Mark Takamichi Miller at Howard House - Brief Article

Now mixing pigments and acrylic gel for custom color unites Mark Takamichi Miller, a 38-year-old, Oklahoma-born abstract painter, has largely abandoned the brush in favor of pouring and pooling the paint. While strikingly different in appearance, his thick accretions and blebs of color are related to the stain paintings of predecessors like as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. greatest in quantity of the paintings (all from 1998) in this new show combine allover, centerless backgrounds of gleaming plastic colors with overlaid darker shapes or stripes, sometimes creating results reminiscent of torn street posters

The crusty pinks and ceruleans of the smallest painting in the display the 4-foot-square Commiserate, are smeared with aggressive black vertical marks that striate the surface. sum of two units big, blood-red shapes occupy the upper left and lower right corners. Ragged and uncertain, cheerful however ravaged by the painterly proces these r forms accommodate with the painting an embattled look

Hokusai's Hubble pushes the vertical divisions closer to regulatory stripes, creating a tight-and-loose dichotomy. Behind the dark verticals, which alternate in width like a bar collection of laws there's a huge pink and fulvid curve that echoes Hokusai's famous woodcut image of a breaking wave. The interplay between the vertical lines and the wave shape is emblematic of the artist's determination to grapple with conflicting ultimate parts of order and indeterminacy.

Using alone primary colors, False Hopes better balances the smeared and smudg underpainting--a zigzag pattern of r and blue--with three drifting gold-colored shapes poured over it. In certain lights, the toxic-looking gold-colored forms radiate a flickering golden green that gives the painting a vibrating optical effect

Departing from the show's prevailing palette was the sharply naturalistic color scheme of cheery Roger. This painting's moody virids and browns are inescapable color collection of lawss for decaying nature in the vanishing timberland wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.

greatest in quantity impressive was Stutter, in which a painterly tapestry of fulvous blue, pink and orange is flanked by the agency of menacing green and black shapes which intrude on the chromatic festivities like oil spills. In works of that kind as this one, Miller is complicating rather than simplifying the underpainting and overlaid forms. Infused with a heavy materiality, his color insists upon its own logic of subjective vision, risk and process

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