Emerging Artists | Jeremy Manyik

Inspired moments

Jeremy Manyik, Acacia, oil, 16 x 16.

This story was featured in the July 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

The year 2016 may only be halfway over, but it’s already brought great success to Colorado painter Jeremy Manyik. On the national stage, Manyik was one of 25 finalists in the Portrait Society of America’s annual art competition, and on the local front, he recently won a top award from the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, CO. The two award-winning paintings share common elements: Both are inspired by people and places close to Manyik’s home in the southeastern part of the state. ACACIA, which won the Portrait Society honors, features the artist’s favorite model, his daughter Acacia. The local kudos were bestowed on Manyik for a scene depicting feedlots in Colorado’s lower Arkansas Valley close to La Junta, his hometown.

In each artwork, Manyik says he was trying to step out of the box. For ACACIA, rather than paint a dark background and flood the subject with light as many portrait artists do, Manyik chose to put the subject in the dark and “rely only on the use of higher chroma and warmer tones to draw the viewer to the subject.” For the landscape, Manyik says he was determined not to paint the usual aspen trees of the Rocky Mountains but instead to capture the simple beauty of a feedlot in fading light.

Manyik is a self-taught artist who has drawn and painted since he was a youngster. In fifth grade he was already taking art classes at the area high school. During the 1990s, when he was looking at college art programs, most seemed to emphasize commercial art, which didn’t interest him. But a 1994 trip to an art show in Denver set him on a new course. “I was blown away by the artwork and loved the paintings by Quang Ho and Daniel Sprick,” Manyik says. “I knew that was the kind of work I wanted to do.”

These days Manyik’s paintings are regularly juried into Oil Painters of America regional shows and have won several awards of excellence. In these paintings and others, he uses style, composition, and color to turn concepts into visual expressions. “Through these means, I attempt to exhibit the essence of what I felt in that brief moment of inspiration,” he says. —Bonnie Gangelhoff

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www.jeremymanyik.com