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Painting the Figure Now: Exploring the Human Condition

July 20, 2022 Thomas Wharton

Megan Elizabeth Read standing next to her painting Nobody Showed Me Which Way To Go, 2022

The human figure is easily the most relatable of fine art subjects, but it is also easily the most complex. That complexity is not just from learning how to accurately paint the human anatomy, but also in deciding how to convey the emotion, life and experience of the figure to fit the composition. Add to that an artist’s individual style—ranging from conveying all the details to fixating on the atmosphere—and you have a multitude of elements that bring the image to life.

In the annual Painting the Figure Now exhibition, presented by PoetsArtists at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, the human experience is on full display. This year’s show, happening July 7 through October 2, is guest curated by art collector Dr. Samuel Peralta who says the addition of Now to the title is the true anchor and theme of the show.

“Figure painting has a long and historical tradition—but for these series of exhibits, the art has to have a perspective that’s contemporary, compelling and current,” says Peralta. “The PTFN series present Polaroids in brushstrokes, as it were, of the human condition Now.”

In selecting the just under three dozen works, Peralta turned to works with a symbolic undercurrent or narrative that allow the viewer to explore the painting. “Including this doesn’t have to be an overt or conscious process—it can emerge subconsciously during composition and be available to be inferred from the finished piece,” he explains. “For me, the question to ask was: Was the artist successful in conveying that intention to me through their portrayal of the human figure?”

What resulted is a show that demonstrates, for Peralta, that work with “the vocabulary of modern accoutrements remains true to its historical, even classical, traditions.” Many of the artists with paintings in the show have atelier training where life drawing and painting classes were at the core of their curricula. Or they take inspiration from great masters—past and present—but with an eye for the contemporary world in which they are living. And, perhaps, something that should be noted is the paintings of the past were once present too. 

There are some artists participating, such as Megan Elizabeth Read, who are outside of the box and didn’t grow up surrounded by the arts or have formal training. Instead, their own work has been an evolution through time and experience.

Megan Elizabeth Read

American, b. 1982

Nobody Showed Me Which Way To Go, 2022

Oil on linen

60 × 40 in

152.4 × 101.6 cm

Read says, “I was always drawn to figurative work as a child; it was really the only thing that interested me and since I have no formal training or background in the arts it made sense when I began creating my own work I would simply gravitate toward the type of imagery I was most moved by.” From a technical standpoint, Read’s artwork has become more simplistic over time and she leans into a minimalistic approach to the materials that helps manage her process.

“More importantly, this need for reduced ‘noise’ and chaos in my real life is directly reflected in my paintings in that they tend to contain large canvases and are generally fairly simple compositionally,” she explains. “There is a lot of room to breathe there and creating these spaces helps me feel less fragmented. Less pull in too many directions. It’s like I am painting away the clutter and chaos.”

Since she started painting, Read has evolved the narrative in her artwork but has found some themes to weave their way through her oeuvre such as “the search for identity and the concept of constructed identities, the need for and fear of vulnerability, and this idea of multiple selves.”

Her work in the show, Nobody Showed Me Which Way to Go, plays into the themes because the work is about “the loneliness and confusion of being dropped into this world without a map or support system and the struggle to find one’s way under these conditions. About dragging yourself along amidst the beauty and terror we are faced with every day,” Read shares. The imagery comes from her personal experience of this feeling this. Growing up she was surrounded by cows, and sees herself reflected in them, so they are a nod to constructed identity and figuring out how to move through life.

Annie Louise Goldman

American, b. 2003

Play Time (Getting Undressed), 2022

Oil on panel

28 × 24 in

71.1 × 61 cm

Annie Louise Goldman is a young artist at the start of her career, and what direction she will take is still unfolding, but for now a passion for the figure has propelled her to new discoveries. Growing up Goldman did family portraits, and at age 13 she wanted to take a life drawing class. She enrolled in an art school in San Carlos, California, which she attended until she was 17 studying under artists such as Noah Buchanan.

“I learned about Baroque painting from Noah, and when I started was really fixated on composition, lighting and drama,” she says. “I also was doing Bard copies in a very 19th-century academic style. That’s been really influential as over the last couple of years I’ve started to explore a more contemporary side of art such as the work of Florine Stettheimer and Alice Neel.”

As a student currently at Laguna College of Art + Design, Goldman has started to develop narratives that are connected to her experiences. They are often very intimate narratives, and that’s reflected in how she approaches her work. Everything she does is derived from life drawing, but to get the right composition she will now take photos of her models, who are usually also friends. The narrative can come to life as she’s photographing, or there are times Goldman has a fully developed idea before the shoot starts.

In most of her work, Goldman wants to show the connection people have with one another. Her selected painting, Playtime, is an intimate moment of a couple undressing one another. Goldman says, “At the time we took the photos, the two women were a couple,” says Goldman, “so I was able to capture an intimate moment. The title reflects the innocent looking image, but it has sexual undertones…it isn’t portraiture or about specific people. It’s meant to reflect however the viewer is coming at the image.”

Christopher Cart

In The Waters, 2022

Oil on canvas

58 × 58 in

147.3 × 147.3 cm

The idea that classical figurative imagery can hang next to any interpretation of the figure in exhibitions today is something that artist Chris Cart says allows artists to have more freedom in expression. This can come back to the figure itself, because instead of having a tight, classical image, the artist can interpret the mood or emotion in the way that suits the composition.

Cart’s work In the Waters eloquently combines multiple figures in a surrealistic move among the waves. The painting, which he says is about love, community, mindfulness and life as a dance, was started over a decade ago as a tightly rendered naturalistic piece, that was sanded down and repainted several times. The “blue lady” came in early, and maybe at first was subconsciously what Cart needed to experiment with the artistic process. A while ago he began to play with using multiple styles in one canvas and created what he calls “mashups in paint.” In the Waters as a result is a harmonious intertwining in composition and style. 

Anna Cyan

Canadian, b. 1974

Smoke, 2022

Oil on canvas

54 × 36 in

137.2 × 91.4 cm

“To me, artist has always meant depicting life as I see it around me,” says Anna Cyan. “Painting the Figure Now is in some ways about building a bridge across time—drawing on the long history of showing the body through paint but using this language to examine the here and now. Painting is a dialogue, not just with the past, but also with the future.”

Vulnerability is a theme that often appears in Cyan’s artwork, but this spring it came into focus on an even greater level and as a reflection of the present. “I am from Ukraine, and as I worked on the painting [that’s in the show], war coverage brought home how fragile the human body is, and the immensity of violence and destruction that can threaten it,” Cyan explains. “Initially, the painting was going to have a much lighter sky, but as the war unfolded, smoke started creeping in, and the overall tonal range got darker. So now the painting is called Smoke. When I look at it, the sound of air raid sirens plays in my mind, and it’s as though the character hears them too, in her world. They are distant, but there.”

Erica Calardo

Italian, b. 1980

Reverie, 2022

Oil on linen

27 1/2 × 17 7/10 in

69.9 × 45 cm

Erica Calardo sees the exhibition as a chance to focus on the greater reawakening in the art world to relearn how to depict the figure—using Old Master techniques and skill, but painting for our times. Calardo shares the initial sentiment of the figure being “the most challenging subject within representational arts. Both technically and theoretically.” For her, reflecting humans in a realistic rather than idealized manner is important.

Reverie is Calardo’s first painting of a male figure and she wanted to depict him more than just as muscular and grand, full of physical strength and power.” Instead, the work is about intimacy and dreams, showing the man as someone who can have true and rich feelings. “My painting shows a person deep in dream and meditation, caught in his reverie,” she explains. “It is a very intimate and simple composition.”

Amy Gibson

American, b. 1976

They Said The Answer Was 42, 2022

Oil on cradled wood panel

24 × 18 in

61 × 45.7 cm

Connecting to the “now” through modern fashion and topics is a highlight of Amy Gibson’s artwork. While always about the human condition, her most recent paintings focus on children and how they look at the world still with wonder and excitement. And it’s a reminder to the adult viewers to remember how they once saw the world as well.

Gibson’s painting They Said the Answer Was 42 is about technology and information overload for children today as they are exposed to news, social media and more at a fast rate. “That made me think back to the late 1980s when social media didn’t exist and I read a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” says Gibson. “The character was able to ask the all-knowing computer created by advanced aliens a question. He wanted to know the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. The computer told him that the answer was 42. That left him even more confused. I feel like kids are feeling this way. They don’t know the questions to ask in order to filter through all of the chaos so they can actually find an answer. This is leaving them filled with anxiety and ambivalence.”

Each painting in the show condenses the theme by intimating a moment or expression of the human form. However, when viewed altogether, Painting the Figure Now “traverse[s] the range of emotional responses for each individual work” says Peralta. “We will see the gestural and expressionist range of the human face and body by seeing the collection as a whole.” 

Along with the show at Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, the works are available to purchase through 33 Contemporary’s Artsy page, and digitalized images will be included in a time capsule on the moon via Peralta’s Lunar Codex project. 

“The Polaris time capsule will be launched via SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in 2023/24 and deposited on the Lunar South Pole via the Astrobotic Griffin lunar lander, which will also be carrying NASA’s VIPER rover to the moon,” says Peralta. “With the three time capsules of the Lunar Codex archiving art, writing, music and film from over 20,000 creatives from over 100 countries around the globe, the [PTFN 2022] artists will be joining the most expansive contemporary cultural exposition ever launched from Earth.” 

About the Author 

Rochelle Belsito is an experienced art writer and editor, having worked for International Artist Publishing for over 11 years in several positions. She served as managing editor for all five of the company’s titles for over seven years, and her most recent role was executive editor of American Art Collector, American Fine Art Magazine and International Artist. Currently she is a freelance contributing editor at Art & Antiques magazine and writes and edits for various other industries.

In Art Review, Artist, Arts, Collecting Art, Contemporary Figurative, Exhibition Review
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GO WILD! Curated by Conor Walton

May 31, 2019 Didi Menendez
Painting by Susannah Martin

Painting by Susannah Martin

There’s no blank spots on the map anymore, anywhere on earth. If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind. ― Jon Krakauer

Inside all of us is… A Wild Thing. ― Maurice Sendak

Straight after I agreed to curate this exhibition, I sat down to dinner with my children and asked if they could think of a good title for a show. The first thing my thirteen-year-old son Daniel suggested was 'GO WILD!' and I thought “Wow! That's it!” As a title and a theme, ‘GO WILD!’ provides a context tight enough to offer coherence, yet loose enough to give the artists freedom to do what they do best. You can interpret it as targeting Nature in its broadest sense, or simply as an exhortation to take a risk; to unleash one's talent, express the Dionysian aspect of our natures. Both of these themes (and many more) came through in the work I have been offered, so I am delighted: overall, I think a bit of the zeitgeist comes through in this show.

Rachel Linnemeier | Camera Click | oil on aluminum | 16x20 | 2018

Rachel Linnemeier | Camera Click | oil on aluminum | 16x20 | 2018

In many of these paintings our relationship with Nature is obviously an underlying issue, but one which presents itself in many forms. In Rachel Linnemeier’s Camera Click it takes the form of ironical detachment. The subject of the painting stands heroically, camera in hand, apparently seeking Nature and ready to ‘capture the scene’, and yet the Nature he seeks already appears reduced, processed, flattened. The painting seems to comment upon the way so much of our experience of the world is now packaged and mechanically mediated. There is humour in this painting, but also melancholy; a sense of lost directness and authenticity in our relationships, both with that which is ‘other’ and with our inner selves.

Dana Hawk | Wildlife | oil on panel | 6 x 6 | 2018

Dana Hawk | Wildlife | oil on panel | 6 x 6 | 2018

Childhood is a recurring theme, which for many of us appears to stand for a time when we were closer to Nature, more spontaneous and whole, and wilder. Dana Hawk Heimbach’s Wildlife “is about being a kid immersed and one with nature.” Serena Potter’s Night-timers are adults escaping into an infantile world of spontaneous fun and irresponsibility. For Linda Tracey Brandon in Capture the Flag, childhood represents “that brief juncture where fantasy and innocence intersect with the wild, reckless freedom of living in the present moment.” These words are also appropriate for the child in Cynthia Sitton’s She Delighted in Them: living in her fantasy, unaware of the approaching storm behind her, it is, according to Sitton, “a love letter to my ill daughter”, and infused with a wistful sense of adult suffering and regret.

Painting by Denise Fulton

Painting by Denise Fulton

Some of the artists have used the nude as a way of articulating our animal natures. Susannah Martin's provocative image Schmetterling (‘Butterfly’) is the quintessence of Dionysiac rapture. In Tina Garret’s Baptism, a female bather evokes the pleasure of skinny-dipping; momentarily shedding inhibitions and finding peace through immersion in watery nature. In Denise Fulton’s Camouflage, the woman hides in plain sight, her form broken up by dramatic shadows. She eyes the viewer like a wild animal (though it’s not clear whether she is metaphorically prey, or predator waiting in ambush). Sarah Lacey’s exquisite drawing Cygnus finds analogies in human and animal form, in this case between human and swan. As she says:

Organic form - the way nature grows and shapes itself - is deeply playful and fractal, and shapes repeat, mirror and metamorphize across forms and species. My model’s bone structure, particularly in the shape of her collarbones, reminded me of the curve of a swan’s outstretched wings. I wanted to bring those shapes to life as a physical manifestation: her daemon, her familiar, an extension of her spirit and power. She is the swan and the swan is her. We are not separate from Nature, we are Nature.

Adam Miller | Diana and Accteon | oil and tempera on panel | 36x50 | 2018

Adam Miller | Diana and Accteon | oil and tempera on panel | 36x50 | 2018

In exploring the contested borderlands between human and animal, ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, several of the artists in this show have rediscovered the power of mythology. Adam Miller's reworking of ancient mythological themes of violence and transgression, suffering and rapture, seem intent on reconnecting us with our deepest natures. For the hunter Actaeon (whose punishment for seeing the Goddess naked is to be turned into a stag and torn apart by his hounds) insight comes at a terrible price. 

An inevitable consequence of reinvigorating of the mythopoeic imagination appears to be the rediscovery of Tragedy, all too apt for the coming age. Indeed, my wager on our dawning epoch is that (contra the superficial optimism of our ‘official’ culture) only a sublimely tragic art will do it justice. In these works, I see its first awakening.

Luke Hillestad | Medusa | oil on canvas

Luke Hillestad | Medusa | oil on canvas

Like Miller, Luke Hillestad brings continuity of human and natural form in a mythological direction. His Medusa, half-animal, appears not as an object of terror but of pathos and desire: in its way it too speaks of our situation in which wild Nature appears less fearsome and monstrous than beautiful and suffering. This Medusa stands like an endangered species; the carrier of an intuitive, poetic wisdom entirely at odds with the technocratic logic of our civilisation. 

Molly Judd | Raskolnikov | 140x150 cm | 2019

Molly Judd | Raskolnikov | 140x150 cm | 2019

Molly Judd is a young Irish artist snapping at her elders' heels with whom I seem to have an unwitting relationship of common themes. When I first saw her Raskolnikov I was so happy she hadn't called it Flogging a Dead Horse, because I am working on a painting of this title, and close enough in theme to hers (which I take to be ecocidal guilt, shame at our criminal treatment of Nature) in Molly's case raised to the level of sublime metaphor.

Martin Wittfooth | As above so below | 30 inches | 2019

Martin Wittfooth | As above so below | 30 inches | 2019

I’ve long been fascinated by Martin Wittfooth's depiction of a post-apocalyptic, post-human world in which a degraded, mutant nature recovers amongst the ruins of our civilisation. Wittfooth’s imagery is striking for its anti-humanism: ostensibly the human image is banished from his art and animal nature reigns supreme. Yet the physical or metaphorical detritus of our culture is everywhere in his world and the satirical force of his work is clearly premised on our species’ collective insanity: Wittfooth’s imagination is wounded, angry and feral.

Both directly and indirectly, many of these paintings bear witness to the planetary catastrophe unfolding around us, and the need to recover a sense of human identity in which Culture isn't opposed to Nature but unfolds within it. This is, I think, what gives some of the best contemporary figurative art - naturalistic in technique but using dream, fantasy, metaphor to plumb our psychic depths - its current impetus and urgency.

All these artists combine old-master virtuoso techniques with a contemporary sensibility to produce paintings that, in sum, tackle almost every subject, from the painfully or joyfully private to the great public issues of our day: politics, ecology, the fate of our civilization and our planet. If an artist's job is to give us images through which we can better understand ourselves and the world, this is exactly what these artists are doing. I think there's a huge appetite today, particularly among the young (and in the context of an often shallow, consumerist pop culture) for an art that isn't simply brash or slick or clever, but that speaks to our deepest desires and needs: for truth and beauty, and above all, for meaning.

There are many treasures to be found in this little collection of works, for those with eyes to find them! Expect to be provoked, teased, caressed with beauty, troubled with insight. You deserve nothing less.

GO WILD!
In American Art Collector, Art Collection, ART COLLECTOR, Art Review, Artist, Arts, Beautiful Bizarre, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Figurative, Essay, Exhibition Review, Figurative, Figurative Art, Fresh Paint Tags Painting, Group Exhibition, Ireland, USA, Artists, Arts, Oil Painting
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