Run & Paint

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Darren Mulvenna's Upcoming Show at Brunswick Community College.

Darren Mulvenna will be showing his recent paintings in the Dean's Gallery at Brunswick Community College.  The opening reception will be 5pm until 6pm on Wednesday March 16th.


Mulvenna's work embraces the patterns of Nature both in subject matter and in the development of his paintings.  Layers of paint and imagery emerge and recede, darken, glow from within, intensify, push and fade; the process searches out harmony in the environment, seeks to distill a rhythm in visual essence.  The paintings seem to exist comfortably in their frames, content & still, before pulsing back out with something new.  Environments are familiar despite the disconnect from common appearance, his surreal landscapes being slightly abstracted (maybe skewed is a better word), moving and dancing like dream-images following a hike in the woods.  One recognizes immediately the living scenes, a bather swimming in an ebbing aquatic light, a female torso rapt in a transcendent light, a classical dancer juxtaposed in a brackish chiaroscuro.  Mulvenna's saturation of life, his vivacity, is cathartic in the vibrant palette and the easy imagery, his figures flying playfully across lush fields and schools of fish languidly pushed in current through a diptych.


Mulvenna's work is life affirming.  One can see his own efforts in connecting to Nature, in finding his place within the complex weave of things, and then transcribing that marvel into these paintings.  His work honestly derives from an artist searching for something that is universal and relate-able, and it does so with glimpses of beauty that elevate the viewer for a fine moment.