These new paintings by Chris Kannen convey nature in idiosyncratic ways. Made primarily on a landscape format, the paintings are complex images from singular subjects such as a sky, a cloud or a wolf. A range of paint application elucidates these simple subjects with many different sensibilities.

Pace is a memorial to Kannen’s brother’s late pet wolf, describing her face in a blend of densely-layered strokes, rainbows, and partly cloudy skies. Skyr is a more indeterminate space, suggesting a tropical sky with a peculiar weight and physicality, like an icelandic yogurt. Smaller-scale works communicate moments and encounters, creating possibilities and questions with an unexpected scrape, brushstroke or color. Waves seen through a porthole, trees confused with factories, a firearm in the snow—these images offer a personal understanding of a beautiful and difficult relationship with the natural world.

Born 1977 in Cleveland, Ohio, Chris lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from the MFA program at Hunter College in 2001. He was recently a near-frozen artist-in-residence with SIM, The Association of Icelandic Visual Artists, in Reykjavik, Iceland in December 2004.