Existential Paintings by Shawn Huckins

Celebrating the United Kingdom’s National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom, and it’s an opportunity to sit back and reflect on the many ways that words can be used. It's something that painter Shawn Huckins thinks about often: working adeptly to recreate the aesthetics of 18th and 19th Century paintings and photography, Huckins imagines how the Revolutionaries would occupy digital spaces—what would they like on Facebook, and who would comment on whose selfie? With an off-the-cuff sense of humor, his Athenaeum series pairs blocky white letters across stylistically-immaculate paintings, and wonders what the state of the language is in today’s rapidly changing landscape.