Series of Portraits, all oil on Canvas (24" x 24" x 2"). *in progress- 14 planned

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At first glance this series is a departure from the rest of the work which is about storytelling, conceptual and interactive portraiture, exploring how people translate and convey themselves digitally, etc.  In fact this series is all of those things, but using the medium of representational oil on canvas portraiture. 

Each image is selected by the artist from sometimes hundreds of images the subject uses to convey themselves online.  Some of them are from social media, some from professional photo shoots to promote the person.  In either case they were selected with permission from both photographer and subject and cropped by the artist to fit the series, sometimes edited slightly for composition.  Like previous work, they ask the question of "how does your humanity translate across the digital world?".

Using a square format was very intentional. It transports them from classical portraiture into contemporary painting, but also into the world of online avatars which are usually a circle or square format.  The scale of them is larger than life, but not so large as to alienate.  Instead of stepping forward to examine detail the way one might with a traditional portrait (usually the same size or smaller than life), the viewer often steps back to take it all in.  The type of brushwork was done with classic hand-painted movie posters in mind to echo the feeling of old Hollywood fame.  At the same time the painting technique has elements of old masters paintings in that the layers of skin are built up gradually. 

Oil on canvas portraits are historically made for the rich, powerful and famous.  In this case they are of people in the artist's community and circle of friends.  People who stand out or tend to be a focus within their communities, but who exist in subcultures often overlooked, whose members are decidedly outside the mainstream.  Elevating them and putting them in conversation with the history of portraiture is the focus of this series. 

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