Paintings on Canvas

A face, cut from skins of dried paint and set on canvas the way a tailor sets a patch.

Mark Westervelt’s paintings on canvas are faces and figures assembled from skins of dried acrylic and latex, peeled from plastic sheets and applied like appliqué. The Chicago painter pushes the portrait tradition toward figurative abstract expressionism, after Picasso, de Kooning and outsider art, to show people in extreme emotional states.

At full scale they hold a wall on their own, against travertine or raw concrete.

Portraits that arrive already stitched together.