A Newborn Chinese Water Deer Is So Small That You Can Hold It In Your Hands But When It Grows Up, It

A newborn Chinese water deer is so small that you can hold it in your hands… but when it grows up, it sprouts fangs and looks like a vampire deer. Source

oH HOLY FUCK MY VOLUME WAS UP ALL THE WAY SEND HELP

Curator’s Monday 155 - Artist on Tumblr

Alyssa Monks | on Tumblr (b.1977, USA)

Brooklyn-based artist Alyssa Monks is a figurative painter, blurring the line between abstraction and realism. “Using filters such as glass, vinyl, water, and steam, I distort the body in shallow painted spaces. These filters allow for large areas of abstract design - islands of color with activated surfaces - while bits of the human form peak through. In a contemporary take on the traditional bathing women, my subjects are pushing against the glass “window”, distorting their own body, aware of and commanding the proverbial male gaze. Thick paint strokes in delicate color relationships are pushed and pulled to imitate glass, steam, water and flesh from a distance. However, up close, the delicious physical properties of oil paint are apparent. Thus sustaining the moment when abstract paint strokes become something else. When I began painting the human body, I was obsessed with it and needed to create as much realism as possible. I chased realism until it began to unravel and deconstruct itself, I am exploring the possibility and potential where representational painting and abstraction meet - if both can coexist in the same moment.” Monks’s paintings have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, and her work is represented in public and private collections.

© All images courtesy of the artist

[more Alyssa Monks | Curator’s Monday with artforadults]

(photo via kuma78)

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