Beep Beep Gallery Invites You To Be Its Guest
Walking into Beep Beep Gallery’s opening for Guest House was like encountering someone missing a limb; no matter how hard you tried, you simply could not stop staring.
J.R. Schulz’s hypnotic paintings and Jason Murphy’s pencil portraits are simultaneously unsettling and completely captivating.
Schulz and Murphy met in 2003 and have wanted to do a show together for a while, they told me, as Murphy held one of his baby twins in his arms. After seeing Murphy’s portraits, meeting the mild-mannered artist in person was a little like pulling the curtain back on Oz. I had expected to find myself talking to a moderately deranged shut-in and instead found myself face-to-face with a normal dude—a dad, even.
His drawings depict only one or two people each posed as if they are sitting for a 19th century photograph—still, unsmiling, and slightly horrific. Some hold animals—a squirrel, a cat—and none look directly at the viewer. Their heads and hands appear slightly over-sized, and they lack any color except for the occasional rose or chartreuse pencil lines overlaid like Technicolor on black and white film. I couldn’t shake the feeling, Saturday night, that these figures looked like people encountering either death or insanity.
Schulz’s paintings, on the other hand, leap to life with abstract, swirling lines of thick color that circle blank eyes or form reptilian scales. If Murphy is the ghost capturer, Schulz is the Medusa painter. I admire the fearlessness of his brushstrokes, which rise teetering like serpents and threaten to lose their balance before regaining it at the last moment.
Congrats to both artists and to Beep Beep Gallery, who has not failed us yet.
See Guest House through September 15th at Beep Beep Gallery, 696 Charles Allen Drive.
Up next:
Sept. 11: Source opens from 8-11p, works by Mike Germon and Truett Dietz.
Oct. 9: Atlanta Celebrates Pornography
Photo Credit: Allyson Petty