Banaby Witfield is, in my humble opinion, an incredibly talented artist. I've been drooling over his work for a couple of years now, and every time I look I see something I didn't notice before. His renderings of his subjects are so visceral, confrontational, and unapologetic that one can't help but feel feelings when one looks at them. He's been written up in oodles of art rags here and there for some time now, and he has really profound things to say with his work. I found the following excerpt on the website for Stux Gallery, which represents him:"Whitfield’s works are at once hopelessly romantic and urgently contemporary. His work simultaneously pulls inspiration from Rococo era portraiture and contemporary fashion advertising. He seamlessly weaves cleverly appropriated Old-Master quotations with images sifted spontaneously from internet sources. The result is works loaded with inside jokes that belong to our twenty-first century psyche. Whitfield’s characters are rendered in gorgeously soft and dreamy pastel, their bodies glowing with eerie internal light, but perversely marred with sickly hues that allude to bruising, rotting, sweltering flesh. Something menacing seems to have a grip on these pastel beauties and the narrative clues are compellingly composed to allow the viewer partial access but ultimate suspense. The indecipherability of Whitfield's highly personal symbolism begins to breakdown as clues to the artist's appropriations surface, illuminating the development of his personal artistic vocabulary. "
To see more:
http://barnabywhitfield.com/pages/main.html
http://www.stuxgallery.com/site/www/artist_gallery/37
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