mark-making – Art Spiel

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October 21, 2025October 20, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Johnny g mullen: Rehearsals in Movement

Installation View, (photo courtesy of Yanmei Jiang)

Walking into Peninsula gallery, an intimate space in the Two Bridges neighborhood, viewers are greeted with the energetic and punchy paintings in Johnny Mullen’s solo show- rehearsals in movement. Mullen has pinpointed his focus on layering paint, motion, and plays with both transparency and opacity in this new series. With the gallery itself being so intimate, you get a close and personal view of the works, a deeper look that proves very rewarding. Meandering from one painting to the next, each of a consistent size, you get to join mullen on his explorations within each piece. Expanding from his interest in color theory, Mullen has added an expanded investigation of layering and gesture within the pieces.

May 14, 2024July 19, 2024, by Mary Annunziata

Marina Kassianidou: A Partial History

in conversation

During her solo exhibition at the NARS Foundation, artist Marina Kassianidou spoke with Mary Annunziata, who previously curated Marina’s work, A Partial History, as part of the inaugural Immigrant Artist Biennial in 2020. In her exhibition at NARS, Marina presents new work inspired by her grandmother’s collection of 19th and 20th-century schoolbooks from Cyprus. On display are four photographs of selected pages from these books, four artist’s books that recreate the full original texts, and four large sculptural drawings. The show celebrates a call and response with ancestors’ material history, showcasing Marina’s time-intensive artistic process in which she works with surfaces found in her surroundings, such as walls, floors, fabrics, paper, and screens, and experiments with ways of marking that respond to the surface’s appearance, use, or history.

August 28, 2023August 28, 2023, by Matt Moment

David Dew Bruner reinterprets still life in Equipoise at Carrie Haddad Gallery

Artist Profile

A person sitting in a chair with his legs crossed

Description automatically generated — Portrait of the Artist in his studio, Hudson, NY. Image Credit: Matt Moment

David Dew Bruner is no more a thief than the next artist—it’s only that he is candid enough to tell us outright who he has stolen from. In “Equipoise: Stasis and The Power of Suggestion in Still Life,” a group show on view at Carrie Haddad Gallery through October 1, Bruner presents a series of drawings, each titled “Morandi Bottle.” More accurately, it is not so much Morandi’s bottles that Bruner has lifted (he’s the first to admit that the works “don’t look anything like Morandi paintings”) but rather the essence of Morandi’s mark-making. “Sometimes, I just love the way other people make marks,” Bruner enthuses. “My endeavor is [to riff off] the gesture of the form, the gesture in the detail, the quality of the line. It may be a subject matter that’s dull as dishwater to me, but the way it’s painted… I’m jealous.”

May 21, 2022May 21, 2022, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Pauline Decarmo: Exit – the Path to New Beginnings at LABspace

Installation view of *Pauline Decarmo: Exit* at LABspace, 2022, photo courtesy LABspace

Some artists paint stunning abstractions, some artists deftly execute exquisite realistic images, while others ingeniously develop astute conceptual work, but the truly magical art is work that can intelligently create the aura of time, space, and experience. Fortunately Pauline Decarmo, by using any means necessary, does exactly that in her exhibition, Exit, on view at LABspace in Hillsdale NY through May 29.

December 13, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Claire McConaughy: Nearby at 490 Atlantic Gallery

Featured Artist

A picture containing plant, colorful

Description automatically generated — Delicate Rainbow, 2021, 24”x30”, oil on canvas, photo courtesy of the artist

In her solo show at 490 Atlantic Gallery, New York based painter Claire McConaughy features landscapes depicted in vivid colors and expressive linear marks. In Delicate Rainbow for instance, the painting plays on tension between horizontal, vertical, and diagonal orientations – an unexpected pale pink flow becomes a backdrop horizon to green vegetation spreading its limb-like branches diagonally upwards; on the top, blue-purple brush strokes depicting sky or water, lead the eye sideways, and then right above, a surprising orange linear brush stroke with the other rainbow colors hinted, stretch across the middle top.

June 26, 2021July 22, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Lisa Pressman and Jim Napierala at Susan Eley Fine Art

In Dialogue with Lisa Pressman

Lisa Pressman, Things That Were Never Said, 2021, Drawing and encaustic, 48” x 38”. Photo courtesy of Lisa Pressman and Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson

The current exhibition at Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson features Lisa Pressman’s newest encaustic paintings and works on paper. One of the primary series on view in this show is entitled Messages, a recent and ongoing series of mixed media works on various handmade papers. Pressman collects handmade paper, including Japanese Shikishi board, which is edged with gold, as well as Letraset—the rub-on letters employed by graphic designers before the computer era. Onto these unique handmade paper, she employs the press-on letters of the Letraset, as a mark-making tool to create a symbolic language—hieroglyphic and intuitive.

August 3, 2020August 8, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Meg Atkinson – Painting as a Leap of Faith

***One Tree, Two Mouthy Ghosts, 2019, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, photo courtesy Max Yawney***

Meg Atkinson‘s paintings resemble puzzles open to multiple solutions. Her imagery is embedded with associative literary and visual layers, as clues to an open-ended riddle. Meg Atkinson shares with Art Spiel what brought her to art, as well as the way she has developed her approach to mark-making, space, gird, and color.

June 26, 2020November 2, 2022, by Catherine Kirkpatrick

Artists on Coping: Barbara Laube

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Macintosh HD:Users:BarbaraLaube:Desktop:studio shot copy.jpg — *Works in progress on the good studio wall*

To Barbara Laube the act of painting is spiritual, shamanistic, healing, and transformative. Truth is found through process and the materiality of paint. Rooted in the history of abstraction, her subject matter may not be obvious and is always left open to interpretation. It emerges from the endless mark making and adjustments to the painting surface. Imagery is often revealed that reflects her relationship to the outside world and her life, and to her deep love of great painting, particularly the early Renaissance. She exploits the play between the open and dense, and the light and dark. In the end the act of painting and paint itself is first and foremost and has always been her way of making sense of her life, loves and beliefs. Ms. Laube lives and works in Riverdale, New York. She has shown extensively in New York, including M. David & Co., Zurcher Gallery, The Painting Center, Carter Burden Gallery, Bowery Gallery, and Sideshow Gallery. She has also shown at Kent State University in Ohio, and in New Mexico, Illinois, Washington, California, New Jersey, and Texas.

May 27, 2020May 27, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Tamar Zinn

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Macintosh HD:Users:tamarzinn:Desktop:ART SPIEL coping in the time of coronavirs :1 ZINN_BehindClosedEyes19_2019.jpg — *Behind Closed Eyes 19*, 2019 / 33 x 28” / oil on panel

Tamar Zinn is a New York based artist whose work reflects the primacy of intuitive sensory experiences. Both painting and drawing are integral to her studio practice. Recent projects include a solo exhibition, At the still point, at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, NYC, a 3-person exhibit, Thinking Sequentially at Key Projects, NYC and curating Explorations in Line at Garrison Art Center. Zinn’s work is in collections throughout the US, including Citibank, Fidelity, IBM, McKinsey, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and NYU-Langone Medical Center.

May 2, 2020April 29, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Alyse Rosner

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

How it looks right now in my studio March 2020 Graphite rubbing on yupo, Works in progress: Graphite and acrylic on raw canvas

Alyse Rosner is known for large scale abstract paintings melding graphite rubbings, gestural brushwork, obsessive mark making and transparent color reflecting her immediate surroundings, personal experience and environmental concerns. A graduate of the University of Michigan and The American University, Rosner received grants from the Connecticut Office of the Arts and The Sustainable Arts Foundation. Rosner has exhibited at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, BravinLee Programs, Odetta and Kathryn Markel Fine Art, as well as Real Art Ways and Artspace in Connecticut, among others. Alyse Rosner is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art.