When I started trying to promote my own artwork online I kept coming across other people's art that amazed or compelled me in one way or another. This blog has been a way for me to practice thinking and writing about art, as well as learning more about my peers and all the incredible art that is being made out there.

Search for an Artist on this blog (or cut and paste from the list at the bottom of this page)

Monday, September 10, 2012

Shane Guffogg

"Ginevra de' Benci #6"  Oil on canvas  30" x 24"  2011





What I like about these paintings is how they take an important and early early impetus for abstraction and turn it on its head. From it's very beginning and running through such diverse movements as abstract expressionism and color field paintings, abstraction was all about abandoning the illusion of depth, flattening the canvas as it were acknowledging that painting is a 2-dimensinal art form. Shane Guffog's work embraces the illusion of depth, but does so without resorting to outright representation. The paintings are built up slowly in varnished layers through rhythmic repetitive brush strokes. The varnished layers give the work a luminous depth (like the sky of a Maxfield Parrish painting (about as polar opposite from twentieth century abstraction as it is possible to get). This also heightens the three dimensional illusion, while the rhythmic brushwork seems to suggest mathematical ideas of stochasticity and chaos theory.
You can see more at the artist's website: www.shaneguffogg.com
or at: Leslie Sacks Fine Arts

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