Benjamin Duke

Dancing Plague - Colorful and Joyous Painting of a Dancing Crowd - Ben Duke

2023

Exploring the tension between the individual and their social archetype, Lupkin chooses his subjects from his local gym where they study boxing. In this intimate portrait, TJ is painted with soft loose brush strokes which contrast with his two black eyes. The painting is framed with a simple black floater frame measuring 17h x 13w inches. Peter Lupkin TJ oil on canvas 16h x 12w in 40.64h x 30.48w cm PLU011 The artwork I create is a visual statement of my moral philosophy. The language I use to convey this philosophy in my pieces is one of traditional symbolism, this being indoctrinated into my personality through an apprenticeship into a traditional stained glass...

Victor Wang's subject is a female seemingly caught in a contemplative moment yet a war rages behind her. She dons a hat shaped as a boat and carries and oar as if to "Dream Away" these other thoughts. Wang uses a blend of luminous colors and buttery textures to evoke these enigmatic moments of meditation. 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 Dreaming Away, 2017 oil on canvas 42h x 56w in 106.68h x 142.24w cm VWG009 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 rod...

Raminta S.R. Mint, a young and emerging artist, challenges traditional representations of the body, positioning it as a reflection of contemporary society’s fixation on physicality a...

Poppy Mills Untitled, c. 1990-2000 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 in. Framed: 39 x 33 in. Signed lower right: Poppy Mills Inscribed verso: Poppy Mills Poppy Mills is a fine arts painter of people and still life whose award winning paintings have appeared in exhibitions at The Allied Artists of America, The American Artists Professional League, The Audubon Society, The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Club, The National Arts Club...