NEW YORK, NY.- Dennis Lee Mitchell an artist working with smoke on paper has received a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant for 2016-2017. The grant is for one year and will allow further development of works on paper. He is a former ceramic sculptor who started working with smoke on paper about five years ago.

Smoke is one of the most ephemeral of all materials. Even when it resides on a sheet of paper, it seems to do so momentarily as if it is in a transformational act.

Dennis draws with smoke as a way to render images of our mutability. The result is a symbolic condensation of beginning and end: apotheosizing the smoke.

Drawing is a primal and elemental form of expression since prehistoric times. Long used for studies and preparatory sketches, drawing is now set free by contemporary artists and highly valued for its immediacy and spontaneity.

As many as 250 or more drawings to secure two or three finished works. The process is repetitive, in an attempt to dissolve expectations, glean the essence, and execute the act while circumventing spurious ideas. Involving chance, the process produces a kind of surrealistic sensuous rendering of the finite and the infinite.

Mitchell's work has been collected in the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and others.