On Tuesday, December 23, 2025, at 11.30 a.m., Joseph Gallivan interviews painter Munro Galloway about his show Rest is Smoke, which is on now at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery until January 10, 2026. Galloway talks about abstract painting with hints of recognisable forms and figures, his use of sumi ink drawings and layered oil paint, and where Abstraction fits in his oeuvre and in the history of art.
Galloway is a Department Chair and Associate Professor of Art at the University of Redlands, near Los Angeles.
Saturday, January 10, 2026 at 12 noon
Artist talk and poetry reading with Munro Galloway, featuring Youna Kwak and Lisa Wells
From the press release:
https://www.elizabethleach.com/exhibitions/247-rest-is-smoke-munro-gallo...
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Rest is Smoke, an exhibition of new paintings by Munro Galloway. The new paintings by Galloway contain layered references to art history, personal memories, and the dramatic, shifting landscape and climate of America’s West Coast.
The exhibition’s title is derived from a sentence Galloway observed inscribed in Andrea Mantegna’s sixteenth-century painting of Saint Sebastian, in Venice, Italy: “Nothing is stable except the divine, the rest is smoke.” Having returned to Los Angeles after a year living in Europe, Galloway found himself newly attuned to the climatic conditions of Southern California: heat, wind, rain, and smoke. These natural phenomena find their way into Galloway’s paintings, in which he reproduces cloud and smoke effects, creating lightness and density, and finding temperature differences in value and color.
A central idea in Rest is Smoke is transmutation: the shift from one state or form into another. Galloway’s paintings are made through a process of building up and removing many layers of richly pigmented paint. Through this process, natural forms and compositions derived from varied sources, including historic seascapes and observations of clouds, storms, fires, sunrises and sunsets, emerge and dissolve into expressive marks, hovering between representation and abstraction.
Certain paintings, such as From an Island, feature concrete references to place, while others such as Dissolve in Rain are more expressionistic and evocative of action or feeling. Elements of ships lost in storms, including sail forms, storm clouds, and reflections of light on water are both figurative and symbolic, reflecting the artist’s longstanding connection to the sea and as a metaphor for the painting process. The gestural quality of the canvases invokes painters from Tintoretto and Turner to Arthur Dove and Joan Mitchell, who sought to capture atmospheric effects and movement in traces of paint.
The new works in Rest is Smoke invoke both the fleeting act of painting and a quiet warning: to rest is to disappear; to act is to remain.
From his site:
From Ghost Town
http://ghosttownlitmag.com/munrogalloway
Munro Galloway is an artist based in the Inland Empire. He is currently working on solo exhibitions at the University of Redlands in California, and Studio 10 in New York. He has also had solo exhibitions at Murray Guy and Soloway in New York. Munro received a BA in Art Semiotics from Brown University in 1994 and an MFA in Painting from Bard College in 2006. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at The University of Redlands, and has also taught at Brooklyn College, The Cooper Union, Princeton University, The School of Visual Arts, and Yale University, in addition to teaching in the Paris College of Art Summer Program since 2013.
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Joseph Gallivan has been a reporter since 1990. He has covered music for the London Independent, Technology for the New York Post, and arts and culture for the Portland Tribune and for Axios Portland. He is the author of two novels, "Oi, Ref!" and "England All Over" which are available lightly used.
He is a TriMet bus operator. Smile and say hello on the 17, but please stay behind the yellow line.