Nigel Cooke

Nigel Cooke

Nature Loves You, 2011-2012

1989, 2009, oil on linen

Nigel Cooke's large-scale paintings depict fantastical hyper-realistic scenes. His influences include Van Gogh, Gerhard Richter, graffiti, Dutch masters, graphic novels, and Byzantine art.

Themes of his work include the sublime, space, decay, death, self-destruction, and landscapes.

He does figurative paintings that evoke anxiety with large open backgrounds. He tries to use colors emotively to communicate ambivalence, doubt, and conflict.

article in which he describes his first painting experience ;)

Inka Essenhigh

Inka Essenhigh

Subway, 2005, oil on canvas

Shopping, 2005, oil on linen

Inka Essenhigh's paintings can be described as Pop Surrealism. She paints cartoonish, highly abstracted human forms, turning everyday banality into a surrealist case study on modern, urban life.

Formally, she paints strangely attenuated forms in flat, simple colors. Her use of seamless paint appears digital and animated, kind of like Fantasia. Her figures appear distorted in their faces and bodies.

Lisa Yuskavage

Lisa Yuskavage

Edge of Towners, 2011, oil on linen

The Smoker, 2008, oil on linen

Lisa Yuskavage is a figurative painter who works with themes of re-emergence. She is concerned with the immediacy of contemporary life. Her engagement with the human form is representative of John Currin.

Adjectives of her female nude include lavish, erotic, cartoonish, vulgar, and angelic.

Formally, she places her figures in front of rich, atmospheric skies, so as to appear to occupy their own realm. Her lines and colors appear dreamlike.

Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown

Performance, 1999, oil on linen

Skulldiver III (Flightmask)

Cecily Brown's works ARE representational, although at first glance appear to be sloppy Rorschach-like ink blobs. Her paintings have been linked to Abstract Expressionism.

She creates expressive oil paintings of slippery body parts entwined, engorged, and ecstatic that form kaleidoscopically in the mind. She rides the line of abstraction, figuration, and pornographic abandon.

Her subject matter mainly centers around sexual pleasure, often public acts. She makes viewers question what they see by hiding her images in lavish folds of oil paint.

Lesley Vance

Lesley Vance

Untitled, 2012, oil on linen

Untitled, 2012, oil on linen

Lesley Vance has a highly personal and contemporary approach to painting, revisiting the traditional genre of still life in the form of exquisite abstraction.

She creates self-made objects as source material for her luminous shapes against darkened backgrounds. She uses oil on linen and watercolors. Her wet-on-wet technique is visually interesting.

Her work could appear non-representational but I see figures in some of her paintings - proof that the viewer determines the subject.