Trevor Young Paintings
American
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. 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 34 Los Angeles 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 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. Young 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 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. For Young, the cold comfort offered by outposts of convenience like gas stations, airports, cheap hotel rooms is not so easily dismissed. Young shares the strange buoyant optimism of his hero, Jonathan Richman. Spending time with Young’s paintings, one can’t help but feel the echoes of that thrill.
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Artist: Trevor Young
Passing Protrusion
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Resting Fuselage
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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 ...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Linen, Oil, Panel
End of Inning
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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, lif...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
First Light
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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 subj...
Category
2010s American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Oil, Panel
In the Park
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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 subj...
Category
2010s American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Red Hardbody
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Oil, Panel
$1,700
Meadowland Erections
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Departure Beat
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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, lif...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Active Runway
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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 ...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Oil, Panel
Red Borough
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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 subj...
Category
2010s American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Suspension
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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 subj...
Category
2010s American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Roosevelt
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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 subj...
Category
2010s American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Natural Body
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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 subj...
Category
2010s American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Placid Comeback
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
Yellow Grid
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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, lif...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
$8,500
Sodium Vapors
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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, lif...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Oil
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Previously Available Items
Flowing Away
By Trevor Young
Located in Fairfield, CT
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 ...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Trevor Young Paintings
Materials
Oil, Panel
Trevor Young paintings for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Trevor Young paintings available for sale on 1stDibs. If you’re browsing the collection of paintings to introduce a pop of color in a neutral corner of your living room or bedroom, you can find work that includes elements of blue and other colors. You can also browse by medium to find art by Trevor Young in oil paint, paint, fabric and more. Not every interior allows for large Trevor Young paintings, so small editions measuring 8 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Alex Roulette, Anthony Ackrill, and Edward Minoff. Trevor Young paintings prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $1,400 and tops out at $10,900, while the average work can sell for $8,500.