I will look at a Chuck Close painting, drawing, or print plan for a long time.
Chuck Close – I am fascinated by a portrait artist with profound facial blindness, and all that went into his inside-out process. The finished quality of the hands (take THAT Kehinde Wiley, you candy-fluff-hack), and the open grid system and almost no paint on the figure’s form, punctuated by the beautifully rendered geometric fabric – It just rocked my world. Who the heck lets Damien Hirst watch their kids?!? If you read the article, check out the last portrait of the woman in light brown – the portrait of Malala Yousafzai. This article in the Daily Beast reports that his children have been babysat by Camilla Parker Bowles, Nicole Kidman, David Cameron, Damien Hirst, and Malala Yousafzai. Jonathan Yeo – Blah blah blah celebrity portraits blah blah blah boring I don’t care… except… he did that great portrait of Kevin Spacey’s character Frank Underwood in the House of Cards. There’s something here for sure, and as soon as I figure out what heck it is, I’ll tell you. Even as I write this I keep going back for more looks. And yet… when I see a face or posture that strikes me (especially the beach teens and Israeli portraits) I can’t stop looking at them. They look as flat as American Apparel ads. Try finding a core shadow or a Rembrandt triangular highlighted cheek. The lighting in most of them are particularly un-art-like. 
Also, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at portrait photography that looks this… I donno… like an advertisement? But now reading the article and checking out a few more, I find I’m enjoying the awkward grace in the poses, as well as the stark compositions.
Rineke Dijkstra – I don’t spend a lot of time looking at portrait photography. I respect the movement, I can’t stand the paint. They say he paints like the Masters, but to put his paintings beside a “Master” Wiley’s portraits look like Disney cartoons. Kehinde Wiley – Yay for the man, boo for the paintings. Now… it sounds like she’s painting pretty? I need to check this out. Contemporary portrait painter series#
I lost some enthusiasm with the gruesome series that followed, but I did not lose the love, and she still has my great respect. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that these were a major influence on my own work. (Irony alert: It’s hard.) Saville later did a series of figures in movement, expressed by multiple arms and overlapping figurative parts. It’s pretty simple, all you have to do is put the right color in the right place, only not exactly, and you get to leave some parts as informal and unselfconscious process marks.
Thank you, Saville!!! As a painter, I’m very attracted to this style of painting in which layered and broken colorfields (juicy color swaths) give contemporary twists on classical painting. Finally, people with female bodies could be as brut as men in the pictures. They weren’t flaunting sexy, they weren’t idealized or small, they were enormous layers of direct, ample, unpretty flesh.
Jenny Saville – It was love at first sight for me, Saville’s series of gigantic fat grabbing ladies. Here are my personal thoughts about each of the above artists: From images uniting the Israelis and the Palestinians located on each side of the Separation Barrier, to Women Are Heroes which highlight the plight of women in conflicts and the famous Inside Out Project that involves portraits of members of different communities, all of these initiatives have been highly influential and continue to gain many followers and admirers. His artwork can be found almost everywhere, as part of what he likes the call “the largest art gallery in the world”, and because of the uniqueness of his ideas and working methods, JR is a success as big as his projects. In the manner of a proper graffiti artist and photographer, JR places his enormous paste-ups on buildings, houses, streets and other urban elements in order to raise social awareness. 
I’m posting my personal thoughts about each of these artists at the end of this email. You don’t have to like them, but you should know about them. Preparing for my Unconventional Portraits class, I found this post on WideWalls: a top 10 list of the most influential living – or barely dead – famous portrait artists.
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