Michael Giles

The girl sitting, signaled and took advantage of the confusion - Michael Giles

2017

"I don’t do enough red paintings. I like red, but somehow it doesn’t end up in my work all that often, or it ends up pretty muted and earthy by the end. When I was lighting the sculpture upon which this painting is based, I knew I wanted to do something with the red lights I had. As with previous work, this painting explores entanglement as both a compositional structure and as an artistic idea. The representational part of the painting is pushed as close to a photographic rendering as I could at the time. Meanwhile, I’ve contrasted that with flat graphic elements. I also wanted to do something interesting with the cast shadow of the form: whereas in some previous works in the series the main form either had a traditional cast shadow grounding the it to the illusion of a ground plane, or no cast shadow which left it floating within the shallow depth of the image, in Untitled Construct 5 I wanted to do something more specific with the cast shadow. The idea came to me to invert it to be pure white. Technically this was a bit of a challenge because the whitest oil paints take months to dry – so this work had quite a bit of ‘sit and wait time’ between layers. Personally, I enjoy the composition of this painting because the red attracts the eye towards the bottom left of the painting, but the contrasting movements in black, gray and white pull the eye up and over...

I have sketchbooks filled with small thumbnail drawings which I usually base compositional arrangements upon. These are non-representational: just lines, arcs, mass tones, etc – basically just playing with formal elements. I had an idea to recreate these doodles as small sculptures. I liked the results, and wanted to have it feed back into my painting work as an intermediate step. That idea grew and I began lighting the sculptures with colored lights...

Continuing a series of formal investigations that blur the lines between representational, flat, and abstract painting approaches, I created Untitled Construct 3. As with previous wo...

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NIGHT TABLE is an oil on canvas painting by Eleanor Aldrich created in 2022. This piece utilizes a thick caulk on top of the canvas as an underlayment, creating a pattern of thick, c...

CLAIRE AT THE PIANO is an oil on canvas painting by Eleanor Aldrich created in 2022. This piece utilizes a thick caulk on top of the canvas as an underlayment, adding a linear texture. The subject of the painting is a young girl sitting by the piano...

Untitled Floralscape, an original oil painting on canvas by William Verdult, is a piece for the true collector. The artist's genius reflects a fiery artistic approach that inspires u...

Victor Wang's highly textured paintings involve thick layers of paint over collaged images from the Tang Dynasty. In "Let Her Go", the foreground shows a modern female figure sitting upon the side of a boat which gives the impression she is wearing wings and about to take flight. Upon closer look, there are various scenes taking place around her in the water - warriors with knives drawn, a jeep in pursuit of some unseen enemy, a cauldron boiling over. Influence by the Renaissance Masters, Titian and Rembrandt for their glazing and layering techniques respectively, the artist builds the surface using heavy paint, swirling and mixing the color on the canvas. The end result is a poetic and emotionally powerful representation of the human form. Victor Wang Let Her Go oil on canvas 48h x 60w in 121.92h x 152.40w cm VWG011 My path through life has been adventurous, exciting, and dream-like. My experience of settling into America in search of better opportunities has been both challenging and inspiring. I use the human face as a vehicle to paint human experiences - worry and wonder, sadness and pleasure - which reflect the emotional stage directly tied to my immigration experiences. I grew up amongst the sunflower fields in northern China. In my childhood years, I played under the bright, yellow sunflowers with my brothers everyday. China’s Cultural Revolution played an important part in my life. During that time, sunflowers were used as political allegories to depict how citizens of China should follow Mao who represented the sun, since sunflowers follow the sun’s movements. People eventually inferred the deception that this symbol masked. After graduating from high school, I was sent to a labor camp in the country for ‘reeducation’ during China’s Cultural Revolution. There, I was subject to grueling farm work. Often, I worked in corn and sunflower fields from sunrise to sunset. Thus, for me, sunflowers evoke both personal joy and sadness. Therefore, to deliver my complex feelings, I use sunflowers as a metaphor to connote my background and emotional stage. My incorporation of collages of figures from China’s Tang Dynasty represents my Chinese heritage and is a constant reminder of where I came from. The texture and earthiness on the canvas’s surface are inspired by the texture of the soil on the farm where I worked in China. Although I often gain great pleasure from the process of painting, it is most important to unfold expressively those feelings within myself. Wang belongs to a generation of immigrant painters from China, whose artistic background was defined by socialist realism but took advantage of their skills and broke away from that tradition to create new subjects in the U.S. “When I was a student during Cultural Revolution, Soviet realism art was among the dominant source of influence and it grabbed us like lightening...

Oil and gold leaf on canvas Sold as a Diptych, and also available individually For centuries, artisans and artists have turned to gold leaf as a way to make their creations shimmer...

Oil painting on wood panel Unique work Hand-signed lower right by the artist

"My recent work now becomes more involved with cloud cover and its effect on light and colour through both its translucent and opaque properties. Clouds are visible masses of water d...

Oil and gold leaf on canvas For centuries, artisans and artists have turned to gold leaf as a way to make their creations shimmer and shine. Also many contemporary artists continue ...