John Reuss

John Reuss, painter from Denmark, does these really cool, really dark paintings of people. Sometimes just their heads, sometimes without their heads. The thing I like about these paintings is that they show heavy influence of cubism in some but not all. 

The works show a world inside the mind, it shows the emotion that you cannot see in a physical way which yeah art does that all that time especially in the realm of the abstract but it's a lot more obvious here. The colors are mostly cold and parts of the body layer over each other distorting the image enough to make it look very uncomfortable but not to the point where you can't make out where all five eyes are. 

Also here's a link: http://www.johnreuss.com/

Chucky Chuck Close

   Chuck Close, American painter and photographer. He's got some good stuff. He does a lot of portraits, some of himself and some of his friends and other people. It's not often you see artist going for the classic hyper-realistic approach that was so common back before abstraction blew up and cameras took over the world with their selfies and whatnot. I like Huck Lose a lot for his paintings being so up close (ha) to the subjects face and the scale at which he paints at is also remarkable. 

     The closest things I could find to abstraction in his work where these paintings I believed he called "pixel" paintings (don't quote me) and even these have an astonishing amount of detail in them. It looks as you're staring through a stained glass kaleidoscope, The use of color is really interesting, it uses the same colors he probably use in those areas but makes them more noticeable, or at least that's what I think is going on, I'm not sure, I don't paint.  

   These last two have a very 80s vinetage-esque filter type deal going on, and it reminded me of Fargo so that's also pretty cool. 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

    Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a expressionist artist born in Bavaria. 

   Ernst volunteered in World War 1 which I can only assume brought inspiration to his Self Portrait as a Soldier Portrait. Instead of taking the "war is hell" approach, he's take a more "war was a weird lsd trip where I lost my hand" angle, and that's something I can get down with. Jokes aside, I'm not sure how to paintings are supposed to really make me feel. I know that the war was bad but nothing in this painting conveys that besides the missing hand and possibly the naked person in the background but I'm not sure. Ernst looks fine though he seems chill so whatever.

        Ludwig was kind of a nut, he had a few mental health issues which I can't really blame him for because war. This image brings about a lot of paranoia with Kirchner looking sketched out at the mountains in the distance possibly being on fire.