I realized I rarely am drawn to portraiture paintings because it tends to remind me of the old school, traditional, paintings from the 1600′s ish. Obviously a lot of time has passed and I am clearly holding grudges against a genre for no good reason. Here are some paintings that prove portraits can be innovative, and interesting.
These are by an artist named Xiaolu Zhang, a Chinese artist that also happens to go to SCAD (the college I went to a billion years ago). The humor is great.
And these are by Kehinde Wiley, a true reconfiguration of the traditional portrait.
And last but not least these are by Phillip Gurrey, these remind me of botched plastic surgery. I really like it.
i love these!
The Gurrey paintings are fascinating – like some Tarantino-esque nightmare!
Very Pop!
Very Napoleonic!
Very Baconish!
Like them all! Especially the third one, it is true that making portraits you inevitable end up connecting with the old art traditions, but, heck, why not?
Modern Art is about discovering new paths, not just blindly destroying of forgetting the past, also because I’m convinced that there can’t be a true new idea without a conscience of what came before.. but again, I might just be falling again in my intellectualism.