Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Monsters Invade in John Brosio’s Paintings

John Brosio’s oil paintings introduce towering monsters and pop cultural elements into the everyday, whether it’s a giant crab or a Big Gulp. The artist has a knack for mixing terror and humor, leaning on his talents in realism to add both components to the work. Elsewhere, he takes a childlike approach to rendering these beasts, reaching back to the sketchbooks packed with dinosaurs and fictional creatures as a child.

John Brosio’s oil paintings introduce towering monsters and pop cultural elements into the everyday, whether it’s a giant crab or a Big Gulp. The artist has a knack for mixing terror and humor, leaning on his talents in realism to add both components to the work. Elsewhere, he takes a childlike approach to rendering these beasts, reaching back to the sketchbooks packed with dinosaurs and fictional creatures as a child.

“Learning to paint has to do with continually learning to see and that’s the exciting part,” the artist says, in a statement. “The success of a painting in the end has so little to do with subject matter but compels us rather with how well it codifies the way in which things relate to one another in this universe. I think of painting as the pursuit of realizing some degree of surrender to these sensibilities through an orchestration of select relationships.”

See more of Brosio’s work below.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Chicago-based artist and illustrator Jacob van Loon's watercolor paintings present an otherworldly architecture that explodes with abstract shapes and blotches of color. While watercolor is medium that is notoriously difficult to control, van Loon manipulates it into rigid lines and precise angles. At a certain point in the painting, however, he seems to get bored with structure and begins to dismantle his careful work with expressionistic, unrestrained brushstrokes. Some of his pieces incorporate organic shapes that he renders with intricate textures that evoke cell structures or perhaps an alien plant species.
Daniela Tieni's drawings and paintings allow viewers to imagine what it might be like to live inside a storybook. Tieni invites us to follow her protagonists, who look like average young women we might see on any given day, through enchanted worlds. While her work is more grounded in reality than in the imagination, Tieni alters certain mundane details to give her work a surreal quality. Her work is highly stylized and has a painterly quality. The textures of her materials are evident in the marks she makes, revealing the essence of the human hand behind these images.
Zach Brown, a 27-year-old Pittsburgh painter, creates paintings teeming with mythological and spiritual references. He accomplishes this with a blend of both metallic and subdued hues, focusing on the human form and injecting it into surreal situations. Influences seem to range from William Blake to Paul Gauguin.
The intimate paintings of London-based artist Emma Hopkins carry both vulnerability and absorbing detail, as rendered in oil in the artist’s visceral style. Each of the works carry a story, often directly depicting a subject Hopkins knows. “When I work with people I develop a body of work based on the individuals themselves and the ideas that come from the experience of working with them,” the artist says. The artist was last featured on cctvta.com here.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List