Wes Hempel

Riding Home

2022

Karen Woods paints a traveler’s view through the window of a moving vehicle rendered in subtly nuanced gestures in oil on canvas or panel. These views from...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas can easily frame the everyday. But my task is to trap the exceptional. Whether I am outside on site, or in the studio working from memory, painting is a personal, idiosyncratic process founded in obsession, and wonder. "My subjects are genuine locations. They all have names, and many have familiar and private associations. But my attraction to a particular street or building often comes, in part, from a suspicion that it is also, in a sense, nameless. I nurture enduring relationships with a terrain. But for me, a particular motif resonates when it seems eligible for a larger catalog of spatial forms. My paintings are less portraits of Brooklyn than pages in an expansive, borderless inventory of space and light. Their index-like titles and typically symmetrical or balanced compositions intend to hint at something of the monumental, appropriate to a classifying program. It is neither the landscape's planning nor its architecture which conjures the shapes I paint. Rather, it is its observation; it is how a place appears that forms a distinct typology. At street level, tight, box-like canyons of space offer motifs best captured in a square format, while aerial, panoramic views from a rooftop invite me to explode them in a wider canvas. When looking around to frame a wider view, the optical distortions of curvilinear perspective weave parallel lines into trajectories mirroring the dome of the sky. And on a clear day, the path of the sun traces analogous curves across it. Only turning achieves a panoramic view, and sky and street are themselves revealed as events. At times, glare, fog, rain and snow are also deliberately organizing factors in my choice of standpoint. I wait for and design with all of them. Land maps posit an objective viewpoint. But star maps...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas c...

Karen Woods paints a traveler’s view through the window of a moving vehicle rendered in subtly nuanced gestures in oil on canvas or panel. These views from the front seat of a car lo...

This evocative fine art painting captures the quiet allure of a backyard swimming pool at night, its glowing blue-green water illuminating the surrounding darkness. The carefully pla...

keywords; rusty, teal, brown, earth tones, surrealism, car portrait, car accident, oil painting, representation painting, strangeness, contemporary surrealistic, unsettling, contemporary realist painting, dreams, symbolic composition, tonalist, grey, monochrome, nostalgic, vintage, early century, illustration, car, automobile, old car wreck...

keywords; brown, earth tones, surrealism, car portrait, car accident, oil painting, representation painting, strangeness, contemporary surrealistic, unsettling, contemporary realist painting, dreams, symbolic composition, tonalist, grey, monochrome, nostalgic, vintage, early century, illustration, car, automobile, old car wreck...

keywords; surrealism, portrait, oil painting, earth tones, figurative painting, strangeness, contemporary surrealistic, unsettling, contemporary realist painting, dreams, symbolic composition, dream, men , portrait, earth tones, tonalist, grey, monochrome, nostalgic, vintage, early century, illustration, brown, car, automobile, tractor, old car wreck...