As compared to other arts, unlike video or movies, painting does not involve motion. The painting is a single frame. However, within that frame can be produced the sensation of motion through gesture. The painting compared to sculpture, statuary, lacks depth in three dimensions. However, the painting can compel the illusion of depth due to the technique of the painter. The painting unlike music is silent. But this silence affords a spatiality for meditation on the other senses, specifically vision, and all of the implications of what is seen. Less abstract than a poem, which works through the symbols of words, painting may still alternatively dissolve photorealistically into its subject or foreground itself as paint, the brush-stroke, the pigment declaring itself. Unlike reality, which flows in time, painting is a frozen moment, and yet, as a moment of gesture, it implies time, and allows an examination of the moment as if the viewer were freed momentarily from the drift of time and allowed to stand outside of it and peruse the moment as if it were a mayfly frozen in amber. The painting is a simulation, a simulacrum, and yet has its own originary status, declaring itself as itself, as painting, as gestural act, even as it may dissolve and lose itself into the imagery of what it portrays.
The Offering, 2026
Charcoal, Acrylic on gessoed cradled wood panel
12 × 24 × 1 1/2 in | 30.5 × 61 × 3.8 cm
What is the moment of gesture? It is to begin with, an act of the attentiveness of the creator, the artist, the painter. Yet the artist dissolves into her tools and would be the first to tell you that it may not be herself that makes her painting, but something that works through her. We have an image of the artist lost in concentration, absorbed in the process of creation. This absorption is important. From the artist’s point of view, it may be a necessity; it may feel like a therapy, a way of healing, of processing life; it may feel like a discipline, a craft, satisfying, like knitting. If the craft is fine and the moment fortuitous, this absorption, this mild trance, may also occur in the viewer of the painting, as they recreate the painting in their mind, by viewing it, appreciating it.
The paintings in this selection are bright and alive with color. They are precise and suave with craft. At times the paint declares itself abstractly as pure pigment. At other times the paint as if disappears into a cheek, an eye, a lifted hand, and what is felt overwhelmingly is the image, the figure of the model, the portrayal. Sometimes the painting recedes into being the flat surface of cleverly applied pigment which it is. Other times it opens out into a depth, and one is suspended in transport, a feeling like watching a good movie, where what one becomes aware of, is coming back out of the painting, the absorption in it which has then occurred.
The human figure is essential to these works. After all, we are biologically and evolutionarily optimized to read exquisite minutia of the expression of a face, the bend of a hand, the aspect of a body. Friend or foe? Who is this?
There is a human community to these painters and artists. They are all alive at the same time we are. We float in our little bubbles of self through a shared-for-a-while space and time. We might as well get to know each other while we’re here. The meditative space within which the moment of gesture of a painting arises is where we may know.
There are more artists involved in this than just the artists who make the art-works. The viewers are artists. As they regard the painting, they recreate it in their minds, as it becomes what it is within their reactions. Those who love art are artists as well, only in their own ways. Ideally art helps us remember how all is art. Making the painting is art. Looking at the painting – at least doing it successfully – involves a certain art of looking. Searching for and locating these artists and getting them together in a shared space is an art. Dulce Menendez, who oversaw this project, agreed when I asked her: “Publishing to me is an art form.” And that is the magic of art, when it works. It leaks through your life and perhaps affords you at times the grace to glimpse that all is an art from, all is a painting, from the morning sunlight through the kitchen window, to the sound of the mockingbird, sip of this cup of coffee as I type these words.
The artworks in this gathering were selected for nothing other than their flagrant beauty and subtle implications. - John Hughes, June 2026