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Lucas Novak

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30” x 24”, acrylic, pumice, and polymer emulsion on paper and canvas, 2025

Intermission No. 50

August 20, 2025

This work occupies a quieter register within my abstract paintings that treat the canvas as a living body. A dense central mass of grey-green texture, scraped and pressed into the surface, suggests compressed sediment. Around it, veils of pearl blue and radiating fields of yellow shimmer like atmosphere, positioning the painting between earthbound solidity and airy expanse.

The surface bears the marks of time with layers eroded and rebuilt, gestures scraped across like geological strata. The painting is a body that is at once weathered stone and vulnerable skin.

In dialogue with other works in the series that embody fire, water, and flesh, this piece draws the viewer into a meditation on matter as memory, and how earthly deposits continue to shift, like a living thing, always changing based on a history of exposure to the elements.

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30” x 24”, acrylic, pumice, and polymer emulsion on paper and canvas, 2025

Intermission No. 49

August 20, 2025

This painting works in a more fragile, flesh-like register, compared to others in the series. Here, the palette of soft pinks, violets, yellows, and greys evokes the skin of the canvas-body itself. It is tender, porous, and marked by stains or scars. The surface is textured with accreted layers that resemble both geological erosion and biological tissue.

By using acrylic on paper and canvas, the work emphasizes absorption and seepage, the way liquid material moves unpredictably, soaking into the paper’s fibers and then hardening into crust.

Conceptually, this painting suggests the threshold between life and decay. The surface vibrates between blooming (with its floral pinks and yellows) and decomposing (with its earthy browns and corrosive textures). This ambiguity resonates with the question of whether the boundary between the living and the non-living is as fixed as modern thought insists.

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30” x 24”, oil and acrylic on paper and canvas, 2025

The Garden of Errors

August 17, 2025

In The Garden of Errors, a woman rests against her hand, her gaze turned inward, as if listening to something only she can hear. Behind her, a lush ground of foliage dissolves into abstraction, where brushstrokes unravel into suggestion rather than form. The setting evokes a private garden, yet one marked not by perfection, but by the subtle traces of missteps, oversights, and forgotten intentions.

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The title points to the ways memory and experience accumulate like vines, how they tangle, repeat, sometimes bloom, sometimes obstruct. Each “error” is less a failure than a mark of humanity, something left behind in the act of living. The figure seems suspended in this landscape of imperfection, not trapped but contemplative, as though she recognizes the beauty within what is flawed.

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As part of the series, The Garden of Errors continues the dialogue between figure and abstraction, body and environment, the seen and the felt. Here, the canvas becomes a place where the inner world and outer world overlap, and where the quiet traces of human fragility are allowed to flourish.

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30” x 24”, acrylic, pumice, and polymer emulsion on paper and canvas, 2025

Intermission No. 48

August 17, 2025

In this work, the canvas functions less as a surface than as a body. It is layered, eroded, and reconstituted through the movement of matter across it. Swaths of earthen browns, aqueous blues, and luminous yellows press against one another like geological strata, recalling landscapes in the midst of dissolution and renewal.

The painting fits the series wherein materials are situated within a deep lineage of myth and science. Ancient traditions across the globe have described human life as having been formed from clay, while contemporary hypotheses suggest that life itself may have originated on its mineral surfaces. Here, the painting becomes an “art-being,” animated not through representation but through its own material vitality.

Gestures ripple like water, fractures open like stone, and the surface breathes between solidity and fluidity. The work thus asks where the line between the living and nonliving can truly be drawn, and whether the body of the painting, like the body of the viewer, might be understood as continuous with the earth itself.

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Check out my Instagram @lucasnovakart      for recent stuff that inspires the artistic process!

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