Recalling early 20th-century German Expressionism, Jesse McCloskey’s vibrant, dynamic paintings walk the line between representation and abstraction. McCloskey’s subjects, such as nudes, mythical beasts, witches, or animals, clearly suggest a narrative, but his fantastical, disorienting spaces and preoccupation with formal concerns—distortion of perspective, bold, gestural marks, and a range of expressive colors—leave his works highly ambiguous and open to subjective interpretation. McCloskey uses an extremely intensive process to create his works, working and reworking up to 30 layers of paint and collaged paper onto his canvases. “A strange alchemy […] takes over when the picture is worked and reworked,” he says. “That alchemy changes the perception of the pictures as the layers begin to swell off the page, reflecting the intensity of the action and narrative, which in turn adds power to both the medium and the message.”