Beyond the Surface: An X-Ray Eye on art with Stela Mandel
We didn’t sit, and there wasn’t even a moment where sitting would have made sense. Her work keeps you on your feet, moving, shifting, stepping back, leaning in, almost like a dance. At times I felt like cheering, other times like crying, and there was an energy in the room that didn’t ask for quiet or restraint, which worked in my favor because I’ve never been very good at staying quiet anyway.
Walking into the ICB Building sets the tone immediately. It’s this big blue industrial structure right on the water, filled with working artists. As you move down the long hallways, each door has a glass window, and you catch glimpses inside as you pass—paintings in progress, materials spread out, moments mid-creation. Every space holds something different. It feels a little like you’re not supposed to be seeing all of it, which somehow makes you look closer.
When I walked into Stela Mandel’s studio, I stopped almost immediately. Right at the entrance was another artist’s work—trees, but not just trees. The shapes of women’s bodies were built into the trunks in a way that felt feminine and fluid without being obvious. The colors were layered greens and purples, the kind I’m always drawn to, and I stood there longer than I expected, already imagining what it would feel like to live with them on my walls.
“Aren’t these fabulous,” she said, coming toward me with a huge smile, paint on her gloves, completely unassuming as she explained that the work was by her studio mate, Anne Garden. She talked about how Anne is enamored with trees, how she had mastered them in pencil and had recently started layering in acrylics and oils, and how sharing a studio with her feels like walking through a forest on the way to work. She said Anne is a wonderful human and a fabulous painter, and she meant it.
That moment tells you everything about Stela. There’s no ego, no urgency to redirect attention back to herself. Just a genuine appreciation for someone else’s work, and the willingness to let it land.
The conversation unfolded the same way her studio does—not in a straight line, but in openings. One thing led naturally into another, and before long she was showing me her beach paintings, the ones with the pink sand that almost looks like Himalayan salt.
She started them during the pandemic when she was in New Jersey at the Jersey Shore. At first, she was painting what was actually there—almost empty beaches, just a few scattered figures because that’s what the world looked like at the time. As things began to open up, she realized she didn’t want to stay inside that visual language. She didn’t want to keep painting isolation. So she started adding people. Slowly at first, then more, until the scenes felt alive again. Not as if the pandemic hadn’t happened, but as if the work itself was moving through it.
The figures don’t come from a single reference. She pulls from multiple images, from memory, and then at a certain point lets all of that go and works directly from the painting itself. Adjusting, adding, responding, building something that never existed exactly as you see it, but still feels completely real.
What she’s chasing is how little she can put down and still have it read as a figure. Just enough line, just enough shape. Nothing extra. The restraint is what makes it powerful. You can feel the discipline underneath it. The looseness isn’t accidental, and the simplicity isn’t because she can’t do more. It’s because she knows exactly how much she can leave out, and that leaves space for your imagination to step in.
She grew up in New York City and went to a serious commercial art high school where deadlines were treated like a job and you were expected to show up and deliver. That structure stayed with her. One of her teachers was Max Ginsburg, and she still meets weekly with her high school friends over Zoom. That kind of continuity says a lot.
From there, she moved into her scaffolding work, which carries a completely different energy. Where the beach scenes feel open and fluid, these pieces are angular, geometric, and precise. She works out the compositions in smaller studies before scaling them up because the angles have to hold. Sometimes a photograph looks right until you try to translate it, and then it falls apart. So she adjusts until it works.
And somehow, even with all that structure, the pieces still make you feel something.
She showed me how she works with oil bars, saturated with paint and wax, and how she uses a T-square to keep her lines clean without fighting for them. Sometimes she blends, sometimes she leaves the marks exactly as they are. Sometimes she doesn’t use a palette at all, mixing color directly on the surface, using solvent to keep things workable long enough to think and respond.
At one point she asked if I wanted to try it on her canvas. I declined. Immediately. She laughed and said the materials are forgiving, that she could fix anything I did. I didn’t believe her.
She talked about watercolor, which she used as a medical illustrator, and how unforgiving it can feel, like one wrong move and you want to wash the whole thing down the sink. Acrylic dries too fast for her. Oil bars give her time. Space to stay with the work.
She moves between pieces instead of locking anything down too early, letting things continue becoming what they are.
And then, almost as an aside, she glanced behind another painting.
There was one tucked back there, wrapped in brown paper, almost hidden like it wasn’t meant to be part of what you were seeing. She looked at it and said, “Oh, this one was featured at the de Young Museum,” as casually as if she was ordering a nonfat latte.
No buildup. No shift in tone.
Just that.
Before I could even respond, she started tearing the paper away. Not carefully. Just ripping into it, pieces coming off in her hands, the sound cutting through the room and building anticipation without her saying a word.
And then it was there.
Seven Shots at Close Range.
At first it reads as abstract. Grey tones, red, movement that feels unsettled but not immediately defined. You could stand there and take it in at that level, but the longer you look, the more it reveals itself.
There are spines. Real ones. X-ray images layered into the background from her time as a medical illustrator. They don’t announce themselves, but once you see them, you can’t unsee them. They ground the piece in the physical reality of a body.
Then the circles. Seven of them.
You don’t count them right away. You feel them first. The repetition pulls your eye back again and again until it clicks.
Jacob Blake was 29. A Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, leaning into his car with his children in the back seat when a white police officer shot him seven times in the back at close range. He survived, but was left paralyzed from the waist down.
For a while, it was everywhere. Protests, conversations, outrage. And then, like so many things, it began to fade.
Standing there, it felt like the piece refused to let that happen.
Not by explaining. Not by telling you what to think. But by holding onto something physical. The structure of a body. The repetition of impact. A moment that cannot be softened or turned away from once you actually see it.
The longer I stood there, the harder it became to look away.
And then, right next to it, everything shifts.
She moves into pieces of women and friends that are warm, playful, full of personality. Wrapping paper from the dollar store becomes dresses and pants. She talks about dressing the figures like Colorforms.
She doesn’t romanticize the process. If she doesn’t want to redraw feet, she cuts paper around them. When the paper stretches from moisture, she reseams it and paints over it. It’s problem-solving. Responding to the materials as they push back.
The X-rays show up here too, subtly embedded in the background, creating contrast with the bright color and lightness in the foreground. One piece includes her daughter alongside her in matching outfits, which somehow leads into a conversation about derby hats and butterflies and the idea of making butterflies out of X-rays.
There’s humor in the studio. And it matters.
Amid everything on the walls, I started noticing framed newspaper articles and a book featuring Bay Area artists that included her work. They weren’t pointed out. They were just there, accumulated over time.
One of the articles focused on her immigrant work, which carries a different kind of weight. It depicts her mother, her siblings, and herself a few years after arriving in the United States after a long journey that began in Poland, moved through the Gulag, through Asia, through relocation camps, before finally landing here.
She calls it her American Dream series.
That history doesn’t sit separately. It’s woven into everything else.
I asked her how she knows when a painting is finished. She said she tends to overpaint and needs someone to take the work away from her. She keeps herself sharp with weekly figure drawing sessions, three-hour stretches of just seeing clearly and getting it down without overthinking.
Community comes up again and again. The one she grew up in, and the one she’s part of now.
Eventually the conversation moves into access. Into the reality that art is still a luxury for a lot of people. Into the question of why that should be.
She had access. Strong programs. Real teachers. Structure.
Not every kid does.
Before I left, she showed me the piece she’s donating to The Aragon Foundation’s gala on May 9, 2026. It returns to the beach series, but this time it’s here, grounded in the Bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.
It holds something quiet and expansive at the same time.
And it connects everything.
Where she came from. What she had access to. What she’s now giving forward.
That space between opportunity and absence.
That’s where The Aragon Foundation lives. Creating access. Providing a class, a teacher, a starting point.
Standing in her studio, surrounded by all of it, that connection didn’t need to be explained.
It was already there.
To check out more of Stela’s art click here:
To watch our interview, click here and make sure to like and subscribe to our channel!
Part 1: https://youtu.be/v7Yno8Mz00M
Part 2: https://youtu.be/v7Yno8Mz00M
Part 3: https://youtu.be/gexF-TPCnhk