FRANCIS BACON
was an Irish-born painter whose paintings depicted surrealistic figures and portraits in a rather painterly fashion. His figures or faces are often amorphous and blob-like, with either a dark or warm-colored background. Distorted faces and mouths, often open with teeth showing, are common themes. His work was often based from images and it often portrayed some kind of painful experience and/or isolation.
NEO RAUCH
is a German artist whose colorful surrealistic paintings explore many personal and political themes. They are figurative and shift between abstraction and representation, often combining several scenes in a dream-like manner. To Rauch, painting is an extension of the dream world.
ANGELA DUFRESNE
is a painter whose very painterly, watery works are often representational though moving into abstraction through swift brushwork and swipes of bright coloration. There are often figures as subjects, as some part of narrative from real life or from films.
LISA YUSKAVAGE
is an American painter whose work predominately works with well-rendered female figures, treating the female form in a bulbous or curvy manner, adorning it with flowers, fruits, or other plant like things. The females are often nude and very feminine. Her works are seen as "confrontationally sexual" with vague to overt eroticism.
LUCIAN FREUD
is a British figural painter of often fleshy, pale persons (painted from live model). The figures, often nude and reclining, are well rendered and nearly realistic, sometimes adding extra definition of shadows and angles which accentuate bodily forms.
MUNTEAN/ROSENBLUM
are collaborating figural painters whose figures are often based on youth figures from magazines and whose well-rendered paintings feature some pseudo-philosophical caption at the bottom. There is often some mysterious scene or narrative involving the young figures, who are positioned in strangely contrasting modeled poses.
ERIC FISCHL
is an American figural painter whose rather realistically drawn figures are often based from live observation or model, and are frequently nude and/or at a beach or other water source, with attention to light. The figures are either publicly or privately nude, shifting the feeling of voyeurism.
Of these artists, the two who most resemble my work either in image, process, or concept, are Francis Bacon and Neo Rauch.
Francis Bacon's molding anthropomorphic imagery is quite similar to my explorations of shifting abstract figural forms. His interest in the emotion represented through these mutated and seemingly mutilated figures mirrors mine. This piece by Bacon, for example:
is quite similar in concept to my recently completed piece of figures on a bed.
In this case, it is a warped figure on a chair. However, he has a more successful sense of atmosphere than I have yet discovered, and perhaps should take a page from his book concerning how to resolve the space around an abstracted form. Perhaps a more solidly colored background is successful in most cases.
Neo Rauch shares my interest in personal and political concepts and creating mixed scenes of seemingly random but meaningful elements. His figures are more representational than I usually do, but having more fully representational figures in my paintings seems undoubtedly a worthwhile exploration into more literal meaning, straying outside of the constant ambiguity of my paintings. His paintings make me want to delve more into precision-type surrealistic painting.
This painting of Rauch's combines my interest in molded form, seemingly random objects, and blending rendered form with painterly aspects (such as his pink sky).
At some point I would like to achieve the surrealist-landscape-narrative effect which he succeeds in.
