In doing so, Kwon demonstrates that true selfhood and memory are not shattered by temporal decay but rather are carved and retained against the grain of time itself.

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Elegant Perfection

Mark Bloch — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:32:53 +0000

Elegant Perfection Mark Bloch October 19, 2026 - 17:32

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Xin Song: On the Way to Utopia
Curated by Thalia Vrachopoulos
Tenri Cultural Institute
September 30-October 14, 2026

When a flat trapezoid is rolled up so its two non-parallel sides meet, who knew it forms what is called a "frustum"? The front of the Tenri gallery is filled with a large cluster of these black-and-white conical forms, shredded by carefully cut, tree-like shapes, and they are typical of Xin Song's almost fractal way of working: deceptively simple and super-complex at once. Macro meets microcosm, like a hologram that works as a whole and also as you zoom infinitely in. Dangling rhythmically from the ceiling, the cones disarmed my rational mind, sending me into a dreamy blur toward "the tree of life" the artist mentioned when I arrived, and away from the headache-inducing thoughts of the climate nightmare that seems to pierce almost any mention of nature these days.

The cones are identical, but it is impossible to see them that way. Based on a horizon she once glimpsed in an instant, trees silhouetted against the sky become black-and-white yin-yang forms; to my eye, a forest of thinking caps (as opposed to dunce caps) that could be lowered onto my head to widen my perspective. They cast shadows on themselves, creating a thousand grays, beiges, and silhouettes between absolute black and absolute white, transparent and opaque at once, like a forest within this viewer's soul. From far away, geometry; up close, a tangle of complicated shading.

Nearby, a long scroll, its coiled end unused on the ground, holds a key to Song's background. As a young woman, she left Beijing for the Chinese countryside to study paper cutting and stencils with farmers who were masters of those forms, and to grind colors out of rocks by ancient techniques: powdery turquoises, browns and whites, calligraphic shapes like waves on a river, swirls of clouds like Art Deco commas or chunky chiffon desserts, painted and cut away, added and subtracted. The scroll is a gateway to her more recent work in the back of the gallery. Xin Song's work belongs to the Western art canon, yet reads as if many strands of ancient Chinese painting have been merged into one.

In the cavernous back room, one work stands alone, echoing how Song's black, as with the frustums, is both comforting and foreboding: the nothingness from which the Tao emerges, unborn potential as well as pitch-dark. A single tree climbs toward the heavens, its crown bursting like fireworks into a dome of lozenge shapes that repeats throughout the show. About 30 flowers adorn a bony, thorny collaged trunk rising from black roots shaped like guns, or sharks with predatory fins.

Up close, I see human bodies, faces, stores, roads, lettering, seated Buddhas, typewriters, and doorways like those in an American Chinese restaurant, all serving as placeholders for Song's embrace of her Chinese past. Images are boldly chopped from slick magazines, their writing erased by her cut lines. Paper bleeding through the holes reveals fans, archways, machine parts, stacked umbrellas, and columns from real Chinese architecture, all supporting white flowers with yellow tassels crowned by delicate red threads. Fiber art, collage, painting, and glitter on textured and photographic paper: the paper's viscosity coming toward me and receding, à la Hans Hofmann's push-and-pull.

Four major works hold this biggest room. One is literally a Taoist gateway. Two feature pairs of birds; the third is an upside-down weeping willow reflected in water. In one pair, one bird is wispy stacked rice paper, the other smooth acetate with fingernail-shaped holes, a simple contrast that sums up Song's whole way of working. Each contains elements of the other: the rice paper one now has holes, and the Swiss-cheese acetate one sports a collage. Every piece hangs about three inches from the wall on magnets, casting shadows behind it, presumably one of many elegant curatorial touches by Vrachopoulos.

Song's forms are not afraid to look too busy, yet somehow they aren't. Above the willow's dark trunk, a shattered piece of found glass hovers over shimmering branches, color against black, white and gray, echoing the contrast between the front and rear rooms, as if parts of the show are pointing to each other.

Look closely: an owl carved from glossy Western magazine pictures shows her command of every era of Western painting, yet the effect is very Asian, sprinkled with an actual clipping of the magic kingdom of Disney that has departed China. There are brush strokes, manufactured fabric, chunky stitch marks from her fiber arts background. Fragments are sometimes glued flat, sometimes hovering to cast shadows. Faces and Chinese letters are carved out of a leaf or flower. The lozenges become rain, then emanating light. Sephora, Zara, and KFC logos surface in the sea of cutouts, evoking the late '80s, when Western logos like Disney first arrived in China, just before she moved to the United States. Elsewhere, a Chinese urban landscape with car headlights receding into the distance is visible, but only up close.

Exotic birds with large purple eyes look at us and at each other like lovers, part messenger, part self-absorbed symbol. Finally, a beautiful palace door, a tree on either side, each with two birds, beckons us toward a majestic orange sunrise and an inner Taoist kingdom. Here the lozenges resemble eyes, eyebrows, pursed lips. A leaf may hold a picture of a leaf, an engraving from currency, or a cut-out luxury watch, maybe just the word "quartz." The giant orange sunset looks almost mopped on, yet majestic and immense, carefully random like the shadows cast by arrays of punched holes on the gallery walls.

A final suite of six smaller tree and flower images sits in intricately sewn mesh fabric frames, punctuated again by that mysterious black: smoke rising from a river while a thousand butterflies rise from the trees; leaves like female genitalia on a riverbank; bamboo with black rocks and snowflake-like leaves; a winding road toward a mountain and lake. Several contain a collaged orgy: piles of mostly female body parts cut from periodicals, black and white and in color, crotches, thighs, fingers digging into flesh, garters and straps. One features a little fanged creature, perhaps a dog. A fleshy extremity in a tree trunk is tagged with the word "invisible," ambiguous, yet somehow a label of honor. There are red flowers like playing card clubs before purple and magenta mountains, snake-like plants against stitched white mountains, blue plum blossoms lost in a form made from a scribbled $100 check.

To me, this series, with eye-popping foregrounds that are over-the-top, layered, clashing, and chaotic, is built atop traditional Chinese ink strategies and classical lakes and mountains that provide a quintessential foundation beneath the turmoil, and somehow it all works. This is indicative of the entire show. To my Western eye, this is an exhibition of stunning Chinese brush painting tropes gone rogue. But when I asked Song about this, she said emphatically no to the tropes and yes to the rogue: she lives to get away from such things and takes no responsibility for adhering to those ancient Chinese prototypes or any rules. But she does value that they lead back to her wellspring. Later, she even shared childhood memories of the "Four Gentlemen" that every Chinese child knows: plum blossom, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum, which stand for pride, elegance, resilience, and detachment, respectively.

Not much of a flower person myself, I do know elegance when I see it, and my flowery descriptions here of Xin Song’s elegance suggest my gratitude that her art pushed my intellect aside and has allowed me to wax poetic in a part of my being that I seldom treat myself to. Perhaps it is that liminal realm between the left and right halves of my brain, where Eastern and Western art could meet. Perhaps it could even reveal a rational way to a future that will save nature and us from ourselves.

Mr. Bloch is a writer, artist, and archivist. He has written about art for The Brooklyn Rail, Paper Magazine, New Observations, Whitehot Magazine, and ABCNews.com.

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Roaming Imagination

Millree Hughes — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:54:51 +0000

Roaming Imagination Millree Hughes March 1, 2026 - 11:54

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Mike Cockrill: Falling in Place
Mosaic Artspace, 19-28 31st Place (Andromeda Building)
Long Island City, NY 11101
Thru March 20th

I became a curious fan of Mike Cockrill's paintings and drawings on Facebook, beginning in 2022, when the artist returned from a Covid-imposed isolation to meet in public. I approached him at a Mark Kostabi show on West Broadway. He's tall and confident, easy to pick out in a crowd. One of the reasons I was attracted to his FB art profile is his graphic versatility, drawing skills, and sharp imagination. Artists such as Daumier and Goya, and editorial cartoonists like Jules Feiffer, created nightmare fantasies and ironic jokes with their pens.

His technical facility is deceptively mainstream, serving a subversive bend. "I had an early fascination with popular forms like magazine illustration and political cartoons." As a young artist, he took a job designing business forms in the financial district for Merrill Lynch, getting an inside view of cubicle life.

By the time we became acquainted, I had morphed into a veteran of the outdoor billboard-painting scene. In the blue-collar circus of ropes and ladders, the painter of big signs was called the "mechanic." Apart from a chuckle about the sinister Charles Bronson movie by that title, I identified with the cold impersonality of the content (cars, bottles, fax machines). The old-school bosses and shop managers put complete trust in my hands. I often dreamed about a clean job at a Madison Avenue desk.

1> Office Drones

In The Idea Room, a distressed gray office like a prison cell, three co-workers are pitching a campaign proposal. They are dressed in sparse Mormon black pants and shoes, white shirts, and ties. The result of their labors is demonstrably futile, the floor littered with paper airplanes and crumpled pages. An executive sucks on the lifeline of a cigarette while another sketches an invisible idea on a floating easel, yet a third lies supine in the exhausted pose of a patient in a psychiatric session. The figures are rendered as ciphers, thin suggestions with clown noses. A clockface stares like a merciless moon.

The Idea Room

2> Maps and Neighborhoods

Mike is from Virginia, a bedroom community close to the nation's government offices. In other paintings, he shows off his gift for storytelling in sunny, halcyon landscapes. The types of children and activities in those are deceptively innocent and attractive. Mike's plots add a sinister twist. In earlier works of lawn parties, sweet girls in pastel pinafores hold pistols aimed at cowering clowns.

His views of suburban houses are devotional and can resemble pre-Renaissance Italian art. The ranch-style houses are composed with a model-maker's care and patience, often using multiple perspectives, or more pastorally, seen from a bird's-eye view. In these, we see a sharp-edged Japanese space, the curved roads gracefully disobey logical connections. The surface is layered and scraped to reveal hidden layers, with drips and veils, seams of patchwork, affirming the flat canvas. Nowhere do we see the anecdote of dogs, figures walking, and cars on errands. An eerie quiet prevails, as if the families have all departed for offices and schools–perhaps a reminder of the Cold War.

Maps and Neighborhoods

The grinning malevolent map of the USA is another of Cockrill's inventions. The omnivorous face of a US map grasps with tentacles and mechanical arms, a reminder of MAGA's threats of rogue imperialism, the face of America: arms dealer to the world. Heads roll, and bloody conquests from history are revived: the map is an ogre–the tenuous Union affirmed by Lincoln at the surrender of Lee's army still festers, remains a squirming, itching bed-case. Anger against scapegoated minorities is normalized.

The Skull Gatherer

3> Falling in Place: Watteau and Fragonard

One wonders whether, by drawing on Watteau and Fragonard, Mike gives free rein to beauty and refinement without contemporary content. Or maybe the bubble-dwelling courtiers of the Rococo era mimic the climate deniers or the isolationists of today's head-in-the-sand retreat from stable alliances? The Rococo world, highly decorated and refined, is now the poster child of a blind and willful negligence of the social order. A student of history knows what followed the last Bourbon monarchy: The French Revolution. Who can say, as some historians claim, that the violence of the 1790s was seismic, causing a chain reaction of mass death, into the Russian Revolution and the two World Wars? The expedient of the guillotine is expressed in Mike's related drawings of decapitated heads.

PUDDLE OF REGRETS

These concerns seem secondary to his fun in picture making, teasing delicate gestures of storybook women and girls from homely scraps and playful accidents on the canvas. The clash of materials and subject is charming as it is contradictory. His attachment of layers and shifting of the focal length on the players in this farcical, self-conscious space vibrates like an earthquake.

Blindfold Falling

4> Parents

There is a similar cancellation or discretion in this canvas. A traditional painter would be locked into the tedious posing of the couple in tiring positions, the result usually forced into its own stiff reality. Mike suggests a dreamlike flash as the principals assume the pose–a memoir deliberately faded, a fashionable red blazer worn by dad, a stylish car coat and handbag for mom. The likeness is an homage, emerging from the mystique of unity.

Parents

In modern culture, the painter is an uneasy hero, constantly striving towards a more complete reality. Bonnard said: "...the artist is grounded in the palette, but when the illusion appears, that's when the nonsense begins." Degas worked on Young Spartans Exercising for ten years. Hopper spoke of "a deepening affection" in his slow process, coaxing finality out of only two paintings a year. They were fiercely committed and took painting as far as their talent would allow. Revision for Cockrill is a source of life.

5> Destruction and Reconstruction

Perhaps living in our challenging, densely opinionated society requires nimble reassessments and constant reactions to the latest shocks. Who is not aware of some imbalance and insecurity? For artists, self-awareness is a top concern, as a daunting field of competitors claim and fight for their own style message. His painting, Fighter Jet No. 3, channels amoral, jarring realism—a pathos like stepping near a bird flattened by car tires. The layering of accurately cut textile shapes conveys a grim, inhuman force.

Fighter Jet No. 3

There was a saying from the abstract painters of the 1950s: "...you paint it out, and it is still there." What was the "it?" Could the artist see the ghost of his failed attempt through the veils of overlaid paint and start over on a new tack?

I think of the myopic trance of Melville's anti-hero, Captain Ahab, searching oceans for the white whale. Mike Cockrill's process of scavenging layers of textile, building images with ready-made colors from the thrift store racks, feeds and satisfies this anxiety. It comes of an impatience with fixed goals and of his roaming imagination. His work is from a tradition in which talented admirers of past masters allow themselves gauche manners and not-so-subtle jokes. Painters hope to surprise themselves, and maybe get some laughs.

John S. Paul, Brooklyn 2026

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Thank you for the review

What a pleasure to read John Pauls insights and reflections on my current exhibition of collage paintings. Thank you JP, Millree Hughes and Culture Catch.

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PSYCHOPOMPS

Millree Hughes — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:12:52 +0000

PSYCHOPOMPS Millree Hughes February 23, 2026 - 20:12

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Josh Smith: Destiny
David Swirmer Gallery, 519 West 19th Street, New York
January 21 - February 28, 2026

I believe that I can use a combination of mental looseness and an almost meditative concentration to access Consciousness. The same place that the artist goes to make the art.

Giacomo D'Ariano and Frederico Faggin's new theory of Consciousness* claims that it is not linked to the functioning of the body and can persist even after death. That it is somewhere else, in another dimension. The body behaves like a drone controlled by this source.

Josh Smith's new show at Zwirner is of paintings of Grim Reapers on bikes on New York streets.

I believe they are painted from AI-generated images. AI really doesn't understand how bikes work at all, any more than it understands how arms connect to the body under that shroud. The hands become wheels, and some join the body to the bike. AI is looking for patterns on the plane at the front of the image, mainly because it has difficulty with the Z-axis. Consequently, wheels order themselves decoratively; lines of handlebars or cross braces link with bike chains in gestural strokes.

AI is perfectly situated to communicate with another dimension.+ It has become like a global unconscious. A dream state that is in danger of becoming a mass hallucination.

Before that happens, perhaps it can reveal pure states of being.

What other ways can I use to access the creative infinite? I have read that drugs can help, but which ones? The shimmer of ketamine? The feel-good confidence of MDMA? There are Halloween colours here that could've come from a 'shroom schema. Purple skies, dirty yellow lights, Pepe the Frog green bikes. Do I need to be on drugs to understand them?

This painting depicts a reaper at the top of some subway steps wieldinga bike object. Josh Smith makes his paint the consistency of a high-class moisturizer. Slippery but not drippy. The line bears no pretense of elegance. It has a hand-wavy quality, a little flutter that gives you the sense of an activity that may vibrate to the point of falling apart.

It is a good example of Smith's tendency to turn an image into a symbol. The amalgamated reaper and bike form an X shape in the middle of the canvas. I closed my eyes and tried to deepen my connection to the piece. But the symbol became an obstacle barring the way to the city and to life itself. The British slang term "Christ on a bike!" connotes surprise.++

This image is of inevitability.

In some areas of these canvases, the figure, bike, and bike chain become obnebulated. AIhas given up, and the artist has rendered its ejecta as is. Abstraction that is merely confusion.

In an attempt to reach out to Consciousness, I took dowsing rods to the gallery. They can also be used to foretell the future or divine hidden truths by bypassing the mind's logical processes. Unfortunately, although they told me where the water pipes were in the building when I asked, "Is this a good painting?" They did not respond.

Conclusion:

What can I understand about Josh Smith's new show at David Zwirner Gallery called Destiny in terms of quantum Consciousness?

Embrace Uncertainty.

Smith's work thrives on contradiction. Instead of trying to resolve these tensions, let them exist simultaneously, much like a quantum system holds multiple potentials. That state of not-knowing is central to the experience.

Deep Seek.

*"Hard Problem and Free Will: An Information-Theoretical Approach" by Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano and Federico Faggin, January 2021

+According to Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, "A structure trapped in an endless feedback loop of self-referentiality." https://iai.tv/video/the-language-of-the-unconscious

++Similar, less common variations include "Christ on a stick" or "Christ on a cracker."

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thanks Millree - deep dive into AI and risk

The underworld carnival mask shares the high risk thrill of urban youth culture – train surfing, skateboard stunts & those tags on impossible hi-rise construction projects & bridges where there is no safe place to stand. (an “angel spot” )– in a kid’s mind the risk is the payoff.

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Routes/Roots

Millree Hughes — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:58:53 +0000

Routes/Roots Millree Hughes February 3, 2026 - 19:58

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Odila Donald Odita: Shadowland
Kordansky Gallery, NYC
January 15 – February 28, 2026

"Fear is the flash, the gorgeous dress our skeleton wears." - Dambudzo Marechera.

It's better if the content of a painting is clear or at least available when you look at it. If not, you need a statement to guide the observer. Often, with abstract painting, writing the statement may require more lucubration than usual. Why these colours, why these forms as opposed to any others? It might end up being as significant an artwork as the paintings themselves.

Odili Donald Odita creates acrylic paintings and wall murals. He was born in Nigeria and raised in America. He has made the intersection of the two cultures a reason for making the work.

This is Odita's second show at Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea. He has included some paintings by his father, who was an artist in Nigeria, and some of his own identity-oriented photographic work from the '00s. The inclusions suggest that he's not sure if the work will communicate its purpose without some background information. The rest of the show is work made in 2025.

At some point in the late '90s, the influence of Illustrator, the vector graphics editing program, was felt across the visual culture. The patterns were used for digital wallpaper, desktop backgrounds, and in the physical world, sometimes as nightclub murals. They seemed to reflect the digital optimism of the era. You could hover over an area with your dropper tool and fill it with your bucket tool in any colour you fancied. Fashion designers like Diane Von Furstenberg used it to update Emilio Pucci's patterns, and some artists decided that the vector images might make good paintings. It was a large part of Franz Akkerman's work. I think I noticed it first in 2000 in a Mathew Ritchie show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

But after a while, it faded away. There were all kinds of other ways to make images on the computer.

Once Odita had adopted the look, he took a few years to refine it and then produced a lot of quite similar-looking paintings. There are some key motifs in the work. The squashed and fractured stripe painting that might be seen as a landscape, as inHeavy 2025 or Future Perfect from 2008. The loose verticals with a diagonal cut, as in Cut 2025 or Cut 2016 (lithograph). There are the diamond-shaped patterns that appear to have a figure in the middle that could either be "Nude Descending a Staircase," or a figure (sometimes figures) dancing. Like "Protector" in this show or "Here and There" from 2008. You get the idea.

There are lots of interviews online in which the artist talks about his relationship to Nigeria and how it informs his work, yet "Protector" has twenty-eight different colours. I still can't pick out which ones are Igbo and which are American. It's not like looking at a Mary Heilman. There is a lot to choose from. Also, I don't know why a digitally derived image should be a painting rather than a print. The associations are with weaving and block printing, so is the complete lack of human touch somehow ironic? Only the slightly raised ridge along the taped edges remains.

Protector, 2025 acrylic on canvas 90 x 40 x 1 3/8 inches

But more than that, there is a caution at the centre of the work that I can't ignore. For example, he often uses a marigold yellow as a highlight colour, but unlike Akkerman, he can't let it stand on its own. In "Camouflage," on either side of this coloured shape, there is a sliver of yellow ochre, or in other places, it has been backgrounded by a low-key azure blue. One shape has a line of dusty mauve running through it, but despite being its colour opposite, it merely subdues it. The whole effect throughout is one of balance, of resolution. The colour arrangements have sanded down any rough edges, and the forms themselves have suffered from the heavy toll that Shutterstock vector wallpapers have demanded. It looks too much like graphic design.

"How do you observe a stone that is about to strike you?" - Dambudzo Marechera

Watching them pluck our friends and neighbours, our loved ones, out of the crowd because of the colour of their skin is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. But anger and fear alone cannot make great art. Max Beckmann's ghastly shadows depended on his detachment, and David Hammons' blade was whetted by critical judgment.

I don't think all artists should or could be actively political; the act itself is political.
I understand that Odita came up at a time when it was harder for black artists to get gallery shows; he may have felt it was necessary to get his point across subtly. But today, I believe, if it can be said, it should be said without a filter.

Odita's statement at the gallery's front desk asks you to consider his work as a philosophical reflection and a meditation on how political forces shape what you perceive. It's a lot for this work to carry.

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modernism (post modernism)

thanks for your concise review of these vigorous works by O. D. Odita, released amid the turmoil of today's unacceptable reality. Odita's work reminds me of another black artist, William T Williams, who chose a similar path: hard edge colors in a structure influenced by the Bauhaus and the geometric fan-shaped spectrums of Frank Stella. In the figurative world, there is also a hard edge approach to the heart-wrenching stories painted in modestly small tempera panels by Jacob Lawrence. At the end of 2025, the Jewish Museum celebrated Ben Shahn, at a time where being Jewish is under increasing attack. As you mention, not everyone can take to the high ground of political commentary.

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Han Ho’s Eternal Light and Radiant Ruins

Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:15:57 +0000

Han Ho’s Eternal Light and Radiant Ruins Dr. Thalia Vra… February 2, 2026 - 12:15

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Han Ho, 21c The Last Supper, 2017 Charcoal, Oil with traditional black ink, Canvas on Korea Paper, Punch, LED 1,350x6x300(h)cm

Han Ho ETERNAL LIGHT
Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, N.J.
Nov 21st - Dec. 10th, 2025

I recently encountered a consummate and mature articulation of the aesthetic imagination in Han Ho’s solo exhibition, Eternal Light, at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. While differing from such artists’ work as Yuan Goang-Ming’s in his meditations on domestic fragility and geopolitical tension, it achieves an equal, if not markedly greater, degree of intensity. Internationally renowned for his monumental light sculptures, spatial installations, and large-scale works imbued with biblical and metaphysical symbolism, Han Ho constructs environments in which illumination itself becomes both the medium and the message, using Marshall McLuhan’s phrase.

Entering the exhibition resembled stepping into a prismatic, otherworldly field of perception rather than a conventional gallery setting. Vast luminous structures, radiant surfaces, and kinetic constellations of LED punctures upon traditional Korean Hanji paper generated a transcendental atmosphere of refracted light that seemed to suspend gravity. In a way, such an experience inevitably recalled the medieval cosmology of Robert Grosseteste, for whom lux was not simply illumination but the metaphysical origin of matter; the first corporeal form from which spatial extension and physical reality unfolded. In Han Ho’s installations, a comparable intuition is materialised sensorially. Light operates simultaneously as both the material and the ontological agent, shaping space while also suggesting its own pre-existence to it.

This metaphysical primacy of illumination finds a particularly forceful expression in the monumental work 21C The Last Judgement. A vast mixed-media composition of charcoal, oil with traditional black ink, Korean paper, and embedded LED constellations, in which light operates not merely as an accent but as the principal medium from which the entire visual field emanates. At once painting, relief, and glowing installation, the work evokes the grand iconographic lineage of Western art history, especially Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Simultaneously, the piece displaces it into a contemporary register marked by nuclear anxiety, territorial divisions, and the fragile dialectics between war and peace reminiscent, in thematic gravity, of Yuan Goang-Ming’s reflections on state fragility and mediated disaster. Yet where Yuan often situates the viewer within the hyperreal circuitry of simulation, Han Ho propels the spectator toward a more cosmic horizon.

Structured in a tripartite vertical narrative of celestial aspiration above, the anguished threshold of lived reality at the center, and the infernal debris of human destruction below, the composition stages an allegorical drama in which clouds oscillate ambiguously between heavenly vapor and nuclear mushroom, embodying the Janus-like conceit of humanity’s technological triumph and existential peril. The punctured Korean paper, illuminated from within by LED light, produces an ethereal radiance that renders figures and gestures almost immaterial, as though suspended in an aethereal continuum where matter itself seems provisional; this internal luminosity simultaneously evokes the silent diffusion of radioactive glow and the spectral afterimage of irradiated atmospheres of nuclear fallout. Subtly interwoven into this vertical apocalypse is the unresolved memory of Korea’s partition, whose geostrategic fracture reverberates less as a cartographic fact than as a psychic and metaphysical condition.

Han Ho, 21c The Last Judgment, 2022 Charcoal, Oil with traditional black ink, Canvas on Korea Paper, Punch, LED Variable Install

This particular concern likewise inflects the almost stereographic The Last Supper, in which Han Ho extends his theology of light into a historical and political allegory, reconfiguring Leonardo’s canonical tableau as the Last Supper of the Twenty-First Century and inscribing it with the unresolved tensions of the Korean peninsula. Christ occupies the center not as a doctrinal sovereign but as a luminous nucleus of life, of inexhaustible radiant vitality amidst collective precarity. Around him, the disciples are reimagined as fractured embodiments of contemporary subjectivity. A uniformed NBC-clad sentinel registers nuclear anxiety, and the aluminum mirror embedded in a Chinese costume reflects not only the spectator but also the weight of hostile forces bearing upon the peninsula. The nude figures facing toward a primordial Korea, silently split across the pictorial axis into North and South. Upon the table, symbolic objects such as tanks and barbed wire cruelly transmute into aestheticized toys, Peter’s denied chicken, kimchi as a sign of cultural homogeneity, and the sushi bomb as purposeless destruction, coalesce into a post-modern still life of poised devastation.

However, it is again light that confers metaphysical coherence upon this dense iconography. These images resist total instrumentalization even within a technologically mediated platform, understanding the form as a vital force rather than an inert representation. In a way, light here becomes a spectral intermediary, binding fractured histories, divided territories, and dispersed identities into a single, trembling field of presence; an eschatological supper staged at the end of time and history.

My encounter with Han Ho’s Eternal Light at Mana Contemporary became an occasion to contemplate through association the unsettling proximity of large-scale annihilation, sensing that the spectre of a global war no longer belongs solely to speculative discourse but hovers as a tangible possibility within the collective imagination. Yet the exhibition does not succumb to despair; rather, it staged the primordial element of light as a fragile but persistent counterforce, offering these aesthetic environs in which existential fear and the enduring human impulse face toward transcendence.

Han Ho’s sublime works, radiating an otherworldly glow, function as a spectacular luminescent architecture of consciousness, dissolving the boundary between sensuous experience and philosophical inquiry. In a way, Han Ho strongly affirms that even when art confronts the imagery of conflict and violence, it retains the singular capacity to momentarily liberate the observer from the contingencies of personal will and social turmoil, reconstituting the viewer as a disinterested and lucid subject of pure contemplation.

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WARP

Millree Hughes — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:32:51 +0000

WARP Millree Hughes December 2, 2025 - 17:32

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Trespasser no. 4, 2025, Oil on linen over shaped stretcher, 72 x 96 inches

KARIN DAVIE: It Comes In Waves

Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Through 20 December 2025

Karin Davie is famous for a suite of extraordinary paintings that she showed in the 00s. They seemed to be her last word on the Stripe Painting, which had been her subject since the early 90s. She cut the stripes loose from the edge, and they recoiled like heavy rubber bands. These large abstract works consist of wildly interweaving fist-sized strokes on a coloured ground. The lines are painted wet on wet, picking up colour as they travel, each brush stroke loaded in such a way as to imply weight and volume and evidence of a light source or sources hitting the surface of the line. She never lets you forget, however, that this is paint speaking the formal language of Art.

In her dynamic new show at Miles McEnery, the stripe is back with a new set of instructions. The show consists of two sets of glorious paintings. Two red wave-like paintings, made up of two joined canvases, and a second group of wavy paintings, each in a predominant colour. They are unusual colours that can appear natural, artificial, or both. All of the second set has a divot cut into the top in the middle of the canvas, as if a giant's thumb has pushed into the picture plane.

"Trespasser No 4" is a particularly lovely golden-haired painting. Lines move horizontally in sensual gestures from one side to the other with a kink in the middle, so that by the time the last line is made, there is a groove or path running vertically through the canvas, finishing at the cut-in divot at the top. As the line moves, it picks up lighter or darker versions of the prevailing colour. The way that darker tones gather in parts of the image makes me think that the shadow of clouds has been cast on Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows." The line sometimes stops firmly before the edge or runs on as if it didn't exist. Drawing attention to the formal limits of the canvas and then sometimes totally ignoring them.

Words have worked for Davie in the past. Not in a literal way that say "container" did for Ross Bleckner with his paintings of the '90s made in the shape of urns. But her '90s pieces were "wavy" Davie's and sometimes "curvy" Davie's. But after the '00s, she began looking inside for inspiration rather than at how she looked from the outside.

"Abstractionists see no more sections, no divisions between different sections of reality, and this is not surprising since reality has been transferred from the outside to the inside of the artist, where experience is all one, and everything exists on the same plane." - Guillaume Apollinaire

Strange Terrain no. 5, 2025, Oil on linen, 60 x 105 inches

A more internal perspective persists in the Red Wave paintings. In "Strange Terrain No. 5," we are reminded of both the sea and the body. These are gorgeous paintings, but she doesn't let you just fall into fairy-tale beauty. She brings you back to the real condition of the body. At one point, a cut opens up between the lines and drips over the undulating surface.

There's a carnal shadow. It's not only a billowing pomegranate sea at dusk, but it's also viscera heaving with the breath, the tissue that covers the ribcage.

Both Strange Terrain paintings are composed of two canvases. It means that when she is painting the horizontal stroke, she has to stop and then continue the line again on the next canvas. This deliberate obstruction asks the question, 'Is the action still authentic if it is made a second time?'

Or in this case, if the line is continued.

It harks back to one of her earlier diptychs like "Ummm….#1 & #2," 1993. Part of the Sidewalk series. Where a curvy form covered by stripes had to be repeated in the second painting.

Ummm….#1 & #2, 1993. Part of the Sidewalk series. Oil on canvas over shaped stretcher. Each canvas: 90 X 60 in

This emphasis on the performance side of painting reminds me of the difference between the guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan. It didn't matter whether Jimi was playing with his teeth or behind his back; you took the notes he played to be an authentic response to the music. But in a performance by T Rex at the Rainbow music venue in the early '70s, Marc ran his tambourine up and down the neck of the guitar until he finally ejected the tambourine into the audience. It really didn't matter what the sounds coming out of the speaker were; it was about the performance of the action. Marc was no slouch as a guitarist either, but he sometimes used the guitar as a prop as well as an instrument.

While I recognize that this example is not exactly the same thing, because Karin very much cares about what the painting looks like. I'm just using it to make a comparison between how glam was much more playful with the rock music form in a way that is similar to how the post painterly abstract artists used Minimalism. The exact same thing would be if Marc played an impassioned solo and then reproduced it, immediately note-for-note. That would be very Karin Davie.

Karin's work is about aesthetics and poetry. She asks: can a painted performance be authentic? Is the edge of the canvas the end of this particular state described by the painting? At the same time she's alluding to places and things in an optical way. This line casts a shadow, this one emanates light. This picture reminds you of waves. Consequently, the image seems to shift constantly between different states.

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Makers Mark

Millree Hughes — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 01:51:41 +0000

Makers Mark Millree Hughes October 31, 2025 - 21:51

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Stretch, Hold, Release
Picture Theory at 548 West 28th Street, NYC

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition." - Walter Benjamin

AI is not regarded as a tool by artists the way the tools of the past were: burnt willow sticks, polished lenses, and Photoshop, because it’s seen as a threat to the artist’s existence.

Walter Benjamin's "Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is in full flow. Music, images, and books are being created to order by producers. Soon, just as Spotify is making its milquetoast music, Netflix wants to generate ambient, half-digested TV using AI and other means. It will be created according to the digitally tracked needs of the public in the service of the corporation. Mechanical Reproduction intends to obliterate the ‘who’ of art making.

Craft-based art returns the focus to the object—how it was made, where it was made, and by whom it was made.

At Picture Theory, the gallerist Rebekah Kim has curated a show of craft-based art called "Stretch, Hold, Release."

The relationship of the artist to where they are from is significant here. Unhitching art from its tethering post of origin has been useful for corporate-made content. It wants to make a global product from a global culture. The specifics of the place make it harder to control.

Luis Emilio Romero paints Guatemalan fabrics, going as far as to imitate the raised stitch in paint. They remind me of Scottish Tartan, '60s hard-edge abstraction, and city plans. However, here, all the shapes and colors that comprise a traditional woven piece can refer to animal, plant, or cosmological patterns. It’s a metaphor for the Mayan worldview.

Lior Moran is an Israeli artist, raised in a country partly populated by people who came there because they had to hide their religion, now caught in a terrible darkness where the objectives on both sides are hidden. He takes found objects or makes sculptures that he hides under a velvet canvas. He shaves off the protruding planes, creating an inverse shadow. He uses twilight colors in his work. They are then bound along the side with a flesh coloured belt that sometimes has a buckle, like a bundle wrapped for a hurried exit.

The multiple handles and thick knotted rope, the little pinafores that she makes for her examinations of Peruvian pottery, draw attention to the utilitarian character of Terumi Sato’s own Japanese ceramic traditions.

Elisa Lutteral is an Argentinian artist born in New York. She is represented here by hanging lengths of woolen fabric with a glove at each end. In the video, the glove-wearing performers are positioned in a specific location from the camera's perspective. The resulting braid is achieved by their movements around each other. It’s an improvised group performance of one of the first crafts that we learn as children.

JaLeel Porcha’s contribution is the least didactic in the group. It’s a deep-pile hanging rug. It appears to represent a clearing in the woods, featuring two black children and a pond, perhaps. He’s influenced by the illustrators of classic American children’s books. The nostalgic quality is enhanced by being a knitted piece, which adds an ironic element to its shadowy mood.

An object that has only been created by hands and shows ´where’ and ‘when’ it is made and ‘what’ it is made from is crucial to understanding ‘what’ it is. Without these interrogatives being answered, it probably isn’t Art at all.

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The New York Art World Rebooted

Mary Hrbacek — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 01:54:55 +0000

The New York Art World Rebooted Mary Hrbacek October 9, 2025 - 21:54

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Nathaniel Mary Quinn Study for Grange Copeland, 2025 Oil paint and gouache on linen canvas stretched over wood panel 18 x 15 inc

Gagosian Gallery: Nathaniel Mary Quinn - Echoes from Copeland (9/10–10/25/2025)

Hauser and Wirth: Ambera Wellmann - Darkling (9/5 – 10/25/2025)

Company: Ambera Wellmann - One thousand Emotions (9/5 – 10/25/2025)

Marianne Boesky Gallery: Celeste Rapone - Some Weather (9/4 – 10/18/2025)

Nathaniel Mary Quinn explores personal, family, and historic narratives in twelve intense new oil and oil pastel paintings on linen, where he uncompromisingly excavates pictorial planes in his search below surfaces for the underlying, intrinsic, emotionally charged forms that spur and motivate his life and his art. His meticulous, exquisitely composed vision displays a strong formal connection to the methods employed by Francis Bacon, while also delving deeply into the visceral underpinnings of the personalities he constructs and describes. This is the primary focus of the complex, highly empathetic structures that build the psychological force that each image conveys. Quinn’s mastery of the paint medium and its many possibilities provides a level of expertise that has long been scarce in contemporary art. The intimate works are forcefully compelling and meaningful. Their complexity draws viewers into the process of painting, assaulting their senses to make them experience otherwise subconscious or unexpected feelings.

Quinn’s ability to submerge the main subjects in a revealing context accentuates their truth on a number of levels in their attempts to escape racism, in their efforts to flee poverty in rural and urban America, and in their desire to put the slave heritage that haunts their quest for freedom and equality behind them. His search for self-realization involves a closer look at the circumstances of his dysfunctional family members. The hope and possibility of redemption is inspired by the novel “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” by Alice Walters.

Quinn’s dynamic blue, red, and yellow hues activate the central themes of his plots to a level of power that sensually engulfs the viewer. The combination of black and white within the maze of the facial forms and features sets the stage for deep introspection and personal tandem feelings one may relate to in one’s own family history and experience. Quinn explores the emotional pain frequently released through the painting process by creating fierce shapes and expressive forms that may function as a healing measure. One can only appreciate the artist’s special ability to transform disturbing-looking structures into unusual embodiments of beauty that grow from facing harsh realities. His distinctive “paint-drawing” technique enlivens the authority of each vignette, where scenes and backdrops express a graphic sensibility that is counterbalanced by his painterly interpretation of the facial features and specific body parts. The show is unique and powerful.

Ambera Wellmann, Mother, 2025 Oil on linen 45 x 49 in 114.3 x 124.5 cm (AW152) Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Ambera Wellman’s two current shows in New York overlap in their visual narratives with the “One Thousand Emotions” coming in as an edgy depiction of the destructive forces in former times aimed against women who are discerned to defy societal conventions. In “Darkling,” her seven oil on linen paintings feature masked congregations who have gathered, as in James Ensor’s masked assemblies, to commiserate, to support, or to experience a sense of communal dread that foreshadows the impending apocalypse. Her painting style is semi-representational, not realistic, which provides a successful vehicle for her phantom-like reveries. Wellmann’s visions of the naked and departed, in a feast that hints at an interim stage of the afterlife, seem to refer to a frightening existence devoid of the order to be found in everyday life. These specters and hallucinations relate to the hellish visions of Hieronymus Bosch projected forward into the contemporary mind.

Wellman is one of the present-day artists to visualize and express the unsettling implications of the current world turmoil. The artist’s beautifully rendered works express emotions of terror and foreboding. She intimates in the painting entitled “Siren,” that our original human genesis as sea creatures will become our endgame. Wellmann delves into her personal philosophy to explore the path to oneness with the Universe; her meditations hint that through the release of the ego, we will achieve that unity. She explores personal, societal, historical, and philosophical ideas in forceful, intricate visions set in fraught outdoor settings and in ethereal evocations of mystical, sensual inner worlds.

Wellmann’s show, “One Thousand Emotions,” displays six oil on linen paintings that are connected by photographic and drawn wall imagery in installation formats. Her emotionally charged images are steeped in nudity, sexuality, and flirtation with the spiritual dark side. Wellman evidently intends to conjure the apparitions of disobedient women from dark, unstable ages, who were persecuted as witches and executed as dissenters. Death is depicted as a metaphor for chaos and change. Wellmann has the courage to explore subjects that spark our fears and resistance to the reality that life is transitory, changeable, and fleeting. Her provocative, intriguing work represents a committed intention to bring universal meaning and philosophical content into the contemporary art arena.

Celeste Rapone Poised, 2025, Oil on canvas 32 x 28 inches 81.3 x 71.1 cm

Celeste Rapone’s large-scale oil on canvas paintings, presented in her current show “Some Weather,” provide a clear vision of believable, ultra-personal imagery that describes a quotidian life every viewer can relate to. In an unusual perspective, Rapone infuses her contemporary imagery with art historical spatial interpretations that evoke the work of Cezanne and Modigliani. Her anatomical distortions accentuate an arm around a shoulder or a female figure shuddering as wind blows her hair under an inadequate umbrella. She piles figures on top of each other in what appears to be the morning after an all-night drinking party. Figures in a hot tub swelter red against glowing white bubbling water. Rapone has a very European vision of the figure, where elongated legs or enormous hands call the viewer's attention to the distorted, accentuated anatomical forms. Her colors are muted, sophisticated, moody, and convincing. The facial features seem morose and reserved, not exuberant. A figure wearing a LOVE T-shirt sits with a girl, suggesting the pair is a couple. There is a sense of orderly melancholy in this vision that is quietly believable. The artist paints beautifully; the subtle tones distinguish these paintings. By their extreme introspection, they create a calming effect that allows the viewer to focus on the personalized, elongated distortions. The group formats allude to unsurprising ordinary relationships present in the everyday lives of the majority of people, which provide a sense of community in life. The elegant rendering of the forms puts these works in a category of their own, as a formal achievement well beyond the usual depiction of common objects and normal people. The delicately modeled, unique figures set in distinctive milieus are poetic and mesmerizing.

The three exhibitions reviewed above, as well as the solo shows “Yuan Fang: Spaying” at Skarstedt and Austin Martin White's “Tracing Delusionships” at Petzel, indicate that the windows in Art have been opened to allow fresh air to circulate. The New York Art World seems to be diverging from past constraints, which have long determined the style of art that holds dominance here. There is a refrain from a song from 1963 by British folk-pop duo Chad and Jeremy called “Yesterday’s Gone.” Its sentiment expresses the space and opportunity for the freedom to flourish that is enabling a new trajectory to flow in the Art World. Unrest and chaos in society often spur creativity. I think this is an upbeat time to encourage and foster the daring types of individualized art that are entirely acceptable, very marketable, and above all exciting and engaging.

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Trust Issue

Millree Hughes — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 02:31:31 +0000

Trust Issue Millree Hughes June 8, 2025 - 22:31

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"Pond with Early Snow III," 42" x 38"

Mary Temple: Rough in the Distant Glitter
Pamela Salisbury Gallery
Hudson, NY
May 17 - June 15, 2025

"Devoid of locus, there is nothing to objectify." Nagarjuna (2nd C)

It's another important time for painters. Digital Art, Photography, and Video Art have all suffered because of social media. We have endured so many ghastly lies and had so many useless products foisted on us that all remote artwork feels untrustworthy. Anything with a physical quality or that is as unlike a phone image as possible is true.

With a landscape painting, you feel as though you are witnessing a genuine response to a real place. You are looking at a different place, in a different time, asking yourself, "Whose eyes am I looking through?"

Temple mixes abstraction and figuration approaches together. Or rather, certain modes of abstraction are employed to convey space. Different artists and times come to your eye as you pass over the surface. A Whitten-like smear, an occluded Guston blodge, a treacley Mitchell line. Compactified dimensions whose works are revealed across a small surface.

It also happens along the Z axis. She situates the viewer a certain number of paces away from the painting—the place where it coalesces. The closer you get, the more it disintegrates into abstraction.

It's one of the many dualities of this show. Hot/cold, light/shadow, close/far. The blue and the orange. One representing the physical, the other representing light, the évanescent.

These landscape and seascape paintings are mostly empty. There are no obvious stand-ins for the figure, like a landform or a lone tree. Snowy branches bend ant-like arms, creating an empty frame.

"Pond with Early Snow III" increases the chromatic value of different parts to distract your attention from the whole. The snow obscures areas of the scene. The water, the land, and the sky share colours. Everything teeters on the edge. It's all part of dematerializing the subject.

Campfire in the Snow 1

Her "Campfire in Snow I" painting finally fills the space, acting as a mediator between the blue and the orange. You are no longer looking into a clearing but are focused on an object and an activity. The flame crackles in swathes of hot colour, melting the blue. The broken branches take on a broken figure appearance, like an abstracted body.

Mary's paintings work well on social media. They transform well into posts. But there are certain colours that are not photographable. The contrast is pushed for the phone image, which limits colour possibilities. Texture can't be seen either. You have to turn up because these are paintings that demand your presence.

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Thank you Millree, this is…

Thank you Millree, this is so gorgeously written. 🙏🏼