Paul Wright revels in the material qualities of oil on canvas in his lush, expressive, and often large-scale paintings. He is keenly attuned to the way different pigments reflect light, the balance of color and form across the surface of his compositions, and the seemingly limitless variety of marks that different brushes and gestures may produce. In keeping with the long history of his medium, he chooses to concentrate on such age-old subjects as still lifes, interior scenes, and portraits of friends and strangers. He realizes each of these subjects with a combination of abstraction and representation, foregrounding his exuberant brushstrokes. As Wright once described his approach, “I have spent the last 15 years developing a painterly language through which I seek to capture a vitality beyond the establishment of a mere ‘likeness’ to the subject.”