Ryan Mendoza- artist week 1

Ryan Mendoza is an artist I discovered a little while back but has really inspired my work. I love his work for the expressive way he applies paint and the limited palette he uses. He has a very painterly style and although he shrouds his figures in a darker light, he conveys a feeling and emotion in his paintings that almost tells a story. On his website a passage reads, "In the past, a family photographer would turn on the spotlights to capture his customers’ features with clarity and exactitude. But when he invites them into his studio, Mendoza turns the lights out. For the privacy of the dead does not require less discretion than the privacy of the living. The dead cannot defend themselves. Their fear of the dead is even greater than our own. Mendoza knows this and covers his characters with a veil of half-light. But, sometimes, he allows a child to enter his studio who, in the painting of some of his pictures, naively draws an object to so identify a life that is no longer. Because not much remains of a life: the memory of a tricycle, or a top hat that one finds forgotten in a cupboard.” (http://www.ryan-mendoza.com/index.php?/about/bla/)