Hold On To What Is Good 2020

Mark Maggiori's painting, “Hold On To What Is Good”, conjures a vast sky, stretching above the rider and horse in a landscape of monumental clouds. I can imagine him mixing those colors, one after the other, layering peach and sky blue. Looking at this painting, I feel how the history of the American West is filled with mythology and romanticism. There’s this feeling that the West has already been ‘painted’ in a certain way, and it’s interesting to see artists today taking on this subject matter. What does it mean to paint the West now? The very act of depicting this subject matter is a way of re-evaluating its symbolism. In this painting, the landscape feels like a dream, an imagined, idealized place – a painterly conversation which is both here and now, and also of another time.