John Maull

Tierra Del Sol Gallery is proud to present

John Maull

Reception Saturday, January 11, 6 – 9 PM
January 11 – March 7th, 2020

Tierra Del Sol Gallery presents the solo exhibition of artist John Maull, a Los Angeles County native who has participated in the studios of Tierra Del Sol since 2005. Maull’s expressive mixed media works are influenced by his personal and cultural histories as well as his dedicated perusal of books and magazines. His impressionistic renderings demonstrate his passion for building visual literacy by investigating imagery and experimenting with texture and form.

Maull creates colorful treescapes from ballpoint pen, colored pencil and paint. These ephemeral works are comprised of layers and redactions that add depth and movement, but also emphasize the experiences he had growing up in a Christian family. In this way, his art practice is an extension of his relationship with his family and his faith. Through ritual repetition, Maull abstracts his trees to distill his subject matter to a qualitative essence.

Maull ’s abstract language reveals a practice that tunes the viewer into his passion for nature and his joy of making. Like Monet’s Chrysanthemums and other dense flora portraits that fill the canvas, Maull captures the timelessness and sense of connection that artists have with the creative processes of the natural world.

Many of Maull’s treescapes appear to depict hillside foliage blowing in the wind. These color dense works cohere his personal experiences with larger cultural references that exist in both the canon, for example Warhol’s flowers, and on its periphery, with the modernist still life paintings by William H. Johnson, one of the most important black American artists (who was coincidentally self-taught). Both these artists abstract flora, affirming a tradition that includes Maull’s

Another fellow black Los Angeles-based artist and age contemporary, Charles Gaines has pursued a decades long study of trees with colored numbered grids and that speak about space vis-à-vis aesthetics and cultural values. Maull also includes numbers and text in his paintings that allude to a greater significance of the landscape, while adding further dimensionality to the works on paper.

Tierra Del Sol is pleased to showcase for the first time John Maull’s powerful paintings. The exhibition opens January 11, 2020 and runs through February 23, 2020.