Seana Reilly

"PeñaFlamenca"  Graphite on paper  20” x 20”

"TippingPoint"  Graphite on Dibond  36” x 48”

"MassWasting"  Graphite on drafting vellum  18” x 18”

"TorrentialConstant"  Graphite on Dibond  48” x 24”

"Schematic 128 (Juliet Is The Sun)"  Graphite on Dibond  30” x 18”

It is not exactly original to say that the arts and the sciences have more in common than most people imagine. But it is unusual to find an artist who incorporates scientific ideas so directly and forcefully into their work. Seana Reilly's art (I'm not sure whether I should even call them paintings or drawings) makes use of and references natural mechanical processes; gravity, fluid dynamics, sedimentation, erosion. Her material is powdered graphite that flows through a liquid medium on a non-porous surface. I love that graphite is simply a basic form of carbon, that basic building material for all of life, a perfect vehicle with which to "draw" the forces of nature. One could easily spin out gleefully on the layers of possible readings into all of this, but in the end what matters is that the images themselves are undeniably mesmerizing. Like electron microscopy or Hubble telescope images, they reveal the workings of nature in new and eye-opening ways. An earlier series of "Schematic" images was more grounded in representation, directly referencing human technologies. These are delicately corroded by the processes that would eventually become the very corps of her work. Go to her website to see many more images and don't pass up the video to get a better idea of how it's all done: www.sreilly.com
Seana Reilly's work was recently featured in New American Paintings #100

Fabian Jean

"Takeover"  2012

"Escape"  2012

"Hold"  oil on linen  34" x 40"  2011

"A New World"  2008

"In the Balance"  2008

Fabian Jean is an artist in Quebec whose work seems very familiar and yet unexpected at the same time. There's no denying his technical skills. I love the scumbled layering of the brushwork and he has a great feel for dramatic color composition. The subject matter has veered away from his earlier figurative and portrait work but even then his images were carefully choreographed arrangements of visual elements. This formal tendency has become more pronounced. Much of it has a kind of decorative feel explicit in his graphic elongated cloud forms (as in the piece "Hold" above) and he's clearly referencing historic sources, especially early Chinese painting. There are other realist painters out there who use animals and still life compositions in similar combination, to create odd and suggestively symbolic motifs. But Fabian Jean's images are sometimes just a twitch more off kilter than the usual fair in this vein. For me that makes all the difference. Throughout his work there is at once both a sense of humor and a peculiar kind of loneliness. After writing these little micro-reviews for four years you'd think I'd be better able to say what I mean but there it is. Sometimes you just have to look and see.
There are a few images at his gallery's website: www.godardgallery.com
but for a larger survey of his work over the last six years go to his Flickr page.

Serban Savu

"New Road"  oil on canvas  30x40cm  2011

"Spring Cleaning"  oil on canvas  97x135cm  2010

"Iara Valley"  oil on canvas  87x120cm  2011

"The Tunnel"

untitled

I've said before that usually I like to post artists that are promoting their own work. Usually that means they have their own website, and usually that means they are still trying to break into the big time (whatever that is). Serban Savu appears to be a pretty well established artist from Romania whose work shows not only there but also at well respected galleries in both New York and Los Angeles. I just wanted to share because I immediately fell in love with their spare simplicity. They have that same kind of workman-like and deceptively unglamorous brushwork you see in Edward Hopper. I think the comparison is an apt one beyond that as well. Like Hopper, Savu uses very careful compositions and lighting effects to create a powerful melancholic mood around ordinary people in the midst of their daily lives. Edward Hopper's world was the early and mid 20th century in America. Savu's is contemporary eastern Europe. Somehow those two worlds don't seem all that far apart.

You can see more of his work at the following gallery websites. Each has quite a few paintings to look through:
www.plan-b.ro
www.davidnolangallery.com
nicodimgallery.com

Vonn Sumner

"Warrior (Fallen)"  oil on panel  14.25" x 12"  2011

"Warrior (Slouching)"  oil on panel  15" x 11.75"  2011

"Amnesiac"  oil on linen  47" x 47"  2011

"Sienna"  oil on canvas  50" x 70"  2008

study for "Lookout"  watercolor on paper

Vonn Sumner's work, whether on a grand monumental scale or in small intimate paintings, is iconic. The word iconic is overworked and overwrought these days, but think about the original meaning of the term, the visual representations of Jesus or the saints in early Christian art. They were not meant to be portraits but mere symbols of the object of veneration, used as an aid to devotion. Von Sumner employs a minimalist approach to detail and composition in depicting realistic but cryptic images that can be seen as creative meditations on psychological states. Whew. OK... that sounded phony as all hell. But I'm serious. His paintings are of real people, but they are not about that person at all and so not portraits at all. The individual becomes a character, an object, a repository for a single idea. And it is that single, simple, curious, cryptic idea that is the point.

Interestingly Von Sumner describes his art education as developing backward historically, first learning about abstraction and expressionism which were well entrenched "establishment" forms at the time. Then gradually working back to the renaissance and (importantly) beyond. He describes his encounters with the content of that world vividly in an interview. Much of painting throughout pre-modern history is symbolic, often with a very precise visual vocabulary. And most of that visual vocabulary is alien to us now, meaningless without historical annotation. But Sumner says that "the very inaccessibility to those meanings draws me to them." And so "It’s about creating a pictorial and emotional, psychological space for the viewer to have an experience and if the experience is linear or literal or verbal then I don’t get what I want from it." Icons of ambiguity if you will. Works for me.

The strength of his work builds as you look through more and more of it so please, go spend some time on his website: www.vonnsumner.com