Evan Lovejoy’s paintings are inspired by both the artist’s love of the natural world and his anguish due to its destruction. Our complicated relationship with animals is shown through the artist’s varying ways of depicting them. Within the same work, a beast moves between a sense of realism, cartoonish rendering, and a more pop-surrealist sensibility.
“I have an intense fascination with the way in which human beings perceive animals,” the artist says. “Their forms are hijacked, and they become surrogates for our ideas, stories, and symbols, despite their inherent isolation from the human thought process. The true animal becomes more and more separated from our consciousness and is replaced by something artificial: a chimera of images and ideas created through a maelstrom of cartoons, fables, wildlife documentaries, museum dioramas, conservationist policies, and zoos. The animals I paint are not representations of their real life counterparts, but instead display a form that is entirely an artifice.”
Find more on Lovejoy’s site.
Keya Tama is a South African artist who says he aims to "reunite old and new through contrasting yet unified iconography." Tama's talent for crafting interlocking creatures, either in the backgrounds of his paintings or in the form of murals, also recalls the work of M.C. Escher. Recently, the Los Angeles-based artist has also been collaborating with others in his pieces, such as the work with Caratoes at the jump.
In his third show at 111 Minna Gallery, Mike Davis offers new whimsical paintings that appear as a continuation of the Northern Renaissance while blending in notes of the artist’s own time period. "Crooked as a Dog's Hind Leg" kicks off on Jan. 10 and runs through Feb. 29 at the space. Davis was last featured on our site 