is a New York based artist. He holds a BFA from Parsons: The New School For Design. He is interested in showing the difficulty and discomfort in fully understanding people. He leaves his subjects incomplete to highlight their limitations, as well as his own inability to see the subject beyond the influence of himself.
I don’t draw or sketch any of my paintings before I begin. Watercolor requires a lot of downtime for drying, so I work on multiple portraits at once. I choose the subjects I will be painting and pull reference photos. First I decide where the whites of the eyes will be so that I can preserve them. Then I lay down my washes and heavily pigmented swaths of color. The next session I primarily work with clean water to etch my desired shapes out of heavily pigmented areas and allow them to set. The last few sessions are worked over mostly with fine detail brushes, drawing out important features like the pupils and the opening of the mouth. For most portraits I try not to work on them more than five sittings. Generally I’ve found that after five sessions my experience of the person has changed too greatly, and the emotions become muddled.— Austin Power
More about Austin Power and his works here.
