Cindy Tower

"Passage", 2010  72 x 68 inches, oil on canvas

"Maintenance Walk", 60 x 60 inches, 2010 oil on canvas

"Seam", 2009  84 x 71 inches, oil on canvas

Tommy Knocker  2007   Oil on silk  68 x 43 inches
Painted in Federal Mill #3, Leadington, MO

Site Painting Photo by Malcolm Gay
Tower painting "Big Wheel" (above) inside a "borrowed" studio- (trespassing) in East Saint Louis

 Cindy Tower's large scale paintings of abandoned factories and similar sites, capture the romance of decay. Post-industrial America (and Europe, and Russia) has become a kind of 'pilgrimagic' destination for recorders of a lost civilization; like those 18th century artists painting the great monuments of antiquity rising from bases of rubble and dripping with vines. Only here the lost age is a much more recent past. And it's not as though the technology has vanished. Much of it has merely moved to developing countries where all the same stuff is still shiny and new. The scale and scope of the abandonment has captured the imagination of quite a few artists, especially photographers who share their documents on group sites like Flickr and LiveJournal. While photographers have the advantage of being able to get in and out of these sites relatively quickly (almost without exception such sites are legally off limits), Ms. Tower's work, done on location, intensifies the experience in a way that a photograph cannot. Her painting is a kind of post industrial impressionism. The chaos and the detritus are enhanced in loving layers of marks and colors allowing the more legally minded viewer to get a real visceral sense of what these locations are like, and more importantly, what they mean.

She does much more work than what I've shown here, including installations and landscape paintings, but her almost fussy brushwork lends itself exquisitely to this particular subject matter.
There is so much to look at on her website ( www.cindytower.com ) that you may want to bookmark it for a bit and go back several times to see it all.

I'd like to thank River Styx magazine for putting her work on the cover so I could find out about it.

Tonia Ackermann

"atelierszene", Painting, acrylic on canvas, 2009, 135 x 75 x 4 cm

"bartelsstraße", Painting, acrylic on canvas, 2008, 150 x 100 cm

"hinterhof", Painting, acrylic on canvas, 2005, 75 x 75 cm

"unterm dach", Painting, acrylic on canvas, 2005, 125 x 150 cm

"hausflur", Painting, acrylic on canvas, 2005, 150 x 175 cm

Tonia Ackermann takes a scene and fractures it into separate panels, each individually rendered. The pieces vary to greater or lesser degrees of color, perspective and even time, creating fascinating studies of the nature of observation. I think we've all seen something similar done with photography, most famously (though certainly not originally) by David Hockney. But approaching this in paint adds an element of depth, of heightened randomness. Like the abstract colored squares in Chuck Close's monumental portraits, one has the sense that each is created in reference to the whole but without reference to its neighbors, suggestive of the appearance of order from random processes. Breaking up the scene into smaller parts also naturally lends itself to a kind of fish eye perspective and some of the work, especially the 2009 piece "atelierszene", at the top, reminds me a bit of Gideon Bok's interiors. It's engaging work and the potential for further exploration is almost infinite. You can see more examples of her work here: http://www.artdoxa.com/Tonia. (She does not appear to have any other website and you must join this site if you want to contact the artist).

Kelly Louise Judd

"Forest Sleep" Oil on panel  16" x 20"

"Lead Us, Lantern" 18" x 24" Oil on panel  2010

"Out Comes The Night"  12" x 24"  Oil on Panel

"Perched" Oil on panel  16" x 20"

"Weeping Woods" Ink and watercolor on paper  2010

Kelly Lousie Judd's work is part of a larger scene in the art/illustration world, that I do not yet know a name for. It exists alongside the pop-surrealist movement. But it is not pop. It parallels steam-punk's interest in 19th century aesthetics but without the industrial focus. It has it's roots in the work of the late Edward Gorey and culls it's influences from the like of Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen. Ms. Judd's work stands out for it's haunting moods and arresting visual concepts. She describes a world of ghosts and spirits, of dreams and tragedy and transformation. You can see more of her work at her website (www.swanbones.com) and on Flickr, or follow her blog.

Erik Sandgren

Erik Sandgren teaches in Washington state and his work primarily concerns the the land, the sea and the people of the Pacific Northwest (although not exclusively). His father was a professor of painting and his life has been filled from an early age with a vast array of influences. Although he cites none of these my own poorly educated eye sees traces of Winslow Homer filtered through the likes of Charles Burchfield and Marsden Hartley. His pieces are as much about the ephemeral personal experience as they are about the place to which that experience is tied. He works both Plein Air and in the studio capturing fleeting moments of light and atmosphere in the first case and then filtering the moment through the lens of memory and meaning in the second.
The titles, sizes and media of his work are unlisted on his website (www.eriksandgren.com) which also shows only a small portion of his output. More work can be seen at karinclarkegallery.com