The Nude in the 21st Century |
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First Place and Award Show Recipient These three paintings were painted from life during 2016 taking most of the year to complete. As I am getting older, over the last number of years I've been drawn toward painting more portraits and figures from life I have always attempted to paint my history, my time. I was educated in the Netherlands at the Rijksacademie. At that time the academy was still dedicated to painting from nature and observation. We were surrounded by great historical examples of Dutch art history. Throughout my life it has been my point of view to be able to paint contemporary experience without having to deny or be an iconoclast to the classical style. Over the past several years quite a few of my peers, friends and lovers have died and whether I like it or not I have become more aware of the passage time and mortality, including my own. These three paintings of the same person explore aging, mortality, it's loneliness, isolation and vulnerability. They are in meditation of the exuberance of the 1960's and it's sexual liberation that still lingers but is now fading. It is about my own generation, both of what I brought with me half a century ago from the Netherlands, and what has happened, what is left and still remains in a more and more alien and dehumanized world. | |
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