A kind of torture

Jan Blythe’s mixed-media paintings look like the white noise that’s in one’s head, and some of that white is quite dark. With layers of jagged scratches, blips or clouds of color, it looks like a psychologist’s photograph of a patient’s deepest inner workings. But that’s just one interpretation.

The work of Blythe, a Bay Area-based artist, along with work by Sandi Escobar and Carol Ladewig, is up for everyone's interpretation at Axis Gallery during December for its 2014 Invitational Exhibition.

Escobar, a Los Angeles native, is an assistant professor at Sierra College, and will be sharing her work that touches the “fine line between the erotic and grotesque, pleasure and pain.” And Ladewig, also from the Bay Area, is exhibiting work from a series where she created a small painting every day “using a complex color that has been made by mixing a simple set of primary pigments and white.”

All three artists' works include rawness, brutality and tedium that reflects a kind of torture. But it also makes it a psychologically fascinating exhibition, which can be the best kind. But that's just one interpretation.