Kris Manzanares

"Girl at Rest / Speed"  oil on panel  48" x 32"  2014

"Fight"  oil on panel  14" x 14"  2014

"Eggplant"  oil on panel  14" x 18"  2014

"Leaving Austin"  oil on panel  23" x 14"  2013

"The Mustard Eaters"  oil on birch panel  32" x 49"

This is a post that's long overdue. Turns out I started to write one in 2012 but got sidetracked and apparently forgot that it never went up. I knew Kris in Arizona more than 15 years ago when she was a sculptor. Having children made that work more difficult but she found time and space to paint instead, a difficult transformation that she made look all too easy. It also transformed the very nature of her art, much of which involves metaphorical narratives based on the lives of her children. But her work is as much about atmosphere and technique as well. She combines very controlled drawing and realism with expressionistic brushwork, the backgrounds often dissolving into pure abstraction. There's something about them that really captures the bright heat of summer days in the southwest. But whether she's painting figurative psychological narrative, a simple landscape or a still life, they are all clearly echoes of her personal life, the small moments and seemingly insignificant objects that together constitute a life.
You can see much more of her work at krismanzanares.com
and if you happen to be in the Phoenix area go see her work in person at Paul Scott Gallery in Scottsdale.

Gayle Bard

"Bainbridge Island Cloud"

"Skagit Flats"

"Franklin County"  2013 oil on canvas 42.5 x 54"

"Bateman's East Sussex"

"It's a Boy"

Gayle Bard's paintings explore volume and light, most recently in the form of vast cloud forms looming over the land. The land is often, but certainly not always, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. She currently lives and works on Bainbridge Island across Puget sound from Seattle, but she is originally from the midwest, and one senses that her youth accustomed her eye to open spaces. Her landscapes are less about the land itself that they are about abstract three dimensional space configured in two dimensional representation. And yet a real sense of place matters as well. The colors of the northwest, a subtle but radiant array of blues, greens and grays, suffuse her work. The sky in her paintings is not simply occupied by the occasional cloud but is a true atmosphere, volumes of air and moisture fading into each other and through which we all move and breathe, more like fish in the sea than figures moving about through empty space. The air is as real and present as the land below. And when it comes to light, she seems to relish not the scintillating prismatic wonder of it portrayed so famously by the impressionists, but the way it fades, and how colors ebb into gray when the sun is only indirectly present.

Her career has spanned over 40 years and covered far more territory than what I've described here, including a wide array of subject matter and approaches including installations. I'm sad to say I've only just discovered her and I wish I had been able to see a recent retrospective of her work at the  at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. If you feel the same and happen to be in the area, you're in luck. She currently has work on display at Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle.

Mark Shetabi

Afterimage (Brontosaurus)

2010

oil on linen

60" x 84"

Fog Machine

2008

oil on linen

18" x 24"

Tanker (Night)

2012

oil on linen

60" x 84"

Tanker (adrift)

2010

oil on linen

60" x 84"

Tanker In Dry Dock

2010

oil on canvas

60" x 76"

 Mark Shetabi is a painter and sculptor who teaches art at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. His large, nearly monochromatic paintings cover a wide range of subject matter with a particular focus on architecture, engineering and industrial design. There is a low contrast soft focus treatment that lends the images a nostalgic quality reminiscent of old photographs. But keep in mind that many of these paintings are 7 feet wide echoing the monumentality of their themes and subjects. Some more recent paintings reverse this scale depicting such humble things as pipe fittings on canvases only inches across. But it's these epic pieces that initially grabbed and continue to hold my attention. There is a feeling of dreamlike unreality to them, as if such things are barely conceivable, much less possible. That they exist in the real world seems almost absurd.

 You can see more of his work at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City.

Eric Aho

French Forest, 2012
Oil on linen, 52 x 48 inches

March Eight Hemlocks, 2013
Oil on linen, 36 x 30 inches

Nocturne (Apex), 2011
Oil on linen, 36 x 30 inches

Ptarmigan, 2013
Oil on linen, 48 x 60 inches

Small Lynx, 2013
Oil on linen, 36 x 30 inches

Eric Aho's work has moved more deeply into pure abstraction over the years and yet it remains deeply embedded in the landscapes that the artist so clearly loves. The line between abstraction and representation is more like a vast gray zone between two peculiar and, for my money, less interesting extremes. Magritte made it clear representational art is still essentially abstract. A painting of a pipe is not a pipe. It is a painting, an amalgam of shape, line and color. Aho makes it clear that an unrecognizable arrangement of colors, shapes and marks can still be a powerful expression of things that exist in the real world. His paintings seem to blend the old romantic landscape traditions that attempted to evoke the awe and wonder one can experience in the face of the vastness or subtleties of the natural world, with the expressive modes of de Kooning and other abstract artists. The degree to which he bridges this seemingly enormous gulf is the key to his success. JMW Turner occasionally accomplished something similar over 150 years ago before pure abstraction was even considered a viable possibility. But since then this kind of synthesis has not been particularly well explored. Which is unfortunate, since it strikes deeply into the essential truths that painting is capable of and humbles a simple narrative artist like myself.

You can see some wonderful work on the artist's website (ericaho.com). Much of it is older but it's well worthwhile to see the gradual shift in his work from representation to abstraction. For more recent work check out DC Moore gallery.

I posted his work once before way back in November2009