Ecclesiastes

This too shall pass. These paintings describe a world that is ephemeral – where everything, the good and the bad, is always passing away. I’m presenting impermanence and constant change in the static form of paintings. The paintings are still. It’s the viewer who provides the motion. The eye roves over the surface. It dives into the depth of perspective; it flips back to the flat graphics on the surface. It alternates between seeing the surface and seeing through it. You can’t see the perspective space, the graphic elements, the water surface and the map diagrams all at once. You read these things one at a time; you go back and forth between them.

My paintings include a range of subject matter as well as a range of representational techniques. Hand painted elements are stacked over mechanically reproduced images and diagrams. The layering, the imperfections and the brush marks in the paint expose the process of making. Manual craft changes the way we interact with images. The disturbing ruins in Syria in particular, deserve the attention of being manually painted.

My intention with this body of work is to create paintings that are visually strong and will get your attention but will resist quick interpretation. The longer the pieces remain ambiguous and mysterious the more I think you’ll see in them; the more they’ll reward you.

Compression

Mikael Sandblom’s work proposes that what we see is not all there is; that how we each frame the world is incomplete and contingent. Landscapes and cityscapes are the starting point for a visual and conceptual act of dissolution.

Sandblom’s art breaks apart and reforms before our eyes. Patches of water atomize into vertical bands as you approach. Dot patterns resolve into billowing clouds as you step back. Throughout the surface, fragments of images float into focus and then recede as the eye moves on to other elements.

These mixed-media paintings are built in layers. Photos, paint and cutouts float over a reflective aluminum substrate that causes the images to change with the light and the angle of view. The paintings do not resolve into single images that can be seen all at once. They reflect a world where nothing is solid or permanent. It’s our act of perception that brings elements into being and dissolves them again.

The experience of viewing these paintings could be more widely applied to life. If we can nudge ourselves to question our tacit assumptions and presuppositions about our world, then we make room for wider possibilities.