Painting from the Wrong Side of the Brain, a show of paintings, is coming to the Sanchez Art Center. Artists in the show include Robert Armstrong, Jeff Carr, Gael Fitzmaurice, Linda MacDonald, M. Louise Stanley, and Jesse Wiedel. The six painters in this show share a continuing delight in the possibilities of representational art. United by a common use of humor, they nonetheless acknowledge the darkness at the edges of our culture.

Robert Armstrong mutates his underground comic sensibility into deceptively cheerful paintings of an era in which the borderland between human and machine has eroded away into nothingness. Jeff Carr’s exploration of a disturbingly altered imagery of artifacts from the fifties and sixties merges into a self-portraiture suggestive of the edge of violence that surrounds us amid a deluge of media tinsel. Issues of cultural and psychological interaction and insight underlie the hot paint Gael Fitzmaurice uses to construct her comically grotesque narratives. Linda MacDonald suffuses the wild with humanity while refusing to look away as nature itself increasingly vanishes or turns into just another commodity. In M. Louise Stanley’s paintings the conflict between humor and tragedy underlies her long-standing insistence on monumentalizing the trivial, as she inserts her artist/beatnik persona into a world of Old Master technique. Jesse Wiedel’s painted moral tableaus of the rustic-into-urban landscape of North Coast motels and strip malls portray moments and people from society’s fringe that erupt into an atmosphere of spiritual nightmare and terrifying truth.

Confronting ever-present mortality and morality with darkly humorous, often raw imagery, these six artists, laughing as they fling paint into the void, invite us to journey with them and discover for ourselves if the “wrong” side of the brain is the side that we all must explore.

The public is invited to a free Artists’ Talk on Sunday, February 13, at 4 pm.