Artist Statement

Jon Mulhern’s work inhabits a space between abstraction and atmosphere, where gesture and intuition generate richly textured compositions. He builds immersive surfaces that evoke elemental forces such as light, weather, stone, and water, without resorting to direct representation. These are not true landscapes, but sensory fields where matter and memory converge.

While painting remains central to his practice, Mulhern moves fluidly across mediums. His work often extends into sculpture and works on paper, offering shifts in scale, materiality, and dimensional presence.

Mulhern is constantly collecting images, including photographs, experiences, historical references, and visual fragments. These form a vast, evolving archive that fuels his creative process. His paintings are reactive responses to this archive: intuitive translations of collected impressions rather than direct depictions. They channel the sensation of movement through space, filtered through gesture, color, and form, like memory mapped onto canvas.

His visual vocabulary draws from historical mapmaking, the poetic logic of traveled journeys, and aerial perspectives of terrain and references that surface subtly in his work as echoes rather than literal citations. Rooted in historical painting yet firmly contemporary, Mulhern’s practice resonates with echoes of Romanticism, including the sublime, the emotional, and the untamed, alongside influences from 19th-century landscape traditions, Impressionism, Japanese painting, and gestural abstraction. His work reflects the material daring of historical masters while embracing the conceptual freedom of contemporary movements.

Within each piece, shifting marks and luminous passages create a destabilized perspective. Gravity feels unsure at times. Suggestive forms emerge: architectural fragments, animal-like textures, remnants of storms or terrain. Yet nothing is fixed. The works offer no single narrative, only a continual becoming.

Resisting categorization, Mulhern’s work draws upon the expressive urgency of abstraction and the contemplative depth of painting history. Whether on canvas, in sculpture, or on paper, each piece is not composed so much as discovered. It arrives with the presence of something lived, rather than constructed. Adding to the greater conversation of painting and expressive imagery often honoring the medium itself.