David deVillier

"The Giant"  oil on wood panel  48" x 47.5"

"The White Meditation"  oil on steel panel  24" x 30"

"The Woman Who Dreams of Other Lives"  oil on panel with steel frame  55" x 55"

"Blue Fox/Blue Woods"  oil on wood panel  48" x 48"

"The Hiding Place"  oil on canvas  30" x 30"

David Devillier is a painter and sculptor originally from Louisiana, currently residing in Idaho. He's an obvious fan of materials, painting on a variety of surfaces from wood panels and canvas to steel in addition to working in 3-d. For his painting he combines hard edged lines and graphic structural forms with a loose energetic application of paint, allowing accident to mingle with design. It's a nice effect. But at it's heart the work is narrative. He employs a variety of thematic set-pieces and characters designed to provoke a tale rather than simply tell one. Recently two of the central elements in his works are trees of all sorts, usually solitary, sometimes in small groups, ...and snowmen. While there is no way for me to know what snowmen signify for the artist personally, I find them a touching and oddly comic commentary on our own ephemeral and fragile existence. Or maybe I just obsessed over the Frosty the Snowman melting in the greenhouse too much as a kid. Anyway, the work is there for you to look at for yourself and make of it what you will. He has a website (daviddevillier.com), but it appears to be a work in progress without much to actually look at yet so I recommend starting with Gail Severn Gallery.

Then you can check out work from various periods at these galleries pages:
www.artforte.com/Artists/deVillier/default.htm
www.codagallery.com/palm_desert/art/index.php?artist=298
www.jhmusegallery.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=83
augengallery.com/Artists/devillier.html

Robert Ernst Marx

"Be Careful"  oil on linen  34" x 46"  2011

"Dear Prudence"  oil on linen  12" x 10"  2010

"Justice"  oil on linen  12" x 9"  2011

"Legion of Loose Ladies"  oil on linen  28" x 26"  2011

"Tired Helen"  oil on linen  9" x 8"  2010

Robert Ernst Marx is a very well established artist who earned his BFA and MFA in Illinois back in the early 1950s. So he's not the usual young up and coming artist looking for a bit of exposure that I usually try to post. But this is all current work from an artist who is still actively striving to perfect his visual language. He creates fascinating and haunting portraits and figures that employ a highly developed collection of marks, techniques and symbolic props. These people, whether real or imagined, reflect the artist's fairly dark vision of humanity and his own admitted obsessions concerning "...the arrogance of power, the exclusivity of the institutions of church and state, abuse by and of both spouse and child, and our own and others' personal fears and insecurities." But for all the dark brooding pessimism of our all too human nature, there is a haunting beauty to the work that attracts the viewer rather than repels. There is also an ambiguity that invites the viewer to interpret and meditate on the nature of both man and art.
Check out his website: roberternstmarx.com
And you can see much more work at the following galleries:
http://www.davidsongalleries.com/artists/marx/marx-dc.php
http://masonmurer.info/robert-marx

Xiaoze Xie

"Chinese Library No. 42"  oil on canvas  32" x 61"  2010

"Chinese Library No. 43"  oil on canvas  42" x 80"  2010

title unknown

"Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto #2"  Photogravure print  2007  14 3/5 x 20 8/9 inches 

title unknown

Xiaoze Xie is a professor of art at Stanford, a painter, photographer and installation artist. Almost all of his work is about printed material, especially books and newspapers, and how these materials are variously glorified and neglected, preserved or destroyed. It makes for an interesting commentary on our own digital information deluge which is so transparently ephemeral. He seems to be saying, see... it has always been thus. The fact that his work is representational and in a sense very traditional reflects on the subject matter as well; the old commenting on the new. I won't add any more here except to say that it is worth reading his own artist statement.
To look at more work you can look at the Stanford website or at some of his gallery's websites, notably Chambers Fine Art and Davidson Gallery

Sharon Dowell

"Interim"  acrylic and ink on canvas  40" x 60"  2008

"Limbo"  acrylic and ink on canvas  12" x 16"  2010

"Masquerade"  Acrylic and ink on canvas  24" x 24"  2010

"Pecan Street Water Tower"  acrylic and ink on canvas  48" x 48"  2010

"Crane"  acrylic and ink on canvas  20" x 32"  2008

Sharon Dowell is a North Carolina based artist, a teacher, a gallery director and a curator. Her work is primarily focused on cityscapes although she does the occasional figurative piece as well. Her technique seems particularly well suited to capturing the push and pull between chaos and order that defines the urban environment. She builds up layers of color and texture in stark geometric patterns that allows us to see into the painting, the way we might see into the reflection of a towering glass facade or through the scaffolding of new construction. Foreground and background tussle for dominance, continually trading places even when what is depicted is merely the flat surface of a building. Sometimes her work reaches an almost dizzying abstraction while remaining firmly rooted in her visual source material. At other times it takes on the look of a graphic illustration with the punch of an expressionist painting. (please keep in mind that unlike most fine art professionals I never use the term illustration as derogatory). The overall effect is to convey the intensity of the urban landscape. Whether capturing the dynamism of it's growth, or it's entropic decay, her painting is rooted as much in emotional perception as it is in recorded fact.
You can see a lot on her website (www.sharondowell.com), much of it smaller studies that are not always as strong as the larger work and there's a lot to look through. Most of the pieces here are from her gallery in Seattle (www.davidsongalleries.com) which is how I came across her art.