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New Work from Alexis Trice

As longtime patrons of Gray Blush Gallery might know, the work of Alexis Trice chronicles the sometimes-preposterous (and always taxonomically accurate) adventures of whimsical wildlife.

Her most recent painting (right) recalls earlier efforts such as Bounty while also staking out its own unique place in her collection. Here we have a tiny ecosystem unto itself, with flora and fauna, insects and mammals, animals and vegetables—a playful glimpse of the natural systems that constantly hum just beneath the surface of our world.

Alexis takes these systems, these relationships, this infinity of tiny little natural histories, and brings them to the surface for our benefit.

Be sure to check out Alexis Trice's other work, including an all-time staff favorite called The Lyre, by visiting her artist page.

Posted: 2012-05-15 13:21:35

New Work from Patrick Zoller

History buffs will recall that, after winning a great battle but losing a huge number of men in the process, Pyrrhus of Epirus said that "one more such victory would utterly undo him."

Romantic though the comparison may seem, it's not a bad metaphor for the more self-immolating moments of the artistic process. Take a look at Patrick Zoller's painting (above), and it's easy to imagine the process art-making as a series of hard-won battles.

As we've observed on a few other occasions, Zoller's sprawling, swirling paintings seek to do what abstraction does best: they try to find ideas or experiences that are in some ways beyond words, and to express them wordlessly.

Climb Summer Morning could well be seen as a reflection of the sunlight on a summer morning's hike—but of course, we can take the word "climb" as a verb as well as a noun. We could see this work as an ascension in itself. We're not just viewing the morning. We're scaling it, absorbing it, and experiencing it with incredible clarity.

In addition to standard acrylic paints, Patrick uses acrylic, enamel, pigment, and latex to bring his pulsing, biologically-tinged works to life. He emerges from the dual traditions of Abstract Expressionism and Post Painterly Abstraction, with their emphasis on the surfaces of paintings, and on the materiality of art-objects. So his inventive intermixing of traditional and non-traditional materials is not so much a radical departure as a clear means to a well-established end: it's all about making the image do more as an image.

It's about the practice of painting, whether the artist one does so with paint or with something else entirely.

Posted: 2012-04-24 18:30:07

Buyer Feedback: Sounding in Meters

Thanks so much to one of our earliest buyers for sending in this wonderful review, and for enclosing some pictures of their new piece in their own space!

Our experience with Gray Blush Gallery was exceptional from beginning to end. We found the website to be very easy to navigate and loved the variety of art as well as the range of prices. The gallery director, Drew Messinger-Michaels, was extremely helpful and readily answered all our questions. He walked us through the ordering process and helped us find the right piece for us.

The artwork that we purchased was true to color and exactly what we expected from the picture on the website. The piece looks perfect in our home (we tried it out in a few different places, and you can see in the pictures below). The piece was shipped on time and was very well-packed, so it arrived promptly and in wonderful shape. And it was reassuring to know that GBG has a ten day return policy, just in case, even though we didn’t need to use it this time around.

Another nice touch was that this particular artist wrote a personal note to us. It definitely made us feel like we have a personal connection to both the artist and the gallery, and that feeling was a big part of what made our experience so impressive throughout. We would highly recommend Gray Blush Gallery!

Posted: 2012-03-27 20:49:43

Featured Artist: Patrick Zoller

Patrick Zoller's work draws on the traditions of Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction, allowing those two stylistic muses to dictate the direction of the images—which is really just a way of saying that Patrick constantly seeks new ways of making paintings that are visceral and immediate, and that take full advantage of what painting has to offer as a medium.

In his current large-scale color field work, he accomplishes this through organic textures and, in his own words, "vivid biological" colors. The results are resolutely flat and undeniably static, and yet the images teem and bubble with implied motion. The colors and shapes don't seem confined to a flat surface; there's something going on beneath, and that something is floating up and out of the canvas or the wood.

Patrick has studied with Helen Frankenthaler and Richard Pousette-Dart, and he attended the Ridgewood School of Art & Design and the Art Students League. He has shown in galleries throughout Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Wyoming through a career spanning more than 30 years.

 

Posted: 2012-02-04 17:49:19

Featured Artist: Mark McWilliams

When we view the world, we're really viewing two worlds at once. There's the physical world, objective and stable (but vast and intimidating), and the imaginary world, subjective and shifting (but personal and intimate). With his sometimes-ghostly collages of self-taken photographs, acrylic paints, and ads from fashion magazines, Mark McWilliams tries to create work that exists between the world we see and the deeply personal filters through which we see it.

   

In Mark's work, there are almost always traces of recognizable, naturalistic images: a human form here, a cat there. But Mark invites his audience to examine these traces from multiple viewpoints—to pick out one or many of the details present and revel in the tantalizing disconnect between how things look and what they mean.

Posted: 2011-12-22 10:50:53

Featured Artist: Sarah Keller

     

Sarah Keller has been painting since the age of seven, and it was only two years before she was earning scholarships and wowing instructors at the Baum School of Art in her native Pennsylvania.

Her artistic project has been to mingle "traditional, representational art with modern aesthetics." She wants to grab the viewer with bold colors and shapes, arranged in the sorts of deliberate, fussed-over compositions generally reserved for page layouts.

They're layouts meant to combine the deliberate messaging of poster art and page design with the equally deliberate viewpoints and brushstrokes of 19th and 20th century representational painting.

It's Art-with-a-Capital-A, and also design—studied, and also decorative. That's the idea, and Sarah makes it work on the simplest and most direct of levels.

Posted: 2011-12-15 11:46:59

Featured Artist: Steve Spencer

The year that he won the prestigious award for Best Drawer in Miss Doris's Kindergarten class, the young Steve Spencer was commissioned to paint the backdrops for the school's spring play. Then Spencer blinked, and he was graduating with a Master of Arts from USC's School of Cinema/Television.

Never a stranger to artistic expression, Spencer has enjoyed success as a photographer, writer, illustrator, producer, and even an investment banker and political consultant. During all of his careers, Steve found inspiration for his own work while taking courses at NYU and MoMA, as well as lurking in art galleries and museums.

The playful and vibrant style of Steve's art communicates his utter joy in observing the world around him. His work takes us inside the energized mind of an artist, constantly exhilarated by the process of bringing the extraordinary to seemingly mundane observations.

When walking down a busy city boulevard, it’s not unusual to see the neon lights of bars, restaurants, and theaters enthusiastically beckoning for your attention—and in this series of paintings, Steve brings several vintage marquee letters to canvas.

The aptly named C, for Center (right) features an outline of the letter C. Individual light bulbs sit poised ready to illuminate the inside of the structure. A vibrant red dominates the color pallet, slicing through the green background of the C, a colorful interaction that creates a bold pallet of blues, greens, and violets—a fine example of Steve's signature style, and of his aesthetic interests.

The final stage of Steve's creative process includes his Dining Room Test: a period of trial time where the piece lives in Steve's own dining room. During this last test, Steve experiments with the feeling the piece gives the room, allowing him to decide on final touches or even major alterations.

Each piece sees a dinner or two at the Steve household, then the artist shares it with the world, and we get to enjoy a truly unique and layered work of art. Steve won't declare a painting done until a few meals have tested its mettle, for the same reason that he wouldn't declare a boat finished if it had yet to touch the water.

As we've said before, if art is going to be an everyday institution (and we feel very strongly that it should be, for as many people as possible), then we need art that looks just as good while people are living around it as it does on a pristine white wall. Steve is a true believer in the idea that art belongs in everyday life—that art should be intimate, personal, appealing, exciting, and ideally, ever-present.

Posted: 2011-12-06 12:32:05

Featured Artist: Michelle Arnold Paine

For Michelle Arnold Paine, painting the world around her is a matter of nothing less than a "struggle to know and accept [her] place in the universe as both a physical and spiritual being."

Interpreting the physical world is a project of "convergence," of living on "the edge between finite and infinite, physical and spiritual space" and thus "beyond words, below words, between words."

"Painting is an act of faith," she says—faith "that epiphanies are possible and the story is not yet complete."

Yet for all of that high-mindedness, Michelle's work is also grounded in a deep love for the simple rhythms of everyday life. It's the continuity of human experience—the traditions we carry on, generation to generation, and the basic love of beauty that we all share—that can transform a simple walk by the river into a profound spiritual experience.

To paint a picture, and to see the world coming into being as she does so. That's Michelle's goal.

Is that lofty, or even grandiose? In a way, it definitely is. There are big ideas at work in Michelle's aesthetic project.

But it's big in such a small and intimate way. The work is so calm, quiet, and introspective that it never becomes too self-serious or indulgent. Michelle makes it easy to get swept up in the simple, beautiful blots and strokes and scratches of her images, and to reflect on just how lovely the act of looking can be.

Posted: 2011-12-03 11:57:47

Featured Artist: Sarah F. Burns

Sarah F. Burns means to reach into the more than five hundred year history of painting, and view contemporary scenes in ways that are "quiet and honest." To her, the tradition of painting represents continuity--part of the human experience that outlasts passing trends and the ebb and flow of individual neighborhoods and individual cities.

Which is not to take anything away from those cities or those trends. Indeed, Sarah could not do what she does unless she loved her subject matter. You need both. You need the ephemera of your own time, and you need a lasting connection to times past.

Posted: 2011-12-02 12:44:35

Featured Artist: Jackie Do

Imagine a twenty-something Texas-raised, New York-dwelling, former aspiring professional rower and poker-ace, and you'll have only scraped the surface of the eclectic personality that is Jackie Do. Born in Sugarland, TX and raised by a single father, Do would grow into an artist driven by a thirst for experience, beauty and adventure. Hardly limited in her intellectual pursuits, Do studied game theory at Stanford University and creative writing at Oxford University, proving to be a true Renaissance woman and believing faithfully in the malleability of human experience.

And yet as a painter, Do is a fresh talent, having entered the art world in 2010. What inspires her? “The rain outside. My rest. The people around me. The internet,” she says. That, and the beauty of her fellow man and life’s infinite opportunities: opportunity which, she insists, exists in bounty for anyone willing to acknowledge and reach for it.

Do paints to feel at home, creating her acrylic-on-canvas expressions in the hopes of reminding observers of the beauty of the human condition and human individuality. Radiantly optimistic, her work manifests out of her curiosity, her boundless love, and a characteristically youthful hope for her world and its inhabitants. Always whimsical, Do’s list of “things currently worth living for” prominently includes “her brick wall in downtown New York City, the first spoonful of a tiramisu, a pair of shoes, and laughter.”

Posted: 2011-12-01 11:49:26

Featured Artist: Jessica Fairley

Bold landscape artist Jessica Fairley views the act of painting as an emotional ritual for both painter and audience. Jessica's creative spark ignites when she considers her ever-changing reaction to her subject, and makes it an integral part of her paintings. It is then that she begins to find what she calls the “pleasure in the process.”

Raised in Carmel and educated at San Francisco State University, California Girl Fairley captures the wonder of Southern California landscapes, ranging from sandy beaches at dusk (right) to overcast Ventura coastlines (below) to lovingly rendered local fauna (above).

Ever-eager to capture the feeling and everlasting radiance of a location, Jessica's recent landscapes, all done in lustrous oil paints, reflect an endearing fondness for her home and a flair for capturing ever-shifting textures in a basically static medium. Those waves feel like waves, even though oil paintings have no tides.

A process-oriented painter, she often adopts the alla prima method of painting, an Italian tradition (literally “at the first”) that dictates the painting be completed in one sitting. Jessica finds this challenge “liberating,” since it allows her to maintain a natural, raw feeling to her work. Jessica uses heavy brush strokes, embraces texture, and hopes that her own changing emotional response to the subject will be evident in her finished images.

Jessica's work can currently be seen at The Artist's Alley group exhibition in San Francisco. She previously exhibited at the Getty Center’s Getty Underground in 2006, 2008 and 2010, and at numerous other exhibitions throughout her beloved home-state.

Posted: 2011-11-30 12:57:59

Featured Artist: Vicki Piron

For Vicki Piron, painting is about balance. Not so much a balance between photo-realism and abstraction (though that's in there, too) as a balance between visual faithfulness to the objects she paints, and her impulse to give those objects stories, personalities, and histories.

Vicki looks at a rusted fan (right) and thinks about how it became rusted. She looks at a tower (above) and thinks about how it changes or appears to change throughout a day, a month, a year, or a decade.

And that's is the ultimate balancing act in Vicki's work: her images capture specific objects at specific moments, but they also depict the passing and processes of time.

In The Tower, for example, Vicki lines up five 30" x 14" canvases like slivers of visual information peeking through window slats. Eeach sliver is a view of the same tower, from different angles and in different lighting. Assembling those impressions into a complete picture of the subject is left up to us.

And Vicki places the fan between us and a big, bright summer sky. She wants us to notice that the fan is weathered and still. She wants us to notice that this object in front of us has a history, and that it has the power to summon up memories (real and imagined) and meanings (objective and subjective).

She also wants us to notice that the sky takes up about as much of the canvas as the fan does. "The near and the far," as she says, are equally available to us for interpretation.

Posted: 2011-11-23 16:27:41

Featured Artist: Ruth Gregory

Ruth Gregory has shown all over the Los Angeles area, her work appearing in over a dozen exhibitions to date, most recently Insight/Inside LA at the Galerie Yoram Gil and Line and Color at the Jose Drudis Biado Gallery. Born the middle of three sisters to parents who would both teach yoga into their eighties, Gregory was raised in North Yorkshire, England and educated in the fine-arts at the Loughborough College of Art, the Chelsea School of Art, and the Manchester Institute of Advanced Studies.

Ruth came to America on an intended three month vacation that ended in a studio and a career in downtown L.A. Currently a California native, Gregory’s work is featured in numerous private and public collections—not only in California, but in the New York and D.C. areas as well. Her honors include the Granada Fellowship in Fine Arts from Manchester Institute of Advanced Studies and the Kay Dorey Award from the Brand Library in Glendale, California.

After a return to her roots in anatomy and figure drawing, Gregory found intrigue in the motif of the "veil" and her graphite on paper work explores themes of ambiguity and obscurity, artistically dissecting the difference between the known and the unknown through investigation of shadows and light.

Gregory's fascination with the in-between resonates throughout her work, provoking observers to contemplate, in her own words, "the theme of a frozen moment of time which contains all past moments and future possibilities."

Posted: 2011-11-22 09:41:26

Featured Artist: Elizabeth Mallery

Here the visual language of 1950s domestic life blends with Elizabeth Mallery's playful sense of the surreal. The nuclear family, living in middle class comfort (above), gathers around the TV—that perfect symbol of the cultural and historical moment when science, art, capitalism, and personal identity all began to blend and intermingle to the point of being indistinguishable from one another.

Or else the family gathers in their beautiful little breakfast nook (below, left), the mother all duty and service and care with her coffee carafe, the father and son mirror images of masculine leisure. These prints take place in a world that is immediately familiar despite the fact that it never quite existed.

So in that sense, is it right to say that Elizabeth is blending Americana with surrealism? It might be more accurate to say that she is exploring the more surreal aspects of Americana itself with her endearingly abstracted people, whose heads are opaque and yet reflective, sanded down and yet strangely warm, blank and yet full of character. Maybe the point here is that mass media makes everyone a reflection of everyone else.

Or that historical memory makes us all simultaneously more and less than normal human beings, like the immaculately dressed and perfectly content little girl (above, right), who munches a banana in her decidedly chimp-like mouth. There is some delightfully personal strangeness in these images, but there is also a suggestion that culture itself is undeniably strange. This little girl is off, but not that off.

Ask Elizabeth herself, of course, and you’ll get a much purer and much simpler interpretation: "Don’t ask," she shrugs, already moving on to something equally weird and wonderful.

Unlike her prints, Elizabeth's paintings tend toward abstract, non-figurative imagery. And yet these paintings display a similar approach to form (they're simultaneously careful and playful) as well as a similar sense of surreal or dream-like rhythms.

These small-scale abstract works (below) began their lives as a series of rectangular paintings on thick, folded paper—with watercolor paints that soaked into that paper, in order to achieve the swirling colors and dynamic, cloudy textures you see here.

But Elizabeth, ever the perfectionist, was unsatisfied with the result. So she cut the images in half, and mounted each of the newly created panels on canvas. The result was a series of tightly composed, squared-off abstractions that have the heft and steadiness of traditional canvas paintings, but also a soaked-through look that would be nearly impossible to achieve without the intermediate step of paper.

Have a look, and see what you think!

  

Posted: 2011-11-21 09:41:07

Featured Artist: Mary Catherine Starr

Although Mary Catherine Starr rarely paints self-portraits, she likes to say that her entire body of work "has become a self-portrait of sorts—a portrait of a young, urban woman trying to live an 'adult' life and enjoying the simple pleasures along the way."

Her work is about breathing new life into everyday objects, and imbuing unexceptional viewpoints with exceptional significance. It’s all about seeing things you’ve seen a thousand times, but seeing them in a new way.

Make no mistake, however: "Most of my work doesn't have any 'higher meaning'—my paintings rarely have a 'dark side' or a hidden message—and truly, what you see is what you get." So these are not paintings about going beyond what one sees. Rather, they’re about simply seeing more.

Take for example the viewpoint in Mark Royal-Apt 310 (right). in the everyday. The image is of a view that the apartment's occupant would literally see daily: a stove, and the wall behind it, and a fresh roll of paper towels.

But this stove does not belong to the viewer. This stove belongs to someone else, or else to no one in particular. This is an everyday view, but not a view from our everyday. It's warm and familiar, and yet it invites us to feel ever-so-slightly like voyeurs—that is, if we still qualify as voyeurs despite spying on stoves and paper towels rather than other people.

And come to think of it, why is there a roll of paper towels over a stove? Someone should say something. But then we are, after all, guests here. Right?

And then of course, there is the titular lightbulb in the piece over there on the right. This bulb does not seem to be the only source of light in this small room. There might be a window, or another lightbulb, but in any case, we as viewers are not looking to this little encased bulb because we would be blind without it.

No, we as viewers are not grasping for light, but only stopping to notice one small detail in one small, intimate space. The boards in the ceiling are askew, but so is the viewpoint. Both are turned and twisted as though breathing, the way that old houses and casual views tend to cozily twist and stretch.

It's an image that is at once still, muted, and warmly introspective—just the sort of moment in time that Mary Catherine Starr so loves to explore.

Posted: 2011-11-20 12:20:12

Featured Artist: Letha Colleen Myers

Letha Colleen Myers was an observant little girl, growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest.  As an introverted child, she spent her free time with nature—exploring, discovering, and creating.  Memories of the seaside town from her youth can be found throughout her work: collages inhabited by a child's perception of land and sea.

Her inspiration comes from exploring these childhood memories as an adult. Letha's imagination combined with her education in architecture and design gives her work incredible depth and insight accompanied by the playful delight of a child. In her art, Letha says, you’ll find "landscapes slightly fractured and segmented by personal mental pathways and their corresponding struggles and/or epiphanies."

Letha takes great pride in her process. For her, creating a piece of art is a result of years of observation, all leading to an insight captured and given new life in the physical form. When in her element, Letha sits before a large table; material lay scattered before her. She has seen all of these individual pieces of paper, metal, and various objects before; perhaps, she's even spent years with these bits of material. Then, with a  dawning of insight, Letha says, they come together to create a new piece of art: an addition to a collection from an inspired artist.

Letha's work incorporates cut paper, found metals, and deep cradle hardboard to create work that walks the line between two- and three-dimensional abstraction. Some of her pieces draw inspiration from the sea, as in the case of The Prudent Sailor, (above, right). There is water and flow and refracting light in the forms of these multi-layered pieces, which are not really paintings, not quite sculptures, and not quite collages, but wonderfully singular creations.

Other times, Letha finds her muse in topography and maps. Paper Grography Multi (below, left) charts out a sort of sky, surface, and underground on its rippling surface, and Paper Geography No. 6 (below, right) takes this conceit a step further by actually including a map and a star or compass among its earthy forms.

Letha lays out imaginary world for us to explore, and rich visual environments in which to explore them. The paper is crisp and colorful, the found materials visibly worn and engraved with history and use—whole worlds flattened and made available for us to admire and enjoy.

Posted: 2011-11-18 13:56:50

Featured Artist: Marc McGowan

New Jersey-born Marc McGowan has produced an abundance of unique and thought-provoking work over the course of his prolific career. Educated at Syracuse University, McGowan once lived in London where he worked for fashion designer Pam Hogg. After returning to America, McGowan split his time inhabiting Los Angeles, Dublin, Ireland and Chicago, where he currently resides. McGowan has shown all over the United States for the past decade, featuring not only in Chicago but also in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.

In just the past year, McGowan shown at various high-profile Chicago galleries, including the Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, The Chicago Buzz and Intelligentsia. Along with being a provocative visual artist, McGowan is also an accomplished musician, performing professionally (if intermittently) for many years.

Currently, McGowan’s artwork plays on and between media, combining photography and traditional hand-coloring to create a new breed of artistic methodology. Several years of experimentation have led McGowan to his process of taking existing photographs and altering them without the use of digital technology. Printed on rice paper and re-colored using acrylics, oil pastels and colored pencils, his art is notable for being reminiscent of a dream or a memory, and his subject material—that is, everyday scenes and objects—helps connect the viewer to something familiar, yet slightly distorted.

Marc  sometimes works with the same photograph image multiple times, transferring it first to a 12" x 12: board, and then to a 24" x 24" board. (Examples include Skaters and Tunnel). Because these latter images are twice as large as their counterparts, they often take Marc more than twice as long to produce. In that sense, they are expansions on the 12" x 12" works, rather than mere variations on a given theme.

Posted: 2011-11-17 12:16:20

Featured Artist: Alexis Trice

Alexis Trice's art frequently, if not always, features the animal kingdom’s more impish individuals on adventures of their own making. Trice’s own adventurous and playful spirit shines through each of her paintings.

A born and raised New Yorker, Trice has always had a passion for painting with oils. She graduated from The School of Visual Arts with a BFA in Illustration, and now owns her own company, WelcomeToTheDogHouse.net, where she creates custom portraits and even designs custom tattoos for pet-lovers.

When creating a custom design, she starts with a sketch from several photo references, followed by an initial color placement, then she takes her time in crafting the animal around the basic sketch, finally applying details and custom background inspired by the personality of her subject.

Driven by her compassion for animals, Trice often donates her work to raise funds to help animals in need. This whimsical artist is inspired by a wide array of sources including, by her own accounting, "rouge and Victorian taxidermy, wunderkammer, preserved fetal animals, insects, wax anatomical studies, Walton Ford, natural history, conjoined twins, backpacking through foreign lands, daguerreotypes and sifting through the weathered pages of old lithographs.

Because of her wide range of fascinations, Trice's work is full clever allusions to the natural world. Take The Lyre (right). In nature, the lyrebird is known for skillfully mimicking the calls of other birds. Trice makes this habit both graphic and humorous by having her little bird collect trinkets—and a pet—rather than songs.

And her work is often equally rich in historical and allegorical references, as in the case of Bounty (above). You see, in Greek mythology, the titan Kronos devours several of his children—grisly stuff—but his son Zeus gets away with the help of his mother Rhea.

Zeus would not have survived without the generosity of his foster-mother, the goat-nymph Amalthea, whose broken horn became known as the Cornucopia, or horn of plenty.

So there's a cheeky reference here, in the bountiful feast set between two (perfectly unbroken) horns and the little bird (who is hardly Zeus) feeding on it. Trice is as playful as Kronos was grisly.

Trice's work has been featured in contemporary galleries throughout the U.S. and in multiple online and print publications—as well on her own page here at the gallery.

Posted: 2011-11-16 11:58:09

Featured Artist: JUURI

JUURI's work is in some ways a reflection on delicacy, contrasting the faces and bodies of Japanese women with floral forms and intricate, abstract brush-and-pencil-and-pastel strokes. Lightness, flow, and movement combine in these forms to create something beautiful and enigmatic and—it must be said—a bit distant, a bit melancholy.

JUURI's beautiful women, like their abstracted or semi-abstracted surroundings, are mysterious. They're inscrutable, as though they find their own physical beauty confusing, even burdensome, or as if to say that behind their forms is something hard to grasp, or nothing to grasp at all. All that floating and lightness renders these female figures somewhat unreal, stuck in the strange position of having bodies that are also images.

In Autumn Showers -Shu Rin- the female body is outlined, a sort of ghost or phantom. This figure's color comes from her surroundings, reflected and refracted from the colorful streams and balloon-like storm clouds all around her. Splashes and drippings of paint and visible pencil hatches form an image that is resolutely two-dimensional, yet full of visual depth.

Posted: 2011-11-15 09:32:58

Featured Artist: Rachel Teannalach

Rachel Teannalach says that her paintings "explore the dynamic between structure and freedom," and that is after all the essential yin-and-yang of what painters do. On the one hand, a painter (even a fully abstract one) observes and borrows images, shapes, colors, textures, and values from the visible world. On the other hand, a painter has to organize those observations and flatten them into a cohesive, two-dimensional image

You've got the freedom of having the whole world to paint, and the structure that isolates some slice of reality and makes it intelligible as a painting.

In Rachel's artist-as-kaleidoscope style, we can see a vast and beautiful natural world being refracted into smaller pieces and more regular shapes. We can see structure and freedom in active negotiation. We can see a canny reflection on what painters do, while also watching an adept painter do it.

Rachel's interest in structure leads her to explore big questions by aesthetic means. For example, how do migrating birds stick so close together, in such orderly and efficient formations? (above, right). How do they know to form a letter V like that? The answer, of course, is that they don't exactly know. They just do it, because something deep inside them tells them that it works. It's one of the underlying structures of the natural world—a living example of freedom and structure in tension.

Repeating triangular shapes echo the birds and their migratory V's, while fractured mountains and sky provide form and balance, all set against a cool tan like that of a parchment, a papyrus, or a hazy day. And in front of it all, there are the birds themselves, flying free while closely collaborating.

But for the meeting of structure and freedom, there is nothing quite like an urban space such as Munich (right). There are rules, grids, orders. But within them, there is an infinity of creativity and innovation. Organization enables messiness. The structure allows and enables the freedom.

Here we can see bits and pieces of Munich’s skyline, peaking through floral flecks of light. Like an urban landscape, the pattern is predictable, but not exactly regular. The shapes repeat, but never precisely. The buildings are similar in their colors and shapes, but they catch the light differently, moment to moment and spot to spot.

Migration and stillness, natural and human-built spaces, abstraction and representation, freedom and structure—all in insightful contrast.

Rachel has studied in Florence and Glasgow, as well as California and Vermont. Her work has appeared in more than a dozen exhibitions nationwide, and she has been working with Stephanie Breitbard Fine Arts since 2005.

Posted: 2011-11-14 10:14:09

Featured Artist: Lauren Adams

West Virginia is not merely Lauren Adams' home. It is also her inspiration and her primary subject matter. In her work, Lauren captures the highly specific and secret spaces of her home state–the sorts of little details that fascinated her as a child, and that she has actively sought to rediscover as an adult. Her paintings are a project of noticing, observing, and capturing the natural world.

Lauren says that she starts most of her pieces in her studio, beginning “with a thin acrylic under-painting or gesture done with a large brush." She then takes this intuitive, abstract image out into the world, where she uses a palette knife to apply naturalistic details in oil paint.

While January 28th II (above, right) is an excellent example of that, February 28th (above, left) might be an even better one. At first glance, you might mistake February 28th for a grainy photograph, since the shapes and textures in the image so closely mirror those of real snow and trees and earth. or just as likely, you might at first think that the image is entirely abstract–that the lines and dots and scratches are there entirely for their own sake.

And of course, either of those interpretations would be perfectly correct. The shapes are there for the own sake—this is a painting, after all—and yet they do closely reflect the natural world. Like a quick glance at something in nature, Lauren Adams’ paintings offer a complete experience in only a moment, but then invite and reward a second, more careful look.

So her work is a combination of indoor and outdoor, of subjective and objective, of imagination and interpretation. It’s about nature, but more than that, it’s about the personal experiences that make us feel connected to nature.

Lauren's work is part of the permanent collection of the West Virginia State Museum. She has also listed her work at the David L. Dickerson Gallery, and exhibited at numerous galleries in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and of course, West Virginia.

Posted: 2011-11-12 17:47:33

Independent Juries and Fair Prices

Juries are an important feature of traditional brick-and-mortar art galleries, but far less common in spaces for buying art online — so our independent jury is a big part of what sets us apart. We take great pride not only in the quality and cohesiveness of our collection, but also in the scrupulous and thorough listing system we've built around that collection.

As we've mentioned on our FAQ page, our jury is an independent panel of experts from throughout the worlds of art practice, publishing, academia, and gallery and museum curation. When artists send us their work, or when we find work that we like, it'' up to the jury to decide whether we'll list it, and if so, what our price will be.

As a result, our prices work different from those of other online art galleries and shops. We don't generally offer promotional codes or site-wide discounts, specifically because we've worked so hard to make our everyday prices fair. Because our jury goes through an intensive process of vetting, taking into account their own extensive knowledge of the art market, you can be confident that the prices we ask are reasonable right now, without having to wait for a time-sensitive special offer.

Now of course, that's not to say that other websites' pricing structures are unfair. It's just to say that we think our own system offers something special, something unusual among online art-spaces, and something of which we're pretty proud.

Posted: 2011-11-10 16:31:39

The Dining Room Test

As we mentioned in his bio, Steve Spencer puts each of his paintings through an incredibly practical and wonderfully simple test: He hangs the piece in his own dining room. Spencer will not declare a painting done until a few meals have tested its mettle, for the same reason that he wouldn't declare a boat finished if it had yet to touch the water.

And this test extends beyond the dining room. Steve’s paintings find themselves scattered all over the artist’s own living space, sometimes displayed prominently on a carefully-chosen wall, and other times mixed in with the messy this-and-that of everyday life.

If art is going to be an everyday institution (and we feel very strongly that it should be, for as many people as possible), then we need art that looks just as good while people are living around it as it does on a pristine white wall. We think that Steve’s art fits that bill beautifully, and we’ve asked him for some images to show what we mean

So if you've been wondering what one of Steve's paintings might look like in your space, here's what they looks like in his.

Posted: 2011-11-04 16:14:33

What Is Mid-Market Art?

When we created Gray Blush Gallery, we had a particular corner of the art world in mind, and we imperfectly dubbed it mid-market art. So what is the mid-market? Are you a part of it? If not, do you want to be? Allow us to clarify.

Our view is this: Over the past several decades, the art market has been effectually cut in half. There exists an increasingly absolute division between art that people place in galleries on the one hand, and on the other, art that people produce and buy for everyday use and display.

This is by no means a gap in the quality of the work, as there is wonderful art being made on both sides of the divide. The problem is the gap itself, a gap in demographics. These two worlds--the world of respected galleries and the world of wonderful things that people place on their walls--these worlds rarely communicate, and those artists and art-lovers who do not fit neatly into either space, or who are comfortable in both, sometimes get left behind.

That's what we want to change. By filling in these demographic gaps, Gray Blush Gallery will ideally be (as we've said before and will say again) a service to both artists and art-buyers. We mean to market art in a manner that invites rather than intimidates, and to curate art in a manner that encourages open dialog and participation.

So have a look around our catalog of diverse and passionate artists. If you can find something you love, and especially if it's something you might not have found without our help, then we're doing our jobs and we're thrilled to be doing so.

And by the way, we're always looking for exciting new work in any and all genres, styles, traditions, and media. If it's being made now, and it's good, then we want one, because we think that someone out there would love it. Interested artists are invited to contact us at info@grayblush.com

So in the end, who is the mid-market? Well, you are, if you want to be. That's what we love about that concept, vague though it may be: it's a group that anyone can join and, we think, a wonderful one to be a part of.

Posted: 2011-10-03 10:28:05

Is Art an Investment?

The primary return on art is love of the artwork itself. Or at least that’s how we feel here at the gallery. But undeniably, a growing contingent of investors, wealth managers, and insurers has defined art as an asset class, supported by market indices like those of NYU Professors Mei and Moses.

As a professional gallery, we seek out creative and exciting new works, and our jury certainly considers market conditions when rendering valuations. That said, our goal is for you to enjoy the pieces and their stories rather than the market trends.

We see nothing wrong with the idea of art as a commodity, or with people reading the market and making their buying decisions accordingly—but our top priority is always to sell you a work of art that you’ll love, rather than an investment that you can profitably resell.

Posted: 2011-10-03 10:24:35

A Statement of Purpose

Gray Blush Gallery is a new online art-space conceived as a service to artists, art-buyers, and those who want to become art-buyers. Sounds great, you might be thinking, but what exactly does that mean? Well, read on!

If you're an art-lover who hasn't quite made the leap into buying original art, then we want to offer a safe, friendly space to explore--and yes, buy--art that's right for you. Every piece is priced and vetted by our independent jury of experts.

If you're a longtime art collector who wants to see exciting, new work, then we want to show it to you.

And if you're an artist who feels caught between the rarefied world of top-tier galleries and the hyper-democracy of handmade sites, then we want to offer a middle ground.

In other words, we see the potential for more people to experience more art more passionately. More art, more people, more passion: that's our motto, our goal, and our plan for making the whole of the art world even more exciting and vibrant than it already is.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, then have a look around our website! You can also keep up with us on Twitter or Facebook. Feel free to subscribe to our mailing list, drop us a line at info@grayblush.com, or give us a buzz at (800) 735-1475. We’d love to meet you!
 
With a whole lot of excitement for what’s to come,
Drew Messinger-Michaels, Gallery Director

Posted: 2011-10-03 10:17:37