Seated Figure

John Mulvaney is a figurative painter who graduated from Tyler School of Art in 1994 and is now an active artist in Philadelphia, PA.  He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Boston University in 1996, and in 2001 was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. 

Mulvaney’s work, best described as figurative expressionism, consists of a dense array of strokes and slashes of color that coalesce into: a figure, a head, an interior, and sometimes landscape. His pieces, ranging from somber to explosive in mood, always display a raw immediacy, and often draw attention to the existential pathos of the sitter. Recent exhibitions include Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham, NY, Cerulean Arts Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, Park Place Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, and AFA Gallery, Scranton, PA.

"Painting to me is a contemplative, solitary experience in which I deal with my fundamental relationship to the universe, the void; creating an image of a figure in relation to that void, the figure-space relationship. Through the purposeful notation of form and space, touching the form in multiple places, I create a rhythmic patterning that begins to generate an infrastructure of its own spatial logic. The importance of this infrastructure of mark making is evident throughout art history, specifically the modernist and expressionist figurative tradition, as well as in the contemporary state. I see my work as a logical extension of this tradition, but more importantly as an expression of my own sensibility for the absolute breadth of form and space, in the sense that every mark is purposeful in the logic of creation. My aim is to have the marks harmonize in the soulful struggle to allow for oneness in relation to the specificity of everything within it, with different weights of focus revealing my individual consciousness, psychology and temperament"