Jeff Mitchell

Art in the cafe...

Laurel Statz


"The Spectator"


December 2025



Laurel Statz is a painter and Madison area native. Her work, while figurative, is influenced by abstraction and minimalism. The paintings often have a quick and instinctual nature, capturing just what’s needed. While she often times herself to eliminate extra details and over-precision, she has ventured into more detailed works as well. Laurel does not attach narrative to her pieces. Rather, she thinks of them like a journaling process for her scatter-brained psyche. The figures in the pieces are meant to be processing tools for the artist and the viewer. She hopes that seeing these figures helps the...
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Friday, December 3, 2010

"Tenderly apocalyptic music from the Midwest. Jeff Mitchell's songs are flashes of memory, emotion, and dry humor. His raw approach to fingerstyle guitar swerves from pedestrian to mind-melting without warning. His live shows have earned him a reputation for emotional intensity, lyrics that silence a room, and genre-bending roots-rock that can bring the house down.

Jeff claims influences that range from country-blues greats Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt to experimentalists like Ween and Mr. Bungle. His lyrics offer abstract impressions of small-town life and a bewildered view of humans in general.

Mitchell has played everything from metal in dive bars to jug band music in grade schools, sharing the stage with folkies, punks, honkey-tonkers, barbershoppers, hip-hoppers, yodeling cowboys, and cardboard robots."

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