1970s Afi

Jack Graves III is an American artist, born in 1988 in Jacksonville, Florida. He grew up surrounded by inspiration, having an art dealer as a father — John Graves Jr., who founded The Collector's Exchange in St. Augustine, FL in 1978 (today Graves International Art).

At the age of 5, Graves’s family moved away from urban Jacksonville, Florida, to rural Somerset, Virginia. There, he grew up in the country, attending and graduating from Grymes Memorial School in 2003 winning the Art Departmental award. He then attended the Blue Ridge School for four years, an all-male boarding school founded more than 100 years ago, also winning the Art Departmental award there out of the entire student body in 2007. Upon high school graduation, Graves attended school abroad for a year, studying art at the University of Newcastle, UK, and then back to the United States to finish at Hampden-Sydney College, VA. He would be recognized for his art at both of these colleges. A large photograph portrait of Graves working in the college's art studio while an art student hangs today within the ground floor of the famous Bortz Library at Hampden-Sydney College.

After college, Graves took his talents into the art world, working in Charlottesville, VA. He mainly works in acrylic paints, but also some pen and ink works on paper. He is predominantly represented by the gallery operated by his father John Graves and brother Alex Graves, Graves International Art in St. Augustine, FL, although he regularly participates in shows and exhibitions among other galleries along the East Coast of the United States.

Graves’s work is featured on the two most exclusive online art marketplaces, 1stDibs and Artsy. Over the course of 10 years, Graves has created more than a handful of painting series: “Abstract,” “Americana,” “Aura,” “Diamond,” “Eclecticism” (Supreme), “Rorschach,” and most notably, his very popular “Icon” series. Since 2011, Graves’s work has been placed in private collections around the world from New York to Hong Kong. He has placed work in private collections in over 35 states in the United States and almost 20 different countries worldwide. Notable acquisitions include Princess Diana Icon III (2019), which was placed into the Princess Diana Museum, Los Angeles, CA, and The Venus of Alexandria Icon (Yves Klein) (2019), which was placed into a private collection within the royal family of Qatar.

Today, Graves lives and works in Jacksonville, FL.

Find original Jack Graves III paintings and other art on 1stDibs.

Used to refer to a time rather than an aesthetic, Contemporary art generally describes pieces created after 1970 or being made by living artists anywhere in the world. This immediacy means it encompasses art responding to the present moment through diverse subjects, media and themes. Contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, video and more frequently includes work that is attempting to reshape current ideas about what art can be, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s use of candy to memorialize a lover he lost to AIDS-related complications to Jenny Holzer’s ongoing “Truisms,” a Conceptual series that sees provocative messages printed on billboards, T-shirts, benches and other public places that exist outside of formal exhibitions and the conventional “white cube” of galleries.

Contemporary art has been pushing the boundaries of creative expression for years. Its disruption of the traditional concepts of art are often aiming to engage viewers in complex questions about identity, society and culture. In the latter part of the 20th century, contemporary movements included Land art, in which artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer create large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations and other works in soil and bodies of water; Sound art, with artists such as Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz centering art on sonic experiences; and New Media art, in which mass media and digital culture inform the work of artists such as Nam June Paik and Rafaël Rozendaal.

The first decades of the 21st century have seen the growth of Contemporary African art, the revival of figurative painting, the emergence of street art and the rise of NFTs, unique digital artworks that are powered by blockchain technology.

Major Contemporary artists practicing now include Ai Weiwei, Cecily Brown, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Kara Walker.

Find a collection of Contemporary prints, photography, paintings, sculptures and other art on 1stDibs.

An elegant and sophisticated decorative touch in any living space, portrait paintings have remained popular throughout the years and are widely loved pieces of art for display in many homes today.

Portrait paintings are at least as old as ancient Egypt, where realistic, lifelike depictions of the recently deceased — commonly known as “mummy portraits” — were painted on wooden panels and affixed to mummies as part of the burial tradition.

For centuries, painters have used portraiture as a means of expressing a subject’s nobility, societal status and authority. Portraits were given as gifts in Renaissance Europe, and a portrait artist might have been commissioned to help mark a significant occasion such as a wedding or a promotion to high office. Prior to the advent of photography, which eventually replaced painted portraits as a quicker and more efficient way of capturing a person’s essence, the subject of a portrait had to sit for hours until the painter had finished. And during the 18th century in particular, if an artist commissioned for a portrait struggled with how to adequately memorialize and capture a subject’s likeness, sometimes a portrait painting wasn’t completed for up to a year.

Whether it’s part of the gallery-style approach to your living-room or dining-room walls or merely inspiration as you devise an eye-grabbing color scheme in your home, a portrait painting is a timeless decorative object for any interior. A landscape painting or sculpture might give you the kind of insight into a specific region of the world or a different culture that you can ascertain only through art. Similarly, when you take the time to learn about the subject of a portrait painting that you bring into your home — the sitter’s history, the relationship between the sitter and the artist should one exist, the story of how the portrait came to be — that work can become intensely personal in addition to its place as an object for an art-hungry corner of your apartment or house.

On 1stDibs, visit a vast collection of famous portrait paintings or works by emerging artists. Search by medium to find the right portrait paintings for your home in oil paint, synthetic resin paint and more. Find portrait paintings in a variety of styles, too, including contemporary, Impressionist and Pop art, or search by artist to find unique works created by painters such as Mark Beard, Steve Kaufman and Montse Valdés.