Alex Lukas (NAP #92) is one of the most prolific artists I know. When he's not experimenting in his studio or attending an artist residency, he is driving across the country gathering images of the US landscape for inspiration. In fact, I bet if he's traveling by plane nowadays he's rather bummed out. 

Boston, home of New American Paintings, was lucky enough to have him create an installation for the Converse Wall to Wall project. Check out these fantastic images of the installation process and final product. Enjoy! - Andrew Katz, Associate Publisher

If you're in town, here's where to go check it out in person.

All Photos By Ryan Sheapare and Alex Lukas.

Dear Nemesis,

When Western painters in the mid-late 1800s imagined the exotic landscape of the East, it was filled with caricature and hyperbole. Style comes into question more in this genre than any other, because the paintings are topical – what you see on the surface, its stylization, its aesthetics, all contribute to the imaginary. In many ways, each painting from this genre is an open letter to an enemy. This is the same type of address cited in the title of Nicole Eisenman’s recent exhibition, Dear Nemesis, which just closed at the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) St. Louis and will soon be travelling to the ICA Philadelphia – a survey collection of over 120 works, primarily paintings and some sculpture, since the early 1990s. Just over a century apart, and yet so related in method, the opponent in question for Eisenman is not outside of the artist, as it was in the past, but is used instead as a frame for her method of production. Both styles of painting beg the question: without gross inaccuracy, how else can you paint pure invention? - Stephanie Cristello, Chicago Contributor

Nicole Eisenman | Guy Reading The Stranger, 2011, 76" x 60"

Caroline Sharpless (NAP #108) paints interior spaces, breathing life into the very heart of the walls and architectural environments she creates. Her rooms oscillate between featuring mundane, muted colors lacking details and interiors highlighting bold bursts of jewel tones with precise intricacies. Both styles tap into and recall familiar memories we all have from the spaces we have inhabited, visited, or come to know.

These spaces seem to carry a human presence, as if some very essence of our earthly being has seeped into their walls. Her paintings remind me of the feelings we have all encountered when packing up an apartment or home. There is always a moment during that process when we stand back and look at the space and see it stripped down to its bare architectural form – furniture, décor, and memories all neatly packed away. And there is always a pang of longing and bittersweet realization, for me at least, that somehow I no longer belong in this space I once called home.

Sharpless captures this mix of poignant and oh-so-human feelings beautifully and seamlessly. - Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

Caroline Sharpless | Time’s Decision Shook, 30 x 30 inches, oil on canvas.

Last week, when I heard the news of the West Antarctica’s falling ice sheet, it was hard not to think of the floating, fragmenting masses that comprise Cynthia Camlin’s (NAP #109) new paintings. For over ten years, the artist has been manipulating frozen landscapes into rich imagery that ranges from the luscious, bulbous forms of her watercolor icebergs, to graphic screen prints of broken, frozen shards made flat by their map-like, textural surfaces. Camlin’s latest series, Divided Earth, on view at Seattle’s PUNCH Gallery, reexamines her familiar subjects, which have become increasingly prominent representatives of the world’s most pressing environmental concerns.  These new, articulated ice shelves—one of which spans a colossal ten panels—loom directly above and beside their onlookers, the grid structures building an illusion so tangible that, at times, the mounds’ jagged edges feel as if they break into our space on a disturbingly intimate level.  I caught up with the artist to find out more about the new works and the way our evolving relationship with climate change has shaped her practice. — Erin Langner, Seattle contributor

Cynthia Camlin | Water Fragment, 1-10, ink, watercolor and vinyl polymer emulsion on paper panels, 12" x 9" each. Image courtesy of the artist.

If your produce shopping is limited to sustainable farmers markets rather than the neighborhood big-box — or if you haven't followed decades of GMC developments — you may be unaware of genetically modified crops' tenacious pervasiveness in the global community. In Venomous Cabbage and other demands satisfied, the inaugural show at grayDUCK Gallery's new eastside location in Austin, Leigh Anne Lester wields graphite and rich color as her magnifying glass to this agricultural reality. — Brian Fee, Austin contributor

Leigh Anne Lester | Deviant Pollination, 2014, graphite and color pencil on drafting film, 29 x 24 inches. Image courtesy the artist and grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

Since the late-1990s, New York-based artist David X. Levine has produced an extraordinary body of work that has continuously evolved. On the eve of his solo booth presentation at the 2014 NADA New York art fair, writer and critic Michael Wilson takes a look at the artist’s influences and – increasingly large-scaled - output over the past five years.

David X. Levine | Mary Brown, 2014, colored pencil and collage on paper, 50 x 52 inches.

Connectivity is a recurring theme in Wura-Natasha Ogunji's work, within personal space and interpersonal relationships — to family, to a homeland, to both hemispheres of one earth. In her solo exhibition Your heart is clean at MASS Gallery, Ogunji unveils a body of works on paper and video installation developed during return trips to her father's homeland of Nigeria and time shared between industrial metropolis Lagos and Austin, TX. — Brian Fee, Austin contributor

Your heart is clean installation view, MASS Gallery, April 25 – May 31, 2014. Image courtesy the artist and MASS Gallery, Austin. Photos taken by Sandy Carson.

Thinking back to my senior year of college, I lived in a co-ed rental house with a bunch of guys and I remember the shocking and seemingly exponential amount of dirty socks that would congregate in the living room. In fact, there were so many that I christened a plastic laundry bin as a permanent dirty sock receptacle, living quietly behind one of the leather sofas.

Dirty socks are Chris Thorson’s (NAP #109) recent subject for her three-dimensional cast and painted works. These discarded, twisted forms carry a life of their own that tell a number of stories – where they were that day (mud from a hike or wetness from the rain), what kind of activities ensued (knee-high soccer socks or thin black dress socks), and what kind of mood the wearer might be in (sleeping sloth socks or whimsical polka-dots). For something so ugly, dirty, and potentially smelly, these worn socks carry a beauty that Thorson illuminates in her works.

Chris Thorson | detail from “Bro Series,” mixed media: hydrocal mixture, gouache, watercolor, colored pencil, oil paint, and dry pastel, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

Nearing the end of her stint at the University of New Mexico, Illinois transplant, Natalie Smith (NAP #105) unveiled her most recent body of work, Lodi, at SCA Contemporary in Albuquerque. Heavily influenced by craft and design practices, Lodi references her affinity for everyday objects, images and forms and belief that paintings can be “arenas in which anything is possible.” – Claude Smith Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor

Natalie Smith | Victoria & Albert, 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches; image courtesy of the artist

New American Paintings West Competition Deadline is April 30th, 2014 (Midnight, EST)

Juror: Nora Burnett Abrams 

For Artists Residing In States: AZ, CO, ID, MT, NE, NV, KS, ND, NM, OK, SD, TX, UT, WY