Jeremy Mann is a painter based in the San Francisco area with a fascinating approach — or more accurately, range of approaches — to his primary subjects of figures, still life and cityscapes.
Mann can paint in a refined, straightforward style of realism, particularly in his still life paintings, and also take his cityscape compositions to the edge of non-representational geometric forms. His figures in interiors, which are his most powerful statements, frequently combine both finessed realism and abstracted elements of “paint as paint”.
Much of his work is somehow simultaneously broken into rough, gritty geometric shards and woven into a harmonious compositional whole. Mann accomplishes this, I think, largely through his command of value relationships. Light plays both a subtle and dramatic character role in his work, sly and whispering in one passage, shouting with bravado in the next.
In his cityscapes, Mann often chooses conditions of night, fog, mist and rain that allow him to apply both his nuanced control of value and also his other forte, which is the application of soft and hard edges. This is also prominent in his figurative pieces, in which softness and hardness combine with muted light and restrained color to create mood and emotional depth.
Mann’s work is currently on display as part of the Summer Small Works exhibition at the Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Culver City, CA (they don’t provide the end date), and will be featured in a solo exhibition at the John Pence Gallery in San Francisco from July 9 to August 29, 2015.
[Note: some of the figurative images on the linked sites should be considered NSFW.]
