Ariel Mitchell: In the Project Room: A Wooley Reasoning

Broadway is pleased to announce A Wooly Reasoning a selection of new paintings by New York-based artist Ariel Mitchell.

Painted in oil on raw linen, Mitchell’s paintings carve a path between exuberance and restraint, careful planning and gleeful abandon. Each work begins as a jotted memory in a small notebook: “Fritos, dirt, grass and utter freedom”, “Spiderweb protection stick” which serves as a roadmap for a small study of surprising narrative specificity. The study is then carefully enlarged in the finished work, with the added gesture and subtle muscle that the new scale allows.

Characterized by repeated, feathery brushstrokes that cascade diagonally across the surfaces, Mitchell’s paintings are mostly built on the sturdy scaffold of a disciplined and focused palette.  However, intermittent strategic jolts of unruly color serve to detonate the compositions—a final flourish for works that cannily link memory, action and facture.

Ariel Mitchell (b. 1985 Stonington, CT.) is a painter living in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA from MICA in 2007, and an MFA from Hunter College in 2021.