Mark Westervelt

Chicago, a studio floor littered with chips of dried paint. Most painters would sweep them up. Mark Westervelt saw material.

Mark Westervelt paints with dried paint. He lays acrylic and latex onto plastic sheets, peels the cured skins away and applies them to canvas, wooden panel or paper, so each work carries two surfaces at once: the glossy face that lay against the plastic and the matte face left to the air. Trained at the Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Chicago, he calls himself a figurative abstract expressionist. His faces and figures, people in extreme states, owe as much to Picasso, Matisse and de Kooning as to outsider art.

On a limewash wall, the relief catches raking light.

The heads look back. They have opinions.