Dennis Lee Mitchell American, b. 1946

Dennis Lee Mitchell lives and works in Washington, D.C. and is a 2016-2017 recipient of a Pollock/Krasner Foundation grant. His recent works are smoke drawings on paper, beautiful mandalas that resemble organic forms like large-petaled flowers and spiral shells. Mitchell's work is in the permanent collection of the Illinois State Art Museum, Chicago, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City and the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

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

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 Lee Mitchell