Shawn Powell

Drawing from the palette of art history, specifically painting, I incorporate whatever elements offer up the most juice, while ditching the confining aesthetic ideologies meant to accompany them. Gestural abstraction, trompe l’oeil, color theory, and the balancing of the sublime and the uncanny are a few of the constant variables found in my paintings. By juxtaposing such disparate elements and techniques, these paintings become odd, uncanny pictures soaked in dialectical tension.  Abstraction greets representation.  The stripes of hard edge abstraction are blurred by references to the interior design of domestic space.  A two-inch thick gesture of paint on the surface of the canvas is undermined by its carefully placed trompe l’oeil shadow.   Thick paint simultaneously exists as surface and object on and within the metaphorical window of painting. 
www.shawnkpowell.com