#figure painter

Lady with a Mask

Artist: Thomas Wilmer Dewing (American, 1851-1938)

Date: 1911

Medium: Oil on canvas

Artist:

Roberto Ferri

"AMOR SACRO"

Olio su Tela 

100 cm x 70 cm 

2016

Although classically trained as a figure painter, Jenny Morgan is breaking with the labor-intensive preciousness associated with the realist approach. Technically intricate with a haunting quality, Morgan's paintings experiment with psychological visual realism, obscuring the physical to expose the spiritual. She obfuscates the portraits' meticulous details by annihilating their likeness, stripping away layers like physical and spiritual wounds, while retaining a striking intimacy. Like an archeologist, she digs to discover the subject's identity.

In her portraits, Jenny Morgan paints photorealistic nudes suffused with fantastical color, distorted by gestural blurs, and sometimes framed by abstracted shapes. Her subjects are most often friends or self-portraits, as having a personal connection with the subject is essential to the artist. Echoing this intimacy, her figures hold eye contact to forge a psychological connection with the viewer. Morgan’s recent portrait series “All We Have is Now” invokes themes of death and rebirth with nods to religious imagery and symbols of mortality. The heady subject matter may seem at odds with the intense color that suffuses her figures—however, it is the push and pull between darkness and light that interests Morgan, to “look at everything in the light and realize it no longer feels so dark,” as she has said.

Artist:

Reisha Perlmutter

"@instagram this is a #painting Throwback to a work from last summer, which is the only time I have ever taken reference photos for work in NYC. Luckily, I had an awesome subject ( @ihartericka ) This piece will also be featured in my upcoming solo show with @fortworksart In other news, I’m finally heading back home to big 🍎 ."