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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Following the release of his Fantagraphics book with portraits of all 44 U.S. presidents, illustrator Drew Friedman brings his satirical, “warts-and-all” style to Ohio State University’s Friends of the Libraries Gallery at Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. In addition to his book illustrations, the exhibition also features his other presidential-themed works over the years, like the magazine cover above.
In the recent, enormous portraits painted by Mike Dargas, the artist pays homage to major figures in art history and tucks surprises into their contours. With “The Unbreakable," which honors Frida Kahlo, the artist says she was "physically broken but her spirit was unbreakable and her powerful essence eternal.” See more of his recent portraits below.
Sarah Ball's oil paintings, subtle in their complexity, are intended for the viewer to encounter the portrait's subject intimately. The practice of physiognomy, or judging the character of a person just from their facial features or expressions, has long been a subject of fascination for the artist. In efforts like her current Anima Mundi show "Themself," she culls her subjects from historic photographic archives, social media, and beyond. "These source images become a starting point for a methodical process of understanding, assumption and translation, where the aesthetic ‘mask' and what lies beneath become the focus of engagement,” the gallery says.
Carl Randall captures the energy and heartbeats of London and Tokyo through his crowded paintings, each figure its own portrait of a real pedestrian in his or her respective city. Toying with perspective, his recent works also implement the architecture and skylines of the inhabited metro area.
Jen Mann’s stirring oil portraits blend realism and abstraction, isolating aspects of the face for photo-negative representations and graphic notes. Mann uses contemporary iconography in her works, using emojis and film subtitles as inspiration. Her toying with a single subject over many portraits represent the prism of personality.
Rebecca Morgan’s portraits of country folk are delightfully weird if somewhat off-putting. Set in hunting camps and other woodsy environments, the artist's work is an exploration of rural and off-the-grid culture, featuring an array of eccentric characters. Her paintings and drawings bounce between humorous, ambivalent and grotesque depictions of everyday existence in rural Appalachia, inspired by the artist's upbringing in a small town in central Pennsylvania. Check out more of her work on Instagram.
Rebecca Hastings' art is a family affair. The Australian artist uses herself and her children as the focal subjects in her highly realist oil paintings - yet noticeably absent from these portraits is the sentimentality one would expect an artist-mother to insert into her depictions of family life. Instead, Hastings subverts these idealized expectations to reveal the more complex realities of child rearing that is rarely touched upon in glossy advertisements or family portraits.
Annemarie Busschers (featured on our blog here) is fascinated by human imperfection. As a society, we tend to run away from anything that renders us imperfect - yet from the artist's viewpoint, these traits we so eagerly try to disown are what lend to an individual's distinction. Busscher's embrace of all imperfections is reflected in her raw, emotive portraits of people, which focus deeply on the lines, textures, and colorations of the skin's surface to draw attention to her subjects' flaws and irregularities.
For more than thirty years, Kerry James Marshall has been creating art to inspire important conversations about African American history and identity. His paintings follow the grand traditions of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, but with new narratives in which black people are the central figures. While Marshall initially began his career as an abstract artist, his dramatic shift to figurative painting occurred in the 1980s when he realized that African American artists and subjects were being excluded from major art museums and galleries. Marshall decided he would use the techniques of the Old Masters so revered in those institutions to create a new dialogue, in which black perspectives are given greater visibility within the art history canon.
Jerome Lagarrigue has depicted many subjects throughout his career- boxers and supermodels to his multi-racial Brooklyn neighbors- but his focus has always been simply, "painting people". The French born artist traces his interest in portraiture to art school, where it was difficult to find a model and this encouraged him to study his own face. These introspective exercises on expression, color, and psyche continue to inform his oil paintings. He also practiced graffiti, influencing his manner of working in large scale with roughly defined areas.
Rebecca Mason Adams's moody acrylic paintings have an edge of realism that makes them look incredibly like black and white photographs. This is because the Providence, RI based artist, currently moving to Los Angeles, first studied photography and since then, has expressed an interested in black and white portraiture, "referencing stylized and graphic photography and film." She transitioned into painting after school, utilizing her skills in photography and lighting to create her subjects, mostly women.
In depicting the human condition, Jean-Paul Mallozzi uses paint to express emotional narratives. His oil paintings make use of thickly painted areas, moving from more accurate detail to abstract elements and exaggerated colors to imply his subject's feelings. Color is fundamental to Malozzi's paintings. "Each one emits a color that echoes complex emotional states that all of us can relate to," he explains.
A child of a bustling city of contrast and colors, Rodrigo Branco's affinity for abstraction may come as no surprise. But his blurred portraits of local people in São Paulo, created using patches of colors and expressive strokes, are actual representations of what the artist used to see as a little kid. Raised in the southern outskirts of the city, Branco had a severe vision impairment that was left untreated for years.
There is a magical simplicity about Brookyn based painter Alyssa Monk's oil portraits, where looking at her work is like looking into the reflection of a forest pool. Her images portray ghostly figures that take form at the surface, inbetween the reflection of other natural elements like tree branches and the sun shining peeking through their foliage. Her lush depictions are often described as a blend of the figurative and landscape.
Nigerian artist Oresegun Olumide goes beyond realism with his meticulously detailed oil paintings that could easily be mistaken for photographs. Notoriously difficult to capture in fine art, water plays a central role in his portraits: each figure is unclothed, allowing Olumide to explore the distinct texture and aesthetic quality of water-on-skin.
Interpretations of Lyon based Eric Lacombe's mixed media works and paintings have been varied and extreme: monstrous, melancholy, horrific, and even beautiful. Describing his art as "caricatures of the soul", the self-taught artist's images exaggerate and distort his characters' faces into haunting portrayals. Their faces look almost like masks, some painted without mouths or eyes, or given bird-like beaks, and yet their transfiguration is the most revealing thing about them. Each is a sort of reflection of the artist's own feelings, who likens his subjects' appearance to a deconstruction of their torment.
Self-taught Romanian collage artists Silviu and Irina Székley consider their works to be “conceptual spontaneities” that distort familiar images into new, transfigured realities. The duo takes traditional images, especially 19th century masterpieces and shatters our expectations through unorthodox manipulation. As the artists say themselves, “Our approach to art is very naïve, ludic and hazardous.”
You have probably seen the work of Lithuanian artist Karolis Strautniekas- he has worked with Audi, Mini Cooper, The New York Times, among many other global enterprises; while his personal projects are lesser known, they powerfully convey Strautniekas’ aptitude for color and composition. “Portraits from Behind,” one of his ongoing personal projects, takes an unconventional perspective when approaching portraiture. This voyeuristic series of illustrations focuses on those intimate moments when our backs are turned.
Collage artist Maja Egli creates surreal portraits by manipulating various images of women to work together as complex unities. Her work can be read both as a feminist statement and as a larger comment on humanity: on one level, she suggests that women are complex beings (a quality that is often denied to them in much of mainstream art), while on the other, Egli’s collages imply that we as human beings are composed of disparate and assorted influences. Most of her figures are incomplete, lacking some fullness of form; the few full figures that we do get are faceless.
Canadian artist Alex Garant's "double-eyed" portraits, featured here on our blog, have become instantly recognizable for the dizzying effect they create. Her style of overlaying her subject's features like eyes and lips produces multiple images that are captivating but admittedly, also challenging to look at; for some, her works create phantom images, and even the feeling of being intoxicated. Her new series of portraits, titled "Wakefulness", is inspired by how our brains enter into a state of consciousness when we wake up.
San Francisco based artist John Wentz plays with texture and abstraction in what he calls his "fractured" oil paintings of figures. Previously featured on our blog, the figures in Went'z work have been described as hazy, dreamy, and stripped away, broken down to a combination of nondescript washes and bold areas of pigment that evoke the feeling of remembering a distant memory that comes back to us as distorted. In his artist statement, he explains that "working within the classical idiom of the human figure, his goal is to reduce and simplify the image to it’s core fundamentals: composition, color, and paint application."
The explosive abstract portraiture of Los Angeles based artist Justin Bower is currently featured in a new exhibition at MOAH (Lancaster Museum of Art and History), "Thresholds". Previously featured here on our blog and in Hi-Fructose Vol. 31, his digital-looking, hand-painted portraits constantly question how much we will allow technology to permeate and destruct our daily lives? Like a glitchy mirror image of ourselves, glued to our computers and mobile devices, the giant, anonymous faces that he paints are continuously broken up by neon colored markings and shapes. His "Thresholds" series is an extension of a series of portraits that first began with his piece titled "Spaceboy" in 2009, here ending with several new paintings created throughout 2015.
Chinese born, California based artist Vincent Xeus paints his portraits with a sensitive treatment of light and shading to an almost haunting effect. Though his work shares elements of 17th-century Dutch masters and contemporaries like Gerhard Richter, Odd Nerdrum, Francis Bacon, and Antonio López Garcia, Xeus has created an entirely new approach. Previously featured on our blog, he has said that his intent is to reveal that which is beneath what we think we see. This involves smudging the paint until the subject's face is hardly recognizable or appears blurry and more impressionistic. His latest body of work, "Hue is Full / A Thousand Faces", which opened Friday at Gallery 1261 in Colorado, takes his unconventional style to a new level where he wipes and scrapes away at his subjects.
Halloween is supposed to be about embracing the sinister, but somewhere along the way, sinister became sexy. Enter the sexy Halloween costume. Artist Deborah Oropallo embraces this costume phenomenon in her layered photo-montages of subjects best known by their masterpiece museum portraits. For her series titled "Guise", Oropallo superimposed pigmented photographic prints and acrylic painting in a way that makes her costumed subjects almost indistinguishable. If you look closely, suddenly, famous faces such as the Girl with a Pearl Earring become the Sexy Maid, Sexy Nurse, Sexy Circus Ringmaster, the list goes on.
As a young girl, artist Margaret Bowland's favorite books and songs told stories about love and life, stories that condition girls to expect certain things out of life and want to be a certain way. Ideas about love, beauty, and personal identity are at the heart of her 19th century-inspired oil paintings, covered here. In particular, her portraits often feature the same African American girl named "J", grandly styled with her face painted white, and attended to by white servants. She makes a reappearance in Bowland's upcoming exhibition at Driscoll Babcock in New York, "Power".
Canadian-born artist Andrew Salgado borrows a variety of influences from art history and popular culture, to paint portraits of deconstructed identities. The people Salgado chooses to portray are complex personalities. Salgado acknowledges this, but does not strive to paint the person's whole identity. Instead, Salgado uses a variety of abstract elements to underline the now-ness during which his subjects were painted.
New York based artist Hope Gangloff paints expressive and visually striking portraits with emotional depth. First covered here, her portraits primarily depict family, friends and other artists in intimate, vaguely erotic and melancholy scenes. Gangloff has described her paintings as caricatures- rather than capturing her subjects' likeness, she focuses on their details separately and intensely, and exaggerates their features like hands and feet.
Spanish artist “Salusitano” paints large-scale mixed media portraits of gazing figures. His works are precisely detailed, oftentimes with 60 layers of paint or more. Appearing almost hyper-realistic, up-close they reveal tiny cross hatched marks made using colored pencil, conte crayon, and oil paint by the tip of the brush. The artist likens this technique to carving out the facial expressions of his protagonists; young girls, boys and women of various cultures.
Korean born artist Samantha Wall's black and white works explore the complexities of race, particularly her own multi-raciality’ between living in Korea and now the United States. First featured on our blog, Wall primarily works in graphite and charcoal to create detailed and conceptual drawings. For her upcoming exhibit at Roq la Rue gallery in Seattle, "Let Your Eyes Adjust to the Dark", Wall created new works using sumi ink and dried pigments to achieve a haunting style of expressionism.
In cartoons, when a character is having a bad day, or particularly depressed, he will have his own small dark cloud following him, often raining and occasionally hitting him with lightning. The more depressed he is, the more it will be just rain, while lightning often indicates an angry mood. The figures and objects in the oil paintings of Toronto based artist Yang Cao must be particularly moody. He paints fantastical still life and portraits of people with their own personal rainclouds. "I like the unpredictability of the cloud. It’s shapeless and changes all the time, it follows the wind and never stays in one form and place. Somehow I find this as a resemblance to our human nature and mind. Sometimes I wonder about the relationship between clouds and winds in comparison to people and society," he says.