Joel Rea was born in 1983 and graduated from Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2003. He has exhibited his work in Australia and the United States and has been acclaimed for his oil paintings in many prestigious art awards through out Australia. In 2013 he was selected for the Archibald Salon Des Refuses exhibition in Sydney, the Black Swan Award For Portraiture in Perth, the Fleurieu Landscapes Prize in Adelaide and is the winner of the 2013 ANL Maritime Art Award in Melbourne. In the Summer 2013 issue of American magazine Art Business News, Rea was featured as one of thirty artists under the age of thirty who are revolutionizing the world of fine arts. In 2014 Rea was selected as a finalist in the prestigious Sulman Prize held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and for the second year in a row was selected as a finalist in the 2014 Black Swan Portraiture Prize held in Perth.
Joel Rea’s hyperrealist paintings delve into the depths of our minds. Using the physical elements as a metaphor for human emotion and experience, Rea portrays nature as pulsating energy that is both majestic and threatening. Rea describes himself as a Contemporary Surrealist Painter, but his work is also a twist on the aesthetics of the sublime in 18th century Romantic art. In common with Romantic artists, Rea is interested in the duality of opposites where nature is a source of purity and timelessness while also a dark sentiment and force of destruction.
SOURCE:https://wowxwow.com/artist-profile/joel-rea-ap
Julie Heffernan is a contemporary American painter known for her Baroque-inspired fantasy portraits and landscapes. Influenced by allegories, politics, and literature, Heffernan’s work explores a sensual fantasy realm where plants and animals coexist in harmony within a lush, plentiful atmosphere. In a reoccurring series, she paints women standing in full skirts made out of ripe fruit or blooming flowers. “When I look back on my work, I realize I was wrestling with my own psychic and physical growth,” the artist has said. “I realize now that when I was doing the flower skirts, they were about a burgeoning sexuality. […] Now I’ve shifted my work entirely to the tortured landscape. I’m looking around for new metaphors for my own present-day experience.” Heffernan notably employs an aesthetic based on the traditional oil painting techniques of Northern Renaissance artists—such as Hierronymous Bosch—while maintaining a wholly contemporary atmosphere that seems to come more from science fiction than art historical tropes. Born in 1956 in Peoria, IL, Heffernan went on to receive her BFA from the University of California Santa Cruz and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 1985, where she worked alongside fellow figurative painter Lisa Yuskavage. Today, Herffernan’s works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Knoxville Museum of Art, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond, among others. She lives and works in New York, NY.
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