Oil Crayon Abstract Paintings

Danielle Frankenthal’s work is about light in all its valences: as the specific light, which is color, as the most humanly perceivable for of pure energy which allows us sight, and a...

Danielle Frankenthal’s work is about light in all its valences: as the specific light, which is color, as the most humanly perceivable for of pure energy which allows us sight, and a...

Danielle Frankenthal’s work is about light in all its valences: as the specific light, which is color, as the most humanly perceivable for of pure energy which allows us sight, and a...

Danielle Frankenthal’s work is about light in all its valences: as the specific light, which is color, as the most humanly perceivable for of pure energy which allows us sight, and a...

Oil and oil crayon on canvas.

Oil and oil crayon on canvas.

Oil and oil crayon on canvas.

Oil and oil crayon on canvas.

Born in New York City, the son of a Czech architect and Viennese writer, Gary Komarin is a risk taker in contemporary painterly abstraction. Komarin’s stalwart images have an epic quality that grip the viewer with the idea that he or she is looking at a contemporary description of something timeless. For painter Gary Komarin, abstraction has never been a formal dead end. Rather, it has allowed him to challenge the limitations of the style - to make painting ‘include more’ precisely because a recognizable image excludes too much. Komarin has been called a “painter’s painter”. His status in this regard is based on the authenticity of his work, its deep connection to the tradition of Modern painting as well as its sustained individuality as an utterly personal voice. Like many of the best artists of his generation he is indebted to the New York School, especially his mentor Philip Guston with whom he studied at Boston University where he was awarded a Graduate Teaching Fellowship. Komarin has been particularly successful at filtering these influences through his own potent iconography. “From these seemingly unlovely methods Komarin gets paintings that vibrate with historical memory, echoing such things as Matisse’s driest most empty pictures. Robert Motherwell’s spare abstractions of the 1970’s, or the early New Mexico and Berkeley paintings...