Actively radiating with energy, Joseph Alef’s paintings convey their own visual language. He often begins with a striking blend of colors, then integrates linear and graphic elements that create sculptural effects. He also builds ceramic tablets that are deeply layered with organic abstractions and vibrant colors.

Alef has been affiliated with the Creative Growth Art Center since 2001. He has been featured in notable publications such as Hyperallergic and the San Francisco Chronicle, and his work has been exhibited at the Outsider Art Fair, New York, and the New Art Dealers Alliance, Miami, among others.

Maureen Clay paints with thick impasto, layering her colors and covering the composition several times. Her intricate sense of color and design creates images that appear abstract and described as “distorted versions of fish, birds, and food.” Her work encourages many viewers to look closely at each image, whether interpreted as a deep seascape or a view through a microscope like Untitled.

Born in California, Clay has practiced at the Creative Growth Art Center since 1991. Selected exhibitions of her work include Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami, Florida; Golestani Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany; and D’Dessin Art Fair, Paris.

Often associated with photorealism, which connects the representational media of painting and photography, Chuck Close produced artworks with a mechanical and detailed reproduction of reality. Utilizing a process he termed “knitting,” Close created large format Polaroids of models that he recreated on large canvases. His portraits are striking considering his prosopagnosia—a neurological condition that prevented him from recognizing faces, as well as his semi-paralysis later in 1988. In 1999, Close made a series of photographic portraits using the daguerreotype technique, then a series of shots focusing on the contrast between the blurred and detailed parts of the faces.Read More

Describing himself as a “landscape painter and a painter of the things that hang around the landscape,” Joe Andoe is renowned for his starkly painted portrayals of flowers, cloudy skies, and animals like dogs and horses. Andoe first covers the canvas with thick black oil paint, then wipes off its wet surface with his hands or paper towels to reveal the image underneath. This artistic process results in a mysterious and textural minimalism in his landscape paintings that depict the American spirit. Read More

Through his expressive study and analysis of form and space, Eugene Allen Bavinger emerged as one of Oklahoma’s most experimental and technically proficient artists. Bavinger initiated a technique known as “glass” painting that advanced abstract illusionism. Applying layers of paint and acrylic to glass, he pressed the canvas onto the painted surface. After the paint dried, the canvas was removed from the glass to become a composition with a smooth, reflective surface. Prioritizing process over product, Bavinger fashioned light-filled and colorful abstract works to create the illusion of depth.Read More

Oscar Brousse Jacobson was a prominent painter of Southwestern landscapes and a strong advocate of Native American art. Embracing a post-Impressionist style in his work, Jacobson thickly applied paint and created blocky shapes that formed sculptural images of Oklahoma and the American southwest. Read More

Richard Stout was an abstract expressionist based in Houston, Texas. Allusively suggesting natural settings to depict the special connections to places found in his memories—like To Robert Duncan—each of Stout’s compositions possess a unique and haunting quality. “All of my paintings have to do with where I am right now,” said Stout in a 2018 interview.Read More

Self-taught artist Gene Davis was a major figure in twentieth-century American painting who played a significant role in the color abstraction movement. Celebrated for his lively compositions of thin, multicolored, and hard-edged vertical stripes, Davis also specialized in collage, silhouette self-portraits, and other conceptual pieces. He utilized an observational, musical approach when painting, comparing his “playing by eye” to a jazz musician who plays by ear. Read More

In his oeuvre, Wolf Kahn brought a unique blend of realism along with a formal discipline of color field painting, a term in which large swathes of color are deployed in large fields throughout the composition and envelope the viewer up close. Kahn’s artistic traits were influenced by the teachings of abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, the color palette of Henri Matisse, and the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. His fusion of color, spontaneity, and representation developed a rich and expressive body of work.Read More