Lucas Blok

Lucas Blok’s abstract colorist paintings emanate and pulse with a lyrical complexity, ushering the viewer into a world of experiential color relationships. With contemplation, Blok’s vivid color fields—composed with geometric tautness upon a pristine surface—slowly begin to vibrate. Color chords register their optical strength. Dominant shapes appear to dematerialize, and phantom colors slowly migrate or surge across the picture plane. Suddenly the seemingly spare world of simple shapes and harmonious hues reverberates with an inner life that possesses a rich visual involvement of aesthetics, intellect, and emotion in a process that the artist finds profound. As one art critic describes, “The more you stare, the more you realize that what originally looked static is tearing around in the frame and taking you with it. It’s a Dionysian revel dressed up in Apollonian duds.”

Born in Gouda, The Netherlands, Lucas Blok was raised in Holland, Canada and the United States. Since 1989 he has maintained a studio in Monterey and a residence in Carmel with his wife, classical pianist Barbara Ruzicka. Resonating like vibrating piano strings, his paintings reflect the rhythms of a home filled with music.

Lucas Blok was invited into the Carmel Art Association as an Honorary Artist Member in 1982. He has had dozens of solo museum and gallery exhibitions in the United States and abroad. His paintings are in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum at UC Berkeley, The Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor, Crocker Museum of Art, Triton Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, Museum of Design, Art and Architecture, and Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula. In 2011 Blok was awarded a much coveted Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner Prize for outstanding achievement in the arts over a significant period of time.

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