Piece description from the artist
Josh M. G. Yates is a difficult artist to pin down. His body of work is as varied as Coast Of California’s brushstrokes. He ranges from pop-art skulls that bring to mind Andy Warhol's work of the 1970s, circular meditations on the cyclical nature of existence, and highly gestural and frenetic abstract painting like Coast Of California (which still has traces of cryptic figuration peering through the abstract mark-making). In the spirit of this aesthetic diversity, the present work is more unique than universal. He does not choose colors or forms that immediately evoke the beach. He translates his experience—the emotional and visual impact California’s coasts have on him—into an abstract reverie that sweeps up the viewer and immerses them in calm and complimentary colors. It grabs one's attention without being demanding, and it does so in a permanent way. Coast Of California is a painting that does not ask much from the viewer but gives them long-lasting satisfaction.
Born in the English Channel Islands, Josh M. G. Yates moved permanently to the east coast, USA, eventually settling in New York City. He holds a BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts.
In his paintings, esoteric phenomena and landscape imagery are rendered as abstracted layers of color. Also incorporated are drawn elements and other mark making. Repeating symbols are suspended, and intricate images often embedded onto the canvas surface.
Josh, in his words, invites a viewer’s interpretation. He places an emphasis on the power of the collective-unconscious and says that his paintings exist in-part to reveal it.
When embraced through a metaphorical lens, Yates’ paintings, in name and content, often reveal a dramatic conjuration; of the esoteric and the more determinate and dramatically rendered compositions. A weaving of free-form, feverish hand-application and the more intricately rendered scatterings of symbolic motifs across the canvas surface, Josh’s paintings renew with prolonged engagement, particularly together, as though compositionally the paintings are unfixed iterations of one another.
His paintings have been collected in the US and abroad.
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