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James Mullen
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Artists Statement
"Growing up in a rural New York environment, the chance to investigate the complexities of my surrounding has attracted me to painting the landscape. For me, painting has become an extension of myself in an effort to help ascertain my place in the world. The landscape has always been a natural vessel for ideas and states of mind, which I feel results in a sense of revelation that accompanies many of my paintings. My representation of nature and objects in landscape painting go beyond the literal to address metaphorically to the human condition. My inspiration derives from an aesthetic of late 19th century American paintings as well as German Romantic paintings. Fundamentally quiet and still, my paintings slow down time to allow for the full absorption of stimulus and thought. I am particularly concerned with the particularities of light and the ability it has to make the ordinary exceptional. The inclination to paint something as fundamentally expansive as nature is itself a clash between the ordering tendency of aesthetics and the seemingly chaotic property of nature."