Wednesday 27th July 2016On today's edition of Artist Spotlight, we're going to take a look at the work on an up and coming young portrait artist named Joshua Miels. Joshua, or Josh as he prefers to be called, works primarily in oil paint in an impasto style, building up layers and layers of paint over a great deal of time.
His work focuses primarily on faces in almost garish hues, but there is something remarkably appealing about his portraits despite their relative lack of a powerful emotion. When contrasted with many other portrait artists, his work seems almost undirected and unfocused, but this is arguably the entire point.
As he explains on his website, "Through my portraits I aim to express the ambiguity of psychical emotion by limiting what feelings my subjects portray. These large-scale paintings of males, most of who I know personally appear somewhat nonchalant. Unable to immediately relate with direct human emotions, viewers look past what they see at face-value, prompting people to question the real individual. "
Whether or not you buy this particular rationale, there's no denying the raw talent that he has when it comes to his use of colour and texture in his work. The texture is developed using the impasto technique, a word from Italian meaning dough, which is immediately apparent when you see the extremely thick quality of the paint that is used - it really can seem like working with dough.
Miels uses this technique to great effect throughout his work, and it's very interesting to see the progression of his style over the last couple of years. You can visit his website at joshuamiels.com to see more of his work, and to decide for yourself how you feel about his interpretation of the male emotional world.
If you're in the market for purchasing work by a contemporary living and practicing artist instead of a piece done by someone long dead, you can swing by his website to order works directly from him. This is a remarkable testament to the equalizing power of the internet, where artists no longer depend on a gallery to sell themselves but can appeal directly to the consumer with some clever marketing.
After all, that's what Gallereo is all about, isn't it? Enjoy!
Posted on July 27th 2016 on 09:54pm