Danny Heller

Usonian Ideal

2024

From the artist statement, "My artwork centers on mid-century American architecture and design, once revered for its groundbreaking ideas in form and social planning, but now largely...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --From the artist statement, "My artwork centers on mid-century American architecture and design, once revered for its groundbreaking i...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art. His main subject is modernism’s footprint on the outposts of Americana—places typified by harsh artificial light and hard shadows on concrete. The show makes clear that for Young, despite the contemporary art world’s preferences for irony, disjunction, and tongue-in-cheek intellectual gamesmanship, painting is at its best when it attempts to offer an unpretentious accounting of where and how we live our day-to-day lives. The celebrations of urban sprawl offered by artists like Ed Ruscha—who famously took no-nonsense aerial photographs of thirty four LA parking lots in 1967, and created sleek, stripped down paintings of Standard Oil stations—are an obvious point of reference in Young’s work. But Young’s choices seem more personal than Ruscha’s, and his technique is certainly more painterly: His images of gas stations are uneasy amalgamations, cobbled together from his own memories of road trips, photographs, and pure invention, and rendered with a sense of atmosphere and drama seemingly at odds with his use of hard lines and simple geometric shapes. Painters today tend to lean on pastiche, on art-historical mashups and code-switching. This typically results in images with no unified style and no concern for pictorial space, illusionistic or otherwise. For many contemporary painters, the picture plane is simply a flat, delimited arena in which different types of visual syntax collide, floating freely. This is a non-strategy in which artists make an end run around some of the thornier problems of composition, perception, and cognition. Young bucks this trend. He activates every square inch of his canvases, blocking in large passages of negative space with skeins of scruffy countervailing strokes. He is not a fussy painter, nor is he out to prove his own mastery to an audience. Like Edward Hopper, Young tends to eschew a lot of paint’s seductive properties, preferring to create hard edges and large, gently undulating planes of subdued color. He draws the viewer into an unpopulated, uncluttered world with a clear horizon line—but one that is also filled with hiccups, discontinuities, and compromises. In Service in the Rear, for example, a shelter for gas pumps in the foreground—closest to the viewer and, therefore, logically a dominant compositional element—is rendered as a hazy silhouette that flagrantly disobeys the rules of linear perspective. This is intentional: The structure is only important to Young in the way that it draws the viewer’s eye below and past it, to the glowing, low-slung building dominating the lefthand side of the picture. Thus Young shows his talent for creating visual tension and drama—and for sidestepping the viewer’s expectations. Young understands that some might regard his brand of painting as obsolete. He also understands the troubled legacy of modernism, and what the triumph of universal technology has meant for cultures around the globe. Still, for Young, the cold comfort offered by outposts of convenience—gas stations, airports, cheap hotel rooms—is not so easily dismissed. Young shares the strange buoyant optimism of his hero, Jonathan Richman, who, in his early ‘70s proto-punk single, Roadrunner, exults in the simple act of driving past the Stop’n’Shop with the radio on...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on ...

"Auto Service" (2025) is a striking handmade still-life oil painting by American realist Greg Gandy, depicting an older car in a bay at an auto service station. Artist Bio: Greg Ga...

Long Island City Contemporary artist Frederick Mershimer created this oil painting on a wooden panel in 2005. The painting (wood panel) is 10.25 x 21.25 inches (26 x 54 cm). This ...

"Westview Avalon Harbor" is an American Realist seascape in California with blue tones. Set on Catalina Island, rolling hills make up the horizon. A valley of palm trees sweep toward the shoreline. Boats rest and sail forward in the harbor, a single sailor is seen standing in a small powerboat in the foreground. Framed. Signed. Carl Bretzke is a representational painter who specializes in urban scenes, nocturnes, and plein-air landscapes. He is a member of the Plein Air Painters of America since 2021. Carl's work has been exhibited extensively in Minnesota and California, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Carl's work has been described in the Washington Post as "simultaneously intimate and detached…The artist's unadorned style recalls Edward Hopper and The Ashcan school." Carl holds an MD degree from the University of Minnesota Medical School. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Colorado...

"Covered Bridge" is contemporary realist plein air painting of a snow scene in Vermont. The water is frozen over, and there are no people. A path leads from the bridge, away from the viewer, and continues off the canvas, letting us imagine... where does this path lead? A hint of fantasy to this realistic portrayal in Jeffersonville, Vermont. Medium: Oil on Aluminum Framed dimensions: 23.5 x 29.5 inches Artist Bio: Rachel Personett was born in Hawaii, but raised in Colorado. Being the daughter of a pilot she has always traveled extensively. She has studied part time at the Savannah College of Art and Design, The Angel Academy...