Nora See

Lucky Duck

2017

Michael Tole is a figurative painter currently living in Tempe, AZ with his wife and daughters. A Texas native, most of his 20 year long career was spent in Dallas. After relocating to Tempe, his work experienced a significant shift from photo-based paintings of retail interiors to fantastical figurative inventions based on pop culture imagery he has encountered via his two daughters’ taste in music videos, and his proximity to Southern California and it’s particular brand of Disney-esque hedonism. Mr. Tole’s career includes shows in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and Miami. His work has been reviewed in Art Forum International...

NORA SEE grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where, as a child, she taught herself to draw. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans. She works and lives in New Orleans. In her oil paintings, Nora See renders framed paintings on walls with which human figures interact. Through her classical painting style and the use of historical visual references, her pieces contrast the past with the present. By combining these temporal elements with the use of frames as containers, she explores themes of consumption, imprisonment, and liberation. Nora’s work has been exhibited in a variety of venues and is also in the personal collection of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. The artist says of her work... “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” A quote oft attributed to various sources that was never actually uttered by any of them. Though Mark Twain elaborated on the sentiment: “Ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms.” In the Framed Series, I use my 1% contribution to combine issues of consumption with my autobiography. I paint copies of copies of paintings within paintings to reference the appropriation, commodification, and altered continuum of art. My paintings of paintings are based on photographs of originals to perpetuate the continual distillation of form, given the ease with which images are presently exchanged and modified. Further, by reducing historically significant paintings to framed objects...

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