Category: painting

Ali Banisadr

Paintings by Ali Banisadr

Ali Banisadr is an Iranian artist who creates astonishing large-scale paintings using his ability to express synesthesia. Giving that synesthesia is commonly referred as the ability to see sound, Banisadr manages to transfer the sound he hears using many details, symbolic references and a special blending of color.

The sound he portrays is not just music, although the parts of his large works easily communicate with the audience and build a premium captivating relationship with the viewer. The sound particles are spread across the canvas inferencing the tragical noise of bombing he had to witness while growing up in Teheran.

The subjects of his paintings are small worlds, collided together in a broad universe of collective experience. Those worlds are inhabited by colorful figures struggling to find inner peace, facing chaotic consequences of war, but still communicating with each other, sharing experiences and helping each other to find a way of coping with unsustainability. The universal message is to find a way to establish methods of hopeful existence, while the circumstances are questioning the faith in humanity.

Titles from Top to Bottom: “Fravashi”,2013; “The Lesser Lights”, 2014: “Foreign Lands”, 2015. All paintings are Oil on Linen.

Cesar Santos

Cesar Santos, “The Restorers”, Oil on Linen, 29 x 39 Inches

Cesar Santos’s art education is worldly, and his work has been seen around the globe, from the Annigoni Museum in Italy and the Beijing museum in China to Chelsea NY. Santos studied at Miami Dade College, where he earned his associate in arts degree in 2003. He then attended the New World School of the Arts before traveling to Florence, Italy. In 2006, Santos  completed the Angel Academy of Art in Florence studying under Michael John Angel, a student of artist Pietro Annigoni.

Santos’ work reflects both classical and modern interpretations juxtaposed within one painting. His influences range from the Renaissance to the masters of the nineteenth century to Contemporary Art. With superb technique, he infuses a harmony between the natural and the conceptual to create works that are provocative and dramatic.

Jean Dominique Ingres

Jean Dominique Ingres, “Jupiter and Thetis”, Oil on Canvas, 1811, Musee Granet

“Jupiter and Thetis” is an 1811 painting by the French neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, located in the Musee Granet, Aix-en Provence, France. The work painted by the artist when he was 31, severely and pointedly, contrasts the grandeur and might of a cloud-born Olympian male deity against that of the diminutive nymph. Ingres’ subject matter is from an episode of Homer’s Illiad when Thetis begs Jupiter to intervene and guide the fate of her son Achilles.

The painting is steeped in the traditions of both classical and neoclassical art, most notably in its grand scale of 136 x 101 inches.  Ingres creates many visual contrasts between the god and the slithering nymph: Jupiter is shown facing the viewer frontally with both his arms and legs spread broadly across the canvas, while the color of his dress and flesh echos that of the marble at his feet. In contrast, Thetis is rendered in sensuous curves and portrayed in supplication to the mercy of a cruel god who holds the fate of her son in his hands.

Ingres kept ‘Jupiter and Thetis’ in his studio until 1834, when it was purchased when it was purchased by the state. In 1848, he mad a pencil copy. The painting was first exhibited at the 1811 Paris Salon, at a time when Ingres’ attention to line coupled with his disregard for anatomical reality was yet to find favor among critics.

Matthijs Roling

Six Paintings by Matthijs Roling

Matthijs Nicolaas Roling is a Dutch painter, active as graphic designer, wall painter, painter, draftsman, lithographer, pen artist, etcher, and academy lecturer. He is considered a kindred spirit of the 3rd generation of the Dutch Group of Figurative Abstraction. Röling is described as the “figurehead of contemporary figurative painting in the Netherlands.

Röling was educated at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague from 1960 to 1963, and at the Rijksacademiein Amsterdam in 1963-1964. His first museum exhibition took place in 1965 in the Drents Museum in Assen. In 1972 he became a lecturer at the Academy Minerva in Groningen, where he educated Peter Pander, Douwe Elias and Jan van der Kool. He also lectured at the Classical Academy for fine art in Groningen.

Salman Toor

Untitled Oil on Canvas Works by Salman Toor

Salman Toor graduated from Pratt University in Brooklyn, New York with an MFA in Fine Arts. He has exhibited in multiple group shows ranging from Dubai, New York, Karachi and Lahore. An important part of his artwork is the influence of cultural lore and tradition.

His paintings narrate the story of the relationship between the elite and plebeians, the conflict of their lifestyles. and present the discord while managing to show the subtle similarities. His vision displays the complex diversity amid sub-continental pop culture and historical influences of Western and European ideals.

Note: a more extensive biography of Salman Toor can be found at: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2020/11/19/salman-toor/

Adam Miller

Adam Miller, “The Bone Wars”, Oil on Canvas, 2016, 96 x 78 Inches

Adam Miller is a 1979 Oregon-born figurative painter whose realistic work explores the intersection between mythology, ecology, and humanism. “The Bone Wars” is a picture Miller painted in 2016 that recreates the fierce disputes that Marsh and Cope held for the control of deposits and fossils in the late 19th century in the United States.

His work explores the intersection between mythology, ecology, and humanism. Visually inspired by Baroque and Hellenistic narrative painting, he adopts a polytheistic approach to contemporary folklore, questions of progress and the experience of human narrative in the face of a world of expansion and decay. Adam Miller’s work is mannerist in its use of the human form as a vehicle of feeling and thought, beyond the literal representation of a particular person.

Clive Smith

Clive Smith, “Separate Together”, Oil on Canvas, 2000, 82 x 110 Inches

Clive Smith was born in St. Albans, England in 1967. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Kingston Polytechnic, at Kingston upon Thames, England in 1988. He moved to New York City where he studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League. He currently works and lives in New York.

The painting shown above is from Clive Smith’s “A Stage” Series.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Deutsch: Nollendorfplatz”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York

“Deutsch: Nollendorfplatz” reveals Kirchner’s shift in subject matter from the female nude to depictions of the metropolis. Here, the perspective is skewed, a clear rejection of his previous study of architecture. The quick, gestural use of line creates a sense of immediacy and speed within the piece, capturing the essence of a busy German city. The use of clashing blues and yellows to depict the cityscape is typical of Kirchner’s style during the Die Brucke years, though the distorted imagery of the city may also have been inspired by an exhibition of Italian Futurist art that he saw in the year that this was painted.

Emil Kosa Jr.

Emil Kosa Jr., “The Big Top”, 1951, Oil on Canvas, 60.1 x 66 cm, Hilbert Museum of Calfifornia Art, Chapman University, California

Emil Kosa Jr. was born in Paris, France on November 28, 1903. He moved to the United States with his family at the age of four. Kosa studied at the Prague Academy as a teenager and then at the California Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1927.  He returned to Paris later in 1927, and studied under Pierre Laurens at l’École des Beaux-Arts.  In 1928, he returned to Los Angeles and studied and later taught at Chouinard and the Otis Art Institutes.

The 1930s were a prosperous decade during which Kosa established himself as a leading West Coast watercolor artist. He experimented with techniques and styles but always preferred to paint outdoors. His work was widely exhibited throughout America, including at New York’s American Watercolor Society and the National Academy of Design. Although he was gaining fame as a watercolorist, his income from his watercolors was not enough to support his family. He took a job in 1933 in the newly-formed special effects department at 20th Century Fox Studios. He was given the role of the art director and held this position for 35 years. In 1963, Kosa won an Oscar for his work on Cleopatra.

Ed Mell

Ed Mell: Storm Paintings, Oil on Canvas and Linen

Born in 1942, Ed Mell spent an idyllic childhood in what was then the small western city of Phoenix. He attended Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and soon after graduation accepted a position in New York as an art director for a large advertising agency.

Seeking greater artistic freedom,he opened an illustration studio and met with immediate success, establishing his national reputation. Seeking a break from the city’s pace, he accepted a teaching position the Hopi reservation in 1970. Time spent on Arizona’s Colorado Plateau reconnected Mell with the land he loved and his artistic course was set. He relocated to Phoenix and began painting his well-known landscapes.

Gio Black Peter

The Artwork of Gio Black Peter

Gio Black Peter is a Guatemalan born, New York City based actor, musical performance and visual artist perhaps best known for his featured roles in the movies “Eban and Charley”, directed in 2000 by James Bolton, and “Otto or Up with Dead People”, directed in 2008 by Bruce LaBruce. His musical and performance art is part of the New York underground and is often in collaboration with the multi-media team SUPERM.

As a visual artist, Gio Black Peter (Giovanni Paolo Andrade Guevara) is known for his figurative and sexually themed paintings.

Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni, “The Charge of the Lancers”, 1915, Collage, Tempera Paint, Cardboard, 50 x 32 cm, Private Collection

Umberto Boccioni was one of the lead artists in the Italian Futurist movement of the early 1900s.  His most famous works are in bronze, where the energy of his forms are represented by a solid trail following a figure.  In “The Charge of the Lancers”, Boccioni depicts a fierce cavalry trampling soldiers with bayonets. The forceful power of this image is an excellent visual representation of the ideas of the futurists.

The “Charge of the Lancers” is the only known work by Boccioni that is devoted exclusively to the theme of war. Being a collage, Charge was also a rare departure for the artist in terms of medium. In previous works, Boccioni had used the figure of the horse as a symbol for work, but in this collage the horse becomes a symbol of war and natural strength, since it appears to be overcoming a horde of German bayonets.

If, in fact, Boccioni was establishing the brute strength of the horse over man-made weapons, it would suggest a slight departure from the Futurist principles of Marinetti. This work also eerily prefigures Boccioni’s own death from having been trampled by a horse.

Futurism was founded by the writer Filipo Tommaso Marinetti, and was joined by a handful of young artists, including Umberto Boccioni at the forefront. Based on Marinetti’s radical manifesto of 1909, Futurism was an extremely fast paced and modern movement.