Mark Bradley Shoup

Storm Shelter

If you're like me all those flat geometric abstracts paintings out there can make the eyes start to glaze over. But when an artist like Mark Bradley Shoup represents recognizable structures and elements in a highly abstracted manner, you begin to see what maybe those other artists were getting at. Only they didn't get at it. These do. We are surrounded by abstraction. The geometric version of it stems largely from the human constructed reality most of us live in. But we either translate shapes into things with a functional meaning or we ignore them. Mark Bradley Shoup just looks at them. And then he maps out these wonderful images complete with designer colors suitable for framing. But seriously. These are subtly done. You can go to Mark Bradley Shoup's website (www.markbradleyshoup.com) to see more of his work, and if you like these, by all means do so. The work is consistent and there's a good deal more of it. But I'm a little disappointed at the dearth of information. How big are these? Do they have titles? Which ones are more recent, and which are older? (it's always nice to get a sense of trajectory when you notice subtle shifts in an artists work). Anyway, I shouldn't complain too much because what matters is that the paintings are immediate, engaging, and skillfully done. So what if they don't have titles, mostly. They're not really things anymore. They're shapes and colors and they help us see the world a little bit differently than we did before. And that, my friends, is art.