• Why I do it

    I believe painting and art as a whole should function as an instrument that challenges popular culture, inspires creativity, and provokes discourse. I also believe in art as the pursuit of quality. Art requires you to get your hands dirty and work. For these reasons, I treat art as nothing less than a historical process. My work always encompasses more than imagery or aesthetics.

    Blending the past, contemporary events, and multiple voices my art juxtaposes street art with traditional painting styles. In subject and form, I remain concerned with landscape, line, calligraphy, abstraction, and expressionism.

    This work is my sweat, it is my life’s work, my challenges, and passions.This is an embodiment of energy and effort - just as a book is much more than its cover. These pieces express why I roll my sleeves up every morning.

    I hope you enjoy it.

  • Artist Statement


    Jon Mulhern is an acrylic painter best known for his abstractions that contain intimate moments of detail within a larger atmospheric landscape. At a glance, one can find an allegorical climax of dancing lines contrasted by bold colors and raw texture. They are gut paintings, each one with its very own personality and hopeful outlook through abstraction. They are not true landscapes, cityscapes or subjects. Rather, the work is founded in paint and ends in paint. Mulhern describes a space without giving away the full story. In the work one can feel natural objects like water, land, stone, animal-like textures, storms, light, nearly manmade structures and allegorical themes. The viewer feels a changing prospective not fully controlled by gravity. His work is meant to give the viewer a visual experience through expression and pure abstraction. Mulhern is often filed alongside genres such as Abstract Expressionism, modernism, Pop Art, Romanticism, political art, and landscapes. His works exist between these categories. He pushes for each painting to feel as if it was born rather than made.

    Mulhern has exhibited at many museums including Peter Marcelle Project, Sara Nightingale Gallery, Art Southampton, Southampton Art Center, Ashawagh Hall, Guild Hall and George Billis Gallery in Chelsea, New York.