A new direction in black and white.
This new series marks a departure for Allan Rodewald.
Working on a large scale with charcoal, graphite, and the traces of the materials themselves, Allan has created a body of abstract works that are at once quiet and powerful. The drawings move between structure and spontaneity—bold marks, translucent layers, erased passages, and the subtle variations that happen when charcoal and graphite meet paper.
There is something especially interesting about these works: the medium becomes part of the process. The dust, residue, and imperfect marks left behind by charcoal aren't simply something to clean away. They become part of the image.
The result is a series with an entirely different visual language from Allan's more colorful and materially complex work. Here, black, white, gray, light, and shadow do the talking.
The large peices are professionally mounted with archival materials, gallery framed, finished with an acrylic front, and ready to hang.
This is a limited body of work created with a particular kind of collector in mind—someone drawn to abstraction, subtlety, and the unmistakeable physical evidence of a true artist's hand.
Allan Rodewald has been an artist for as long as he can remember.
His formal training began at eight years old and continued through college, but his career has never followed a straight line. He has painted cars, restaurants, homes, enormous murals, architectural spaces—and eventually developed a highly personal body of contemporary work that moves freely between abstraction, realism, materials, light and color.
Today, Allan works from his Houston studio, continuing to experiment, make new work, show his paintings and welcome people into the process. His work carries traces of everything that came before it: classical painting, automotive finishes, mural work, unconventional materials and decades of simply being willing to try something new.
Teaching and sharing have always been part of Allan's practice, too. From children discovering art for the first time to collectors wanting to understand what they're looking at, Allan has a gift for making the process accessible, personal and fun. His studio talks have become an important part of that connection.
And then there is the experimentation. Allan doesn't seem particularly interested in staying inside one style. Sometimes a mistake becomes a technique. Sometimes a painting gets rescued from the “graveyard.” Sometimes something unexpected happens and the only appropriate response is, “Wow—that's pretty cool.”
He is still curious. Still making. Still teaching. And still having a pretty good time being an artist.
That, more than any list of accomplishments, is Allan Rodewald today.
Contact Allan