Tim Okamura Portrait Paintings

Beautifully rendered large-scale contemporary figurative painting of two African American women. Oil and mixed media on canvas. Size: 76 × 60 in 193 × 152.4 cm Through a mode of portrait painting that acknowledges tradition but also tries to capture the rawness and urgency of contemporary elements of street art, graffiti, and urban motifs, Tim Okamura seeks to celebrate the individual but also – and importantly – discover through his models, metaphors for greater aspects of the human condition. Okamura uses an academic-based, realist approach to painting and incorporates the mark-making and spontaneous language of spray-painted graffiti, collage, and iconographic “signage” in an attempt to weave the nuances of relationships of ethnicity, social identity, and inner-city sub-culture into his subjects’ stories, as captured on canvas. The stories that he has sought out in recent years have belonged primarily to African-American and minority subjects – in particular women – a segment of our society who he feels have been under-represented in the history of figurative painting and narrative works, and whose strength, courage and stoicism he most often finds very inspirational. Tim Okamura’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Toronto Congress Center, the Hotel Arts in Calgary, Canada, the Jiménez Colón Museum, and Standard Chartered Bank in London, England. Celebrity collectors include Uma Thurman, musicians John Mellencamp and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (The Roots), director Ben Younger and actors Bryan Greenberg, Vanessa Marcil, Annabella Sciorra, and Ethan Hawke, among others. Exhibition History: Solo Retrospective - "This Story Has Not Yet Been Told...The Work of Tim Okamura," - The Robert and Sallie Brown Gallery and Museum, The Sonia Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, University of North Carolina (2013). black history month, African American, portrait, figurative art, figurative painting, black portrait, female portrait, black women, black female, women's history, African American painting...