Gregory Block, After, oil on board, 48 x 36 in.

Block’s painting After is one in a continuing body of work featuring donuts that began following a cycling accident in 2018. “I broke 20 bones, underwent several surgeries and, months later, found myself stiff, sore, underweight and painting dark, brooding still lifes,” the artist shares. “One morning, my housemates brought home a box of donuts to share, and when I opened it, I immediately knew this was the world in which I needed to immerse myself to heal. The play of light and shadow on the donuts, all those robust forms, colors, textures—it was beauty and joy in a box! To this day, I’ve never seen a box of donuts that isn’t full of sensory excitement.”

Hollis Dunlap, Enlightenment is Fleeting, oil on panel, 12 x 16 in.

Artist Hollis Dunlap features his representational figurative scenes that interweave imaginative elements. “I like to place the figures in spaces that seem to be ambiguous or dreamlike, with hints of interiors or landscapes,” he says. “I generally don’t paint obvious narratives, although I may start doing more of that. I like to give subtle hints toward classical biblical or mythological works that I like but represented in a modern context.”

Heather Neill, Munk’s Tea Party, oil, 24 x 14 in.

For example, in Enlightenment is Fleeting, Dunlap notes that the pose is similar to a Christ-like figure painted by Édouard Manet, but depicted as a woman instead. “This painting started out as a simple pose, where the main attention was given to the form and the lighting,” Dunlap says. “I thought the symmetrical pose implied some sort of meditation or religious aspect. My feelings around spirituality and enlightenment are kind of referenced sarcastically in the title, which is meant to imply that a universal understanding of how our world works is difficult for the human mind to grasp, hence the fleeting nature of those feelings. It is about the meditations on life and death, and time, the difficulty of understanding them for long, and feeling some kind of connection to something larger than us.”

Elizabeth Zanzinger, The Leap, oil on panel, 40 x 28 in.

Show attendees will also find whimsical imagery like Heather Neill’s oil painting Munk’s Tea Party. She explains, “There are two huge windows to the left of my easel...and outside, just two steps away, is my Ruth Stout garden. Last winter I tried an experiment by putting some bird feeders just inside the garden fence, inviting them to come inside. A few months ago, this little critter moved into the compost pile. He was adorable to watch darting between the pickets of the fence, and up and down the railroad tie edging to the new garden bed I planted around the outside. One day, I filled a teacup with seed and set it up on the edging. I was hoping to snap some close ups of the birds migrating through that spring, but the only taker was ‘Munk.’”

Daniel Sprick, Jen’s White Roses, oil on board, 11 x 10 in.

Visit Gallery 1261 in Denver, Colorado, to see the full collection. The show will open with a reception on August 16 from 6 to 8 p.m., and hangs through September 6. —