Jeff Muhs creates visual dynamics between atmospheric phenomena and cognition. Bold black and white brushstrokes builds intensity in the background as color fields in the foreground soothes and creates a calming experience. Muhs achieves this seemingly perfect balance of activity and calmness through gestural brushstrokes, pouring, dripping and smearing paint.
Muhs treatment of color is akin to that of color field painters. His fields of color are at first sight calming but under close scrutiny they surprise the viewer with great vibrancy and aliveness. The forms in color seem to be informed whether with by landscape of shorelines or the mind. His black & white gestural strokes serve to activate the paintings and approximate the visual experience to that of waves, winds, and storms whether of water or thought. Witnessing the paintings the viewer is confronted to both an abstraction of the natural cycles of the elements and an elegant representation of the human psyche.