Words + Images by: Michael Avey of The Penrose Projex

Planes, drones, and UFOs strobe across marbled blue altitudes. Coral-streaked vapor trails highlight above a fading canopy of telephone wires and dead branches, forming an arial latticework. Spokes can be heard clicking from a solitary bike floating in and out of streetlights on the vacant road below. 

A rider passes homes brimming with warmth; the kinship framed in windows liven an otherwise muted scene. In his wake, iridescent orbs begin to apparate around an unassuming neighborhood—glints of a dying light above begin cascading into auroras. Even the modest glow of homes begins saturating the canvas. As the last rays of light withdraw, the space suddenly shifts into something otherworldly.

Paradigm Rift

In a burgeoning era of art in cyberspace, it's hard to give every creator the likes and reposts they deserve. A consumer-driven algorithm trills indifferently as it pumps unending content into our feeds. 

Despite the dissonance, Eli McMullen arrives to offer something that feels all new, while knowing the feeling all too well.

A classical painter by trade, McMullen suffuses imagery from the physical world into an ethereal landscape via abstract impressionism. The uncanny blend of elements is nothing short of scroll-stopping.

“It's just kind of reproducing what I see in my environments and then taking elements of the architecture, the light, and the feeling, but remixing it into something just from my imagination.  It's like an abstract shuffle of the elements,” McMullen explains while examining some of his previous works.

Heavy darkness sinks the visual field of gravity into flecks of vibrant colors and intricate linework. Further inspection reveals trees, streams, and leaves that form the natural foundation of his work. The diaphanous symphony of polychromatic aberrations overlaid yields like an ultra-rare holographic trading card. 

Eli’s proficiency has landed him in a multitude of spaces ranging from galleries across the country, a 2022 participant in the RVA Street Art Festival, and most recently featured at Miami’s Art Basel. 

Destination Unknown

Emerging from woodland edge territory, Eli set his sights on the awe-inspiring splendor of.. suburban real estate developments (I know, stay with me).

McMullen has spent his evenings trawling the neighborhoods of Richmond in search of almighty inspiration. “I'm usually on my bike, wandering around, almost trying to get lost. I'm like, ‘Where does this go?’ Following this intuitive kind of motion and then most of these things I'm capturing are taken super quickly on my crappy old smartphone.” 

Sitting down in Eli’s studio, we delved further into the process:

“I honestly spend more time exploring my environments than I do painting them because it takes so many hours of exploring and like trying to discover and also catching whatever random light sources are happening in that moment which is constantly fleeting.” 

Even though the subject matter has changed, Eli still relies on forming an organic connection with them.

“I'm allowing it to find me more, that's the ultimate goal. I'm not forcing myself to go and just get anything I can; I'm taking the time to allow those moments to find me rather than trying to rediscover them.” 

Rapture via Rhapsody

There’s been a palpable mood shift in Eli’s work from abstract naturalism to a quasi-Stranger Things lens of our neighborhoods from the upside down. Consuming darkness has become a steady fixture of his most recent series.

“I find I like more existential moments at night time, and I think it's interesting especially because so many of these places were captured at a time where there isn't as much life present in the neighborhood, time seems to be suspended.”

Eli leans more into the use of negative space as part of these works, and while at first, that may seem counterintuitive to his purpose, the artist again sheds light from a different angle.

“I enjoy painting the human experience without necessarily representing the human form directly,” McMullen explained. “I kind of love just the infinite interactions that I can play around with that world.. kind of like the imprint or the presence of humans without necessarily painting figures.”

“I've only done this twice, but I'm taking a print of the painting and just knocked on the door of the house, and I'm like, ‘this is your house, it inspired me, it's really cool, just as a thank you, here's a print of it.’  and not knowing if they were going to be freaked out or what, but they were so happy and stoked about it..”

Merging Worlds

Dabbing red acrylic paint from his brush, we explored Eli’s headspace while working on his next piece. “I think there's a realm of art that's more described as visionary art, where it's kind of usually just psychedelically infused.” 

“With putting down the realism in everyday surroundings and investigating more into my mind of how I can build my own worlds from just my imagination fused with the inspiration. I think that's where, I guess you could say there's more magic in that way of thinking.”

While he spends his waking hours gathering the necessary elements, other components are gathered from another realm “Things of spaces I've experienced in my dreams, I feel like they come into play.” 

“I'm almost living another life. It's also super hard to remember everything. There are always these just hazy, little snapshots of what happened. But it's literally, a whole other day's worth of experience that I have in these dreams.”

Eli has looked inward often at this phenomenon. It seems to him that the output of art flows from a melding between lived experience and our subconscious resonance with them.

“I guess a lot of it is grounded in a form of daydreaming; trying to allow your mind to wander to a place where the imagery just kind of appears and builds itself inside of it inside somewhat of a physical space in your own thinking. And whether that comes in a slow transitional process or like a flash of an image that just pops into your mind, I feel like those kinds of things can be inspired by all different emotions.”

Twilight Renaissance 

For Eli McMullen, dreams are where the mind and soul connect into an aura that’s organized into a prism, refracting his inner light and casting a paradigm that phases between fact and fiction. 

McMullen’s scope of metacognition seems to amplify hues of life that often go unnoticed.
That boring house on that dull street in that suburban neighborhood is anything but when viewed through another frame.

“They're everyday spaces, but they're also personal spaces. Even though they could be occupied by so many different types of people and throughout so many different timelines, I think it's cool that I could be capturing this moment in time.”

Doing all this under the cover of the night might give a foreboding tinge to the scene, but the absence of light is merely a precursor to radiance unforeseen.

“These places are being illuminated from within, and there's this microcosm of life that exists in these spaces that you can just fly by. And to then take a second to just reinvestigate something through the abyss, that is what feels special.”

“It's so easy to overlook because it's so regular and just like, ‘ah yeah, I've seen that like a thousand times’. But to elevate that through a perspective that makes you want to investigate it for a moment longer. I think that's been revealed to me as one of my goals.”

If you’d like to traverse more of Eli’s worlds, feel free to enter through this gateway.

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