Jeremy Mangan

"Rorschach"  acrylic on panel  18" x 36"  2010

"Hotel & Bar"  18" x 20"  acrylic on panel  2010

"Evening Sky"  12" x 18"  acrylic on panel  2009

"Moon Lantern (End of the Beginning)"  9" x 12"  acrylic on panel   2010

"Western King"  16" x 20"  acrylic on panel  2010

Jeremy Mangan's imagery begins with the barns and grain silos of the American west. These tin-roofed white clapboard buildings form a starting point from which he riffs, ad-libs, re-invents and fantasizes with obsessive zeal. It's a fun ride to look through the last few years of his work and see all this transformation taking place. When, in real life, you see one of those enormously tall house-like structures rising up out of the plain along a lonely stretch of rail line, it's not unnatural to wonder at the ant-like business of human beings. Mr. Mangan's work takes this notion and kicks it around the block a bit, playing up not only the hubris of mankind's endeavors but also the sheer wonder and strangeness of it all. His paintings are full of wit and invention with a fine long view of our peculiar impact on the landscape. To see much much more got to www.jeremymangan.com

PS on the trivia side of things, I think it's interesting to note that the artist has supported himself as an ice-sculptor in New York City. How that may tie into his painting imagery I'll leave to you to ponder. There are ice sculptures to view on his website including one of a Hummer, which I think is kind of hysterical.

Gale Antokal

Departure 1, study  2010

Group Shot 1, 19 ¾ x 62 Pastel, Flour and Ash on paper 2007

Group Shot 2  14 ¾ x 42 Pastel, Flour and Ash on paper 2007

Place 11  18 x 25 Pastel, Flour and Ash on paper 2007

Place 12  15 x 20 Pastel on paper 2007

Bird on Cage  2010

 Gale Antokal's delicate pastels describe a kind of mundane surrealism. The surrealism stems not from the the subject matter (that's where the mundane comes in, the ordinary simple everyday events and places in the world around us) but rather from the ethereal effect she evokes from her materials. Pastel's innate softness gives her images a shimmering unreality that seems on the verge of vanishing. It's as if seeing itself is an ephemeral act. In some of her work she replicates blurred landscapes photographed from a moving vehicle. But in doing so, her aim is not simply to replicate an effect of photography but to get closer to what it means for an artist to translate living vision into a still static image. Somehow she manages to capture in each piece a sense of the transitory and irreducable nature of vision, and in this way conveys a similar metaphor for life itself. It's a touching and haunting world that she depicts. You can see much more work on her website: www.galeantokal.com

Her work was recently featured in New american Paintings 91

Shane Walsh

Channel 70"x 64" oil on canvas 2008

untitled

It's been a while since I posted some abstract art. A lot of the artists I've posted take representational imagery and explore it's abstract qualities. The flip-side of this is the abstract painter who mimicks or suggests representation. Understanding the distinction between the two realms of art is to understand that the line between them is a blurry one that's often best ignored. The examples above show a transition in Mr. Walsh's output from atmospheric hints at submerged landscapes and debris, to imaginary three dimensional constructs. Over the course of a relatively short span of time his work has gone through some fairly radical shifts but what's interesting is the consistency of vision and logic that runs throughout. I'll be curious to see where he goes next. He has no proper website but rather a simple blog where new work is posted on a fairly regular basis: shanewalshpaintings.blogspot.com

I'd like to thank visualinventory.blogspot.com where I first saw his work.

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.