Fremont First Friday Art Walk: Jim Phalen

If you’re free this Friday we’ll be keeping our doors at 1109 N. 35th Street open until 9pm once again for the Fremont First Friday art walk. This month we’re excited to be hosting painter Jim Phalen. We’re very grateful to Jim for allowing us to show some of his work, which we’ve long admired. We think this review, from the New York Times, says it best:

Mr. Phalen (paints) still lifes: pomegranates, a knife on a table and outdoor greenery. But the artist takes his subjects as they come: his own face, a dog curled up beside a stained bath tub, an equally grimy sink on its own and, his magnum opus, the bird’s eye view of loft buildings in lower Manhattan. Though given to teasing his surfaces as if to make the paint go farther, Mr. Phalen does well with his urban palette of browns, grays and the occasional pearly white. But he is a painter of integrity and when faced with living tissue- a blazing yellow tulip or his own flesh- it is as if he were experiencing an epiphany. This is art about urban life that for some is akin to joining one of the more ascetic religious orders.
– Vivien Raynor