Meghan Howland

Meghan is a young artist, born in 1985, living and working in Portland, Maine. She studied painting at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and studied in Italy for a year also. Meghan's close detail of figures clothes and hair is outstanding, but most interestingly she focuses many of her paintings around the obstruction of the face, most commonly birds with outstretched wings.

Meghan kindly sent me her statement:

"Meghan Howland is an emerging artist living and working in Portland, Maine. Her work offers a unique range of styles and observations, while often personal in their meaning, ventures to examine larger cultural and emotional issues.  Through a haze of oil paint, and sometimes animals, we are confronted by situations that are at once disarmingly beautiful, yet are infused with an implied sense of yearning, loss, or disaster. In recent work, subjects are bathed in nature in a subtly unnatural way. Naive to or unaffected by what is happening around them, figures are often used to explore issues of fragility, identity, and our individual understandings of nature within our own personal, somewhat obscure relationship to it." 

www.meghanhowland.com

Huang Zheng

Huang Zheng, a Chinese artist, paints hyper realistic portraits up close of women's faces.

Art Slant

Alyssa Monks

Alyssa Monks is a realist painter from New Jersey. She has studied art in Florence, Italy and New York City, USA, as well as also teaching in New York. Monks uses natural filters such as glass, water and steam to distort the shapes of the body in her paintings. Her most recent artworks involve painting the figure behind a shower screen, the steam distorting the body. Her works are extremely detailed and exact, heres a statement from Monks:

"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,” Alyssa states, “I am exploring the possibility and potential where representational painting and abstraction meet - if both can coexist in the same moment."

Check Alyssa's website for more!