Tag: hyper-realism

Alyssa Monks

Paintings by Alyssa Monks

Alyssa Monks’s paintings are of a representational narrative genre. She portrays a specific place and time with simultaneous empathy and detachment.

Monks is part of the Continuing Education Faculty at the New York Academy of Art, where she teaches Flesh Painting. She currently is also an instructor at the Montclair State University.

She earned her BA from Boston College and an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art. At the New York Academy of Art, Alyssa studied with Vincent Desiderio, Jenny Saville, Wade Schuman, Brenda Zlamany, John Jacobsmeyer, Harvey Citron, Deane Keller, Edward Schmidt, Steven Assael, and Lisa Bartolozzi. She additionally studied at Montclair State College, the New School, and Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence. She completed an artist in residency at Fullerton College.

Claudio Bravo Camus

Claudio Bravo Camus, “Noureddine (Portrait of a Young Man)”, 1983, Oil on Canvas, 57.5 x 45 Inches, Private Collection

Born in 1936, Chilean-born artist Claudio Bravo initially established himself as a society portrait painter in Chile and Spain, but he became better known for his vibrant still lifes of such everyday items as packages, crumpled paper, and draped fabric. Although he lived in Morocco for many years, it was the Spanish classical masters who inspired the provocative style of his hyperrealist paintings.

Though Bravo had some training under Chilean artist Miguel Venegas Cifuentes, he was primarily self-taught. He was only 17 years old when he had his first exhibition in 1954 at Salón 13 in Valparaíso. In the early 1960s Bravo moved to Spain, where he made his living painting portraits on commission, including pictures of Gen. Francisco Franco’s family members.

Bravo had his first New York City show in 1970. Two years later he settled in Tangier, Morocco, where he began to paint landscapes and animals as well as still lifes and portraits. His paintings regularly sold for impressive sums, with his 1967 “White Package” fetching more than $1 million in 2004. Bravo was, although, little known in Chile until a 1994 retrospective exhibition of his work at the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts. Claudio Bravo Camus passed away in June of 2011 in Taroudant, Morocco.