Events| Art Expo 2016

On April 14th-17th, Rodney was pleased to be included in this year's Art Expo event at Pier 94. He displayed four pieces from his #Disfashionate series, including two brand new works, with the Art Nation and Solco Gallery booths. The Art Expo, together with two other smaller art fairs, took over the entirety of Pier 94, showcasing 400+ innovative artists. The event drew a large audience, with visitors from all over the world in attendance. Overall, it was a wonderful experience and provided a chance to meet with some talented artists and see their artworks. 

              The Art Expo is an annual event that has occurred for 38 years and counting, and has been "changing the way people buy and sell art, bringing the biggest publishers, galleries and collectors face to face with hundreds of established and emerging artists."


                                       We hope to see you at Art Expo 2017!

Art Expo | Pier 94
711 12th Ave
New York, NY 10019
http://www.artexponewyork.com
Instagram: @artexponewyork

Upcoming | The American Academy in Rome

                                             View of the studio and living               
                                           quarters at the American Academy in Rome. 

Events| Save the Date! HLOS June 2016

Launched| Artfinder

      

Community Spotlight| Ian Mack

       

Ian Mack is an artist from London who has been working in Chelsea for nearly 12 years, with an art career spanning 50 years. Mack lived in several cities throughout his artistic career, all with inspiring landscapes that influenced his painting process over the years.
 
As a young artist, Mack studied and subsequently lived in Mexico, where he perfected the craft and technique of painting. Mack then moved to Colorado to pursue a fine art career, eventually moving upstate in the mid nineties. It was this change in landscape that sparked a drastic shift in Mack’s work, from more representational painting to fully non-representational. Mack’s studio today is filled with vivid abstracted artworks, varying all the way from pocket sized to practically covering the wall.
 
Mack started out as a sculptor, creating abstract works that deal with solid mass, counter space, shape, and the graphic design possibilities of three dimensional objects. He told me that this beginning to his art career still resonates with his current practice, and that it has all come full circle in his paintings today in terms of form, composition, and shape.
 

        
 
                                It was in Mexico where Mack discovered color.

“Mexico just opened my eyes to color. So I decided that color is going to be my life. And I’ve been really just pursuing that ever since, just trying to find ways to make color meaningful, and powerful and intense. But not bright. I’m not interested in bright color. I’m interested in intensity of color. And color that you can’t really use as background. You’re confronted with it. Like in my pink painting or orange painting, there’s no escape…that’s part of my mission.”
 
Mack said that he is also intrigued by design, which is apparent by the graphic nature of his work. He doesn’t really design his paintings, but design is always in the back of his mind.
 
His new artworks are based on images or compositions he’s seen in the landscape. In order to recreate these moments back in the studio, Mack creates miniature sketches of the compositions that catch his eye while out in the field.  
 
             
                              
                          "There's no great distance involved - it's quite contained."         

“They always start with tiny little miniature drawings. And I have hundreds and hundreds of these little drawings. The good ones always end up as paintings.”
 
He said he is usually sitting somewhere outside, in a rural environment, or nowadays the city, when he creates these little diagrams of whatever he is observing.
 
In his earlier work, he was interested representational paintings of landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, which also involved the flattening of space and the removal of perspective. Mack said he always felt that he knew he was not going to continue painting that way. 
 
“I got to the point where I really understood what I was doing with the paint. I knew what the end result was going to be, so I worked toward an end result. But I knew at some point I wanted to throw all that out, because If I know what I’m doing, I’m not so interested.”
 
 
            
        Mack and his old visa for Mexico                     Residue from the larger paintings become                                                                                            smaller works of art. Related to painting,                                                                                                     they can be hung on the wall.
 
Mack described to me the turning point in his career where this dramatic shift in style began, when he moved to the landscape of upstate New York. “The contrast between the line and the snow was very striking and it enabled you to really see something clearly, and you could focus on it. But you have to focus, because you can only really focus on a small amount of information, and actually read it in detail. That’s really my whole shtick. What I’m really interested in, is the bit that I can really study in detail.”

                         
 
Part of Mack’s process is not only about abstracting a found object or place, but being inspired by it, and letting it tell a new story, as in this piece titled “The Military Landscape,” in which the form is reminiscent of a military vehicle.
 
Creativity also runs in Mack’s family, and some members of his family were actually illusionists! One of his relatives had even invented a trapdoor for their show that was such a good illusion, it was very difficult for anyone to find it on the stage.
 
I find this indiscernible trapdoor to be an important connection back to Mack’s painting practice. Because like an illusionist, Mack, too, is able to hone in and focus on the invisible things – the things in our environment that most of us cannot see at all.

 
                              “It’s all about found design, found composition.”  

Ian Mack | Chelsea
526 W. 26th Street, #723
New York, NY 10001
https://www.ianmackstudios.com/