Eric Fortune

Illustrator and gallery artist Eric Fortune creates images that are at once fantastical and emotionally immediate. His subjects, often elongated and in motion, seem isolated but straining to connect, adrift in worlds just beyond their understanding.

His paintings, are done in acrylic on watercolor paper, and always have a strong element of texture, complimenting his often muted palette and tonally complex compositions. Shadows and half light play a frequent role, with areas of illumination moving your eye to the core elements.

Fortune studied at Columbus College of Art and Design. His clients include Simon & Schuster, Tor Books, Harcourt Brace, Scholastic and Realms of Fantasy. Lately he has been focusing more in gallery work with showings at Opera Gallery (NY), Copro Nason Gallery (LA), LeBasse Projects (LA), Roq La Rue Gallery (Seattle), Gallery 1988 (LA) and others.

There is a step-by-step process of the image above, bottom on Arrested Motion, and a step through of another image on a blog post from Irene Gallo on Tor.com.

Fortune also has a blog, and there is a nice introductory gallery on the Tor.com site.

Found Here: http://www.linesandcolors.com/2010/02/05/eric-fortune/

Lyrical, haunting, yet poignant at the same time, Eric Fortune’s paintings make lasting impressions. These are characters who are neither out of place in the world, nor at home in it — they are characters wrapped in their own worlds. The emotionally complex metaphors Fortune paints are richly evocative. His imagery is quiet yet dynamic, and seasoned with a touch of surrealism that takes us to captivating places, beyond our everyday experience but filled with truth.

Packed with emotional nuances he creates soft yet riveting lighting and atmosphere. With uncompromising patience and discipline he slowly builds up his luminous characters and worlds until they radiate life.

And so what sometimes seems to be a simple image to the viewer becomes richer and richer as he or she becomes increasingly entranced by the emotional presences within the art. A true original, Fortune is emerging as a subtle yet powerful artistic voice.

Eric is an artist based out of Columbus, Ohio. He received his BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design where he was honored with the Outstanding Senior Award upon graduation. His work continued to garner acclaim with the acceptance into such prestigious annual competitions as The Society of Illustrators NY and LA as well as Spectrum and others. He was the Artist Guest of Honor for ConGlomeration and was recently awarded the Jack Gaughan Award for Best Emerging Artist of 2009.

Currently Eric is focusing his efforts on personal paintings and upcoming gallery shows. He has shown or will be showing at the Opera Gallery (NY), Copro Nason Gallery (LA), LeBasse Projects (LA), Roq La Rue Gallery (Seattle), Gallery 1988 (LA), and many others.

Found Here: http://www.ericfortune.com/bio

Karel Funk

Anyone who has ever ridden the New York subway at rush hour knows the feeling of being pressed so close to your fellow commuters that you can see their every pore, shaving nick and flaking follicle. To artist Karel Funk, newly arrived in Manhattan from his native Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 2001, that proximity to strangers on a train proved overwhelming at first—then career changing. He’d been toying with suburban angst in his paintings but felt that route was already well traveled by others. In urban voyeurism, however, he knew he had found his ideal subject.

“I was fascinated by how this boundary of personal space completely disappeared on the subway,” Funk recalls by phone from his home in Winnipeg, where he returned in 2003 and works in a studio in the basement of his house. “You could see details of somebody’s ear or neck that you’d never observe just socializing with friends because there’s this boundary we all keep.”

It’s those close encounters with strangers that inspire Funk’s hyper-realist, neo-Renaissance portraits of young urbanites, the latest of which go on view in April at New York’s 303 Gallery. “I wanted to convey that moment when you’re forced to look intimately at the back of a stranger’s head, but I didn’t want there to be any emotional connection,” says Funk, who depicts minute details like an acne scar or a fabric fold with exquisite, microscopic clarity, applying sometimes up to a hundred layers of acrylic to a wood panel. To Carter Foster, curator of drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which owns a Funk, the 38-year-old artist “comes close to [Edward] Hopper in the way his works implicate the viewer as a kind of voyeur.”

Yet even as he allows us to scrutinize his subjects, Funk reveals little of their lives. His paintings are firmly rooted in the history of portraiture, he says, acknowledging his debt to Renaissance masters such as Holbein and Bronzino, with their focus on precise detail and brushwork. And like those artists, he pays great attention to what his subjects wear, seeing the jackets and hoodies he provides them as modern-day armor and shields.

But unlike traditional portraiture, in which the subject typically locks eyes with the viewer and background details provide clues about them, Funk’s subjects face away from us or have their eyes closed, as if they’re unaware of our presence.

“As soon as you see a face—there might be some tension in the eyes or mouth—there’s a story, a feeling,” he says. By obscuring the face or cloaking it altogether as Funk does, “it becomes very hard to find a specific narrative or emotion about that person,” he notes. “My paintings give you very little. There’s nothing there to connect with except for the formal qualities, the texture of skin, hair or clothing, and the questions you’re left with about ‘Who is that person?’”

Found Here: http://www.wmagazine.com/artdesign/2010/03/karel_funk

Bush Monkey Portrait - Chris Savido 2004

Chris Savido (born Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania) is an American artist whose acrylic portrait of George W. Bush composed of monkeys created controversy when the managers of Chelsea Market closed down the "ANIMAL'S PARADISE" art exhibition[1] there because of it. It was later auctioned on eBay. There was debate over whether the closing of the show constituted censorship. Supporters of the managers claimed that Chelsea Market was private, and thus management had a right to exclude the painting, while supporters of Savido "[looked] into the degree to which the Chelsea Market walkways are legally definable as 'public space,' and, as such, fully protected by the First Amendment."[1] Anonymous donors later paid for a digital billboard over the Holland Tunnel to show a detail of the painting.[citation needed]

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Savido

New York Art Shuttered After Bush Monkey Portrait

by Larry Fine

NEW YORK - A portrait of President Bush using monkeys to form his image led to the closure of a New York art exhibition over the weekend and anguished protests on Monday over freedom of expression. Twenty-three-year-old painter Christopher Savido poses with his painting 'Bush Monkeys,' a portrait of President Bush, at the Animal gallery on New York City's Lower East Side, December 13, 2004. The portrait of Bush using monkeys to form his image led to the closure of a New York art exhibition over the weekend and anguished protests on Monday over freedom of expression. (Mike Segar/Reuters) "Bush Monkeys," a small acrylic on canvas by Chris Savido, created the stir at the Chelsea Market public space, leading the market's managers to close down the 60-piece show that was scheduled to stay up for the next month. The show featured art from the upcoming issue of Animal Magazine, a quarterly publication featuring emerging artists. "We had tons of people, like more than 2,000 people show up for the opening on Thursday night," said show organizer Bucky Turco. "Then this manager saw the piece and the guy just kind of flipped out. 'The show is over. Get this work down or I'm gonna arrest you,' he said. It's been kind of wild." Turco took the show down on Saturday and moved the art work to his small downtown Animal Gallery. Calls to the management of Chelsea Market for comment were not returned. From afar, the painting offers a likeness of Bush, but when you get closer you see the image is made up of chimpanzees or monkeys swimming in a marsh. Savido, 23, said he was surprised by the strong reaction to his painting, listed in the catalog at $3,500. "It seems like people got a kick out of it," Savido said. "When they really see it, they almost do a double-take. I like to get a reaction from people." The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-bred artist said he was happy for all the attention paid to his work but said the decision to shutter the exhibit was "a blatant act of censorship." Savido plans to auction the painting and donate proceeds to an organization dedicated to freedom of expression. "This is much deeper than art. This is fundamental American rights, freedom of speech," Savido said. "To see that something like this can happen, especially in a place like New York City is mind boggling and scary." Found Here: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1214-03.htm

Leah Tinari Paintings

ARTIST STATEMENT

I work in acrylic and gouache on both paper and canvas.

Personal photographs taken with a 35mm camera inspire the imagery in each piece. The photographs that interest me most are the ones that someone else would rip up or erase from their digital camera shortly after they are taken. Not knowing what to expect from the film is exciting to me and many times leads to happy accidents like corrupt composition, disheveled hair, flushed cheeks and red eye. I am also intrigued with the space in a photograph. I often eliminate objects and elements to create location-less expanses, allowing the figures to exist in voids and allow for multiple narratives.

The content and formal elements in my paintings combine to offer an always personal, occasionally caricature-like narrative, addressing and encompassing both the awkwardness and the complexity of the human condition. Although the work is a documentation of my personal experiences, I hope that the images will evoke familiar feelings or create a sense of voyeurism - as if the viewer is peeking into a still from someone else’s life that is utterly foreign to them. My paintings are snippets of time that capture moments and function as a visual diary to create my social realism, a documentation of 30-something contemporary lifestyle and behavior.

My work is a celebration of life. I strive to make paintings of my life, the people and the world around me. I want to create a wonderful and vital dialog between people and art, and between art and life.

Found Here: http://www.leahtinari.com