Alexa Meade - Three-dimensional portraits.

"Rather than creating representational paintings on a flat canvas, Alexa Meade creates her representational paintings directly on top of the physical subjects that she is referencing. When photographed, the representational painting and the subject being referenced appear to be one and the same as the 3D space of her painted scenes becomes optically compressed into a 2D plane."

UPCOMING

Alexa Meade at the National Portrait Gallery Museum
Portraits After 5: Camera-Ready Color
National Portrait Gallery
Wednesday, June 6, 2012, 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Under The Unminding Sky

"These paintings reflect my interest in the way that the road delineates and controls how we experience landscape. From the roadway perspective, we not only travel from one place to another, we see landscape in a varied and complex manner. I use water on the windshield to create a shifting lens for the way we see the environment: it both highlights and obscures our viewing. Perspectives slip and compress, while shapes and colors merge into one another. I also work with relationships between surface and depth, between flatness and illusion. These images are born out of real experience and have a close relationship with the medium of painting: its fluidity, transparency, and capacity for layering, mixing, and blending."

Gregory Thielker

The Hyperrealistic Paintings of Jason de Graaf.

"My paintings are about staging an alternate reality, the illusion of verisimilitude on the painted surface, filtered so that it expresses my unique vision. Though my paintings may appear photoreal my goal is not to reproduce or document faithfully what I see one hundred percent, but also to create the illusion of depth and sense of presence not found in photographs. Many of my paintings are about the relationship of light with reflective and transparent surfaces and my journey to understand those qualities and convey my sense of wonder and intrigue over them. In all of my paintings the subject matter is a springboard and a means to explore my ability to communicate something unique to the viewer. I use colours and composition intuitively with the intent of imbuing my paintings with emotion, mood and mystery. Throughout, I try to remain open to new ideas as the painting unfolds."

Jason de Graaf