Wyatt Mills Paintings Are A Visceral Rage, An Expression Of Modern Anxiety
Wyatt Mills paintings are a full on assault on your senses. His work is visceral, a rage, an expression of modernity; our anxieties, neuroses and complexes. Such a rich vein to mine and he does it so well pushing the envelope all the time, dealing with subjects that we all squirm from, find hideous or captivating in a sick voyeuristic way. Or as he puts it:
If I had to have one goal I guess it is to be able to depict the mindfuck we all live in as accurately as possible.
Heavily influenced by the likes of Diane Arbus, Egone Shiele, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon Mills attacks his canvases like there’s no tomorrow, his harsh brushstrokes and strong colours confronting the viewer and shaking them out of their passive role. It’s almost like he wants a reaction, wants you to scream back. These are not passive compositions that you look at and walk away from. As he says himself:
I want the viewers to walk away with a loss of social reservation and an expansion of their inner dialogue I want them to privately debate which social boundaries they find hideous or captivating or offensive or attractive.
It’s not surprising that this LA painter, who now lives in New York looks to Charles Bukowski to describe the way his brain works:
The way Charles Bukowski writes, he throws your mind into atmospheres that wrap around you in a way that blinds the world in front of you, and, all you can see is your imagination. That type of work is timeless. Visual art is rarely able to reach that level. I am trying to break out of the way paintings are usually constructed with a logical world, and a solid cohesive structure. I do not want to paint a picture, what i am struggling to accomplish is how to create an image that is not perceived as a picture, but looks like a memory, or experience. I want to incorporate movement, feelings, and sense of instability. What I am dealing with is how I perceive my reality.
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