Words As Paintings

It's hard to believe that this painting is made up entirely of words.
You don't hear much about language based painting these days, and yet the more you look the more you'll see that it's pervasive. Graffiti, our current avante garde is certainly language based and everywhere you look, artists are incorporating words into their works. It's not at all uncommon to find main stream artists whose work deals solely with the written word or text.

Henry Mandell is just such a one and his works are at times stunning and certainly thought provoking. His oeuvre is all about language and painting, but with a twist.

The image, "Orosius" 2008, ultrachrome pigment on canvas is from his Website. You really do need to see it larger to find out what's going on here. In my book, Henry gets big bonus points for providing such large images to study. At his site, when you click on an image from the gallery of partial images, a new page opens with the complete image. Click on it again for a massive enlargement.

Read his Artist Statement to get a handle on what he's doing. He's also represented by Miranda Fine Arts and you can read a shorter take on his Statement there and view their images.