Gregg Laananen: Night On The Sun

Gregg Laananen’s new paintings, thickly encrusted oils on wooden panels, materially echo their original subjects: earthy, darkly colored and teeming with life. For his third show at Harris Harvey, the University of Washington graduate focuses on long views and tight close-ups of natural subjects such as tree trunks, mushroom clumps and winter-blooming camellias. The American artist’s use of pointillist brushwork and flattened space brings to mind works by the Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt.