Portrait Painting | Daily Art Fixx - Art Blog: Modern Art, Art History, Painting, Illustration, Photography, Sculpture

Kris Lewis: New Works – David B. Smith Gallery

Los Angeles based painter Kris Lewis has a new exhibition opening May 20, 2011 at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, Colorado. “Lewis’s portraits are unique in the emotional involvement he invokes in his viewers. His works depict characters caught between strength and fragility, creating a feeling of mystery and isolation. They are painted within environments that are both unexpected and out of the ordinary. Lewis explains, “I want them to be real, but off slightly, so that viewers ask, what is odd about this?” The figures are incredibly realistic, but somewhere in the portrait is a subtle distortion of the figure itself, the perspective, or the environment that the person could not, or should not be in. Through the facial expressions, the gestures, and the physical presentation of the individual, Lewis expresses powerful emotions, which pull the viewer into the painting, fully intrigued with the story behind the portrait. In each piece, Lewis weaves an existence replete with love, conflict, beauty, tradition, fear or isolation.”

The exhibition runs through June 18, 2011. For more information, visit David B. Smith Gallery and KrisLewisArt.com.

Lu Cong: Painting

Born in Shanghai, China in 1978, and immigrating to the U.S. in 1989, Lu Cong is a Chinese/American portrait artist. Cong graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Biology and Art in 2000. That same year, he moved to Denver in an “effort to delay entry to medical school.” He rented a small studio on Capital Hill and began to teach himself to paint in oils.

In 2005, Cong made Southwest Art Magazine’s annual list of twenty one artists to watch under the age of 31. In 2008 he was named as one of five “Today’s Masters Making Their Marks” by Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.

Cong is regarded by many as one of the “most distinctive young artists to recently emerge from the American West. His paintings center around the faces of his carefully chosen subjects. His style pays homage to 18th Century Romantics, yet it is unmistakably conceived in and relevant to the contemporary era.”

For more information about Lu Cong, visit LuCong.com.