A selection of recent oil paintings, I’ll Take You There visually transports the viewer into Mike Piggott’s world of painting. This new body of work finds Piggott painting with a bright, Pop Art exuberance. A palette of pinks, yellows and greens playfully balances the cooler tones within Piggott’s deceptively simple compositions.

In subject matter, Piggott has a little bit of fun with the viewer, blending hot colors into the still life imagery and recognizable local landscapes that make up some of his best work. A richly painted still life of a flower and vase gives equal attention to the brilliant woven Mexican tablecloth and the flat, pink background as subject, and the eye cannot help but have a good time. Piggott’s pervasive sense of good humor is found here and elsewhere, whether in the bird’s eye view of the cabin in Silhouettes and Shadows, a free rein Appaloosa horse with pink toenails, or the purple chinking of a log cabin. Further fun is had in an interior scene of a log cabin, a feast for the eyes with two chairs and what might be four Mike Piggott paintings hung with a mounted fish and a convex mirror above a hilarious side table wearing swim trunks. In this uncanny homage to Renaissance master Jan van Eyck (The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434), Mike Piggott masterfully lays claim to the “painting within a painting” and gives us a chuckle.

With a rich understanding of art history, Piggott creates compelling and curiously biographical works that document the qualities of life in the American West that span old and new. The works nod to folk art and faux naïf, while toying with two-dimensional abstraction and color-field painting approaches. Mike Piggott’s images bring a haunting air even as they are pleasantly nostalgic—a celebration of nature and humanity rendered in paint.

There is a mercurial fascination with the fragility of life that Piggott communicates with his deft brushstrokes. He admits that he likes to skirt the mysteries and complexities of life for which we have few words that never seem to define the experienced sensations. He conveys this with his shadowy figures, be they ice skaters or cowgirls, desolate or cozy cabins, and with the adumbrations of lakes or streams. Inspired by diverse forebears like Milton Avery and David Hockney, Piggott doesn’t just paint—he plays with perspective and color, both in paint and printmaking, and more recently with his breakthrough iPad drawings.