observational painting

June 16, 2025June 15, 2025, by Jan Dickey

The Treasure Below Grand

ISammy Bennett, *Above Grand (Echoes of Language as Code),* 2025, photo courtesy of Flaneurshan Studio

Where Air Turns to Fog at Below Grand, curated by Ray Hwang, gathers Sammy Bennett, Anna Gregor, and Jesse Ng in a sometimes cheeky, but overall multivalent and sincere, investigation of visual perception and the machinery of capital-F/capital-A Fine Art presentation. With his characteristic casual abandon, Hwang exploits the gallery’s awkward architecture to its full potential, letting Bennett install an upside-down trompe-l’œil “group show” in the street-facing walk-in window display while reserving the closet-sized back room for a collection of Gregor and Ng’s paintings.

September 27, 2021September 27, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Lauren Whearty: Slippage between Abstraction and Image

*Lauren Whearty in her Philadelphia Studio, August 2021, photo courtesy of the artist*

Lauren Whearty paints mostly still life from observation and preliminary sketches. Occasionally she takes photos of things which serve in her painting process as cues to spark a sense of memory rather than a source for likeness. She builds her compositions with a collage-like construction, adding and removing objects from both the paintings and the still life set ups. She loves the process of fitting things into the grid of the canvas, playing between representing objects and maintaining a close sense of the flat painted surface. “Color for me is expressive, connects to memory and play in the studio. In using repeated objects, the excitement in experimentation comes from how an object is painted, from their color to their expression and what I can get paint to do,” she says.

June 27, 2020June 4, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: John Mitchell

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

:1. JohnMitchell_coping_final.jpeg — *John Mitchell at work on “Twinkle”, oil on linen, 37×80”. Photo by Twinkle Ghangas, Tuesday, January 14, 2020.*

John Mitchell, born 1971 in Southern Illinois, is an American artist. As a draftsman, printmaker, and painter, Mitchell works from direct observation of people, places, and things. He was educated at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University. Mitchell lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

August 12, 2018November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Mary DeVincentis – Conscious Rituals

Mary DeVincentis paintings conjure worlds that are simultaneously inner and cosmic, personal and universal, unexpected yet strangely familiar. Some of the core concepts of Buddhism, such as impermanence, emptiness, interdependence and the origins of suffering, aversion and ignorance, often surface in her work in allegorical forms. Her imagery, conveyed with a remarkable fluidity of color and form, takes the viewer deep into their own inner worlds. The artist shared with Art Spiel some of the experiences that led her to art, some of the ideas behind her work, and her overall process.

Mary DeVincentis, Heaven Can’t Wait, 23” x 35”, acrylic on yupo on panel, 2017, photo courtesy of the artist

Continue reading “Mary DeVincentis – Conscious Rituals”

February 27, 2018May 30, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Cultivate Your Own Garden at the Painting Center

Ashley Garrett, No Exit — Ashley Garrett, photo courtesy of the artist

The exhibition “Cultivate Your Own Garden” curated by Patricia Spergel and Shazzi Thomas at the Painting Center features artworks by twelve contemporary artists whose work references garden and landscape in diverse sensibilities – traditional observational painting, narrative paintings with subtle political commentary, and paintings that lean more towards abstraction. Cecile Chong, Elisabeth Condon, Daniel Dallmann, Carlo D’Anselmi, Lois Dodd, Ashley Garrett, Xico Greenwald, Eric Holzman, Wolf Kahn, Judith Linhares, Carol March and Ruth Miller all share in their work a love for nature, paint, and rigor in transmitting that passion. Continue reading “Cultivate Your Own Garden at the Painting Center”