Matthew Durante Paintings

"Fragment 9" by Rudolf Kosow is a striking miniature painting that employs a minimalist yet impactful use of color and form to convey deep emotional and psychological states. The art...

"Fragment" by Rudolf Kosow is a deeply introspective miniature painting on wood that subtly plays with shadow and light to evoke a sense of hidden depths within the human form. This ...

As is generally the case with my paintings, this work proceeded from a place of unknowing. The specificity of imagery and technique belie the non-specific character of the ideas and narratives presented. The imagery is not tied to any pre-existent source (textual or other). It is not preconceived by the artist, rather it is produced spontaneously in the process of painting. That said, it seems both easy and sensible to connect the imagery in this painting to common cultural material, especially that from very ancient sources. The central figure is very much like a totemic Neolithic goddess- the sort of which seem to be among the most ancient artistic works, examples are extant from eras stretching back tens of thousands of years. A lot has been written about figures of that kind but of course no one can reasonably claim to truly understand them. Here the great goddess appears with wings and entwined serpents. Crowned also with a glowing orb she has become an emblem of a matristic hermetica. The smaller figure may be less evidently archetypical. She is a younger goddess, a daughter like Persephone to Demeter. She lifts the breasts of her mother signifying perhaps how the presence of the child evokes the nurturing qualities of the mother or how Persephone’s seasonal ascent from the underworld awakens in her mother the impulse to again give life to the world. The cluster of gynomorphic figures contained by the crescent moon at the center of the painting refer to the balanced transformations of the lunar cycle and their mysteriously harmonic physical manifestation in the vital cycles of a woman’s body. At their axis is the cycloptical abdomen of the figure enthroned on the moon. The entire totem rises from a terrestrial gateway into an open landscape. In the background megaliths obscure the horizon. They represent a first boundary in time- the beginning of history. Below is the gateway, the opening to an inner earth...

For Playboy Magazine, German-American artist and illustrator Franz Altschuler paints a heart-pounding scene of a red-light district in Tunisia. What's immediately distinctive is how ...

A Large, Dynamic Mid-Century Modern Painting of a Chicago Night Club Showgirl by Noted Artist, Rudolph T. Pen (Am. 1918 - 1989). Painted in the 1960s, this is a large, vertical, abs...

A solitary back, stripped of identity, rendered in layers of translucent scumbling and incised abrasion. The flesh becomes terrain—scratched, weathered, elusive. In this fragment, R...

“I thought the world was turned upside down when I started this body of work right after the 2016 presidential election. Little did I know. I had gone to the Woman's March in Washing...

Brightly colored expressionist nude figurative painting of a reclining nude female with bold yellow, blue, and magenta accents by Linda Goodman (American...

“I thought the world was turned upside down when I started this body of work right after the 2016 presidential election. Little did I know. I had gone to the Woman's March in Washing...

A moment of retreat, a whisper of flesh against shadow. The female form turns inward, her back becoming the quiet locus of emotion. In this fragment, Kosow softens the tactile abrasi...

This is a version of the Renaissance motif known as "Death and the Maiden". I think the motif generally was meant to condemn Voluptus (born of the...

“I thought the world was turned upside down when I started this body of work right after the 2016 presidential election. Little did I know. I had gone to the Woman's March in Washing...