Fresco Tempera By Jamali

Jamali is an established, professional New York Artist. His complex surfaces and mystical imagery have been compared to the neo-expressionists Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. His gestural techniques link him to Jackson Pollock and the New York school. But the pre-eminent art critic Donald Kuspit has seen that Jamali's singular method requires its own name, "Mystical Expressionism". ​ Jamali created "Mystical Expressionism" the 6 ism in the history of art, a marriage of contemporary consciousness and art's most ancient traditions. Jamali's fusion of these opposites--the contemporary and the timeless--has produced a life work unmatched in its scope, variety, and spiritual depth. He has innovated several unique painting rituals and styles including; painting with his feet; Fresco Tempera; Pigmentation on Cork and Pigment Dispersion. He has attracted a select international and circle of collectors, drawn by his mystical style and charismatic persona. ​ Mystical Expressionism is a new mode of art-making that combines the scientific insights of our new age with humankind's ancient wisdom. Obeying the dream guide who set him on the path to art, Jamali himself has named his life's work Art & Peace. Through all these works, persistent themes and mythic imagery define a singular artistic vision. Jamali's paintings are inhabited by dream figures that appear and then fade away. Mothers, sons, lovers, and dream guides — these are the characters of Jamali's visionary cosmos. His hieroglyphs and inscriptions promise revelation without disclosing their truths easily. Always dwelling in the tension between image and abstraction, Jamali draws us toward "the beautiful resolution of opposing forces" — the moment of transcendence in which art coincides with peace. The source of Jamali's art and his life, lies in the primordial spiritual traditions of the East. In his birthplace Peshawar, the Asian crossroads city, Jamali drank in Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi ideas of the sacredness of being. He spent years of his youth with a mysterious desert people who still respect the shaman's powers. But he also studied modern physics and engineering. Jamali is the first to incorporate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics into contemporary art. ​In recent work, Jamali explores new materials and artistic ideas. In his paintings on cork, he creates a kind of negative surface, exploiting the cork's readiness to absorb and resist pigment. His photographs are quiet statements of profound spirituality. From the beginning, Jamali has made his own path. He has pursued an "ecological vision" of art's place in contemporary life, art as an essential part of our contemporary household and the vehicle of a new mythology. Jamali now beckons a wider public to take part in that vision. Join me, he says, in Art & Peace.

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.