"Girl Friends #1" Contemporary Original Expressionist Portrait Acrylic Painting by Judith Raphael

Description

Judith Raphael creates portraits invented from various sources including photos from family albums, children, grandchildren, cell phone snaps of friends, … more Judith Raphael creates portraits invented from various sources including photos from family albums, children, grandchildren, cell phone snaps of friends, magazines and always art history. Raphael's subjects are mostly girls with their particular discomfort in accepting the cultural paradigm of womanhood. Influenced by European painters like Balthus, Lucien Freud and Paula Rego. Raphael portrays young girls whom she adapts in aggressive postures to gently mock the macho stance of classical male sculpture, photographing them and reinterpreting their personae as they enter the cusp in life where girls hover before entering full-blown adolescence. Playful, yet serious, Raphael's figures appear as feminine foot soldiers in the process of becoming women in a complex new world.

Born in Chicago, Judith Raphael taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Moraine Valley Community College. Her paintings have appeared in galleries and museums in Chicago, New York and elsewhere. Raphael has won painting prizes at the 179th National Academy Museum Invitational, the Springfield Art Museum and the Illinois Art Council. She has been the recipient of Illinois Arts Council Grants, a Regional NEA Grant, a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Grant in New York, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, and residencies at Yaddo, The Djerassi Foundation and The Virginia Center for the Arts. less