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About Figurative Artist Wayne C. Allen

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I start­ed paint­ing back in the 1960s, but real­ly start­ed tak­ing it seri­ous­ly in Art Class­es at good old Elmhurst College.

I sup­pose that my “arts edu­ca­tion” began in Col­lege, at Elmhurst Col­lege (now Uni­ver­si­ty.) I’d paint­ed a cou­ple of things, in oil, while in High School, and they were “ok-ish,” but then… Art class.

The very first thing we were asked to do was to paint a por­trait from a live mod­el. Being me, I paint­ed her on plex­i­glass, and mount­ed the plex­i­glass on a box full of twin­kling lights.

The next paint­ing was tak­en from a “Life” or “Look” cov­er (mag­a­zines, for those of you younger than me.) It was a pho­to of a mom, dad, and baby, cud­dling. I loos­ened the image up a bit, but my colour palette was pret­ty bland. 

My art Prof gave me an “A”, but then, fate­ful­ly, asked me, “Can’t you see the colours in the shadows?”

Giv­en the amount of recre­ation­al sub­stances he and the rest of us were tak­ing back then, I guessed he was tripping.

Then, I began to see what he meant by that. There WERE colours in the shadows.

It took a while, but I saw what he meant. 

Real­ism dic­tates an almost exact match­ing of what is right there. In a fig­u­ra­tive world, the real­ism remains, but is “over­writ­ten” by the artist’s vision of how to bring out the emo­tions con­tained in the scene.

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I won’t waste a lot of your time on Art Theory, but suffice it to say that I hated, absolutely hated Abstract Art. Instead, I became a figurative artist.

To quote Wikipedia: “Fig­u­ra­tive art, some­times writ­ten as fig­u­ra­tivism, describes art­work (par­tic­u­lar­ly paint­ings and sculp­tures) that is clear­ly derived from real object sources and so is, by def­i­n­i­tion, rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al. The term is often in con­trast to abstract art:

Since the arrival of abstract art the term fig­u­ra­tive has been used to refer to any form of mod­ern art that retains strong ref­er­ences to the real world. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurative_art

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I pret­ty much stopped paint­ing from the ear­ly 70s to the mid 80s, focussing instead on pho­tog­ra­phy. But then, a cou­ple of pho­tos tweaked my imag­i­na­tion, and out came the brushes.

I even went through a hyper-real­ism stage; a cou­ple of my paint­ings from way back then have an almost pho­to­graph­ic qual­i­ty. The down­side, for me, was that the images have a bit of a “flat­ness” to them. 

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This por­trait has a sto­ry: a friend want­ed to learn to take stu­dio por­traits. Her friend came along to pose. She liked pos­ing so much, I pho­tographed her 2 more times (and pho­tographed her wed­ding, but that’s anoth­er story!)

This paint­ing demon­strates pret­ty clear­ly my hyper-real­ism stage; sev­er­al of of my paint­ings from ’83 through ’88 have an almost pho­to­graph­ic quality.

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I think I was ini­tial­ly enam­oured with pho­to-real­ism because I’d spent so many years learn­ing to take good photos. 

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Anyway, some years passed as I focussed on photography, opening a studio in a suburb of Chicago, and doing model photos, figure studies, and ad work.

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After moving to Canada in ’75, I of course opened a studio, and kept doing photos.

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I took anoth­er break, resum­ing paint­ing at the turn of the cen­tu­ry. This paint­ing shows the begin­ning of my explo­ration of fig­u­ra­tive art and colour in the shad­ows. It’s still fair­ly fig­u­ra­tive, but I’ve stepped away from hyper-real­ism… for good.

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From 2000 through 2010, I fur­ther loos­ened my style. Much of my work back then fea­tures a more styl­is­tic, “blocked colour” tech­nique. I pro­duced sev­er­al paint­ings that fea­ture the play of light and shad­ow, with a tip of the hat to my core “fig­u­ra­tive artist” perspective.

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More about Figurative Art

This “real world, focus” fit for me. My brain just does­n’t com­pute abstrac­tion. I like the “here and now” real­i­ty of fig­u­ra­tive art (I’m a sim­ple Zen guy, after all.) 

I there­fore start­ed to “open up my colours” a bit… which was cer­tain­ly step one toward becom­ing a fig­u­ra­tive artist.

More time passed, and that ques­tion about fig­u­ra­tive-style paint­ing and colour in the shad­ows start­ed nib­bling on my brain. 

I’ve nev­er aban­doned my love of fig­u­ra­tive paint­ing; each paint­ing I cre­ate has a very real basis in reality.

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I’ve always loved the human form, and that also fea­tures heav­i­ly in my fig­u­ra­tive art. In a sense, it dove­tails with my love for pho­tog­ra­phy.
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This paint­ing is one of sev­er­al from a lazy after­noon pho­to shoot. It is all about colour hint­ing at the under­ly­ing emotion.

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I think I final­ly set­tled on the per­fect blend of fig­u­ra­tive art and styl­is­tic art around 2016. My com­mis­sioned por­trait style “locked in” and seems “easy.”

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The result is a body of work that revolves between three themes: nude fig­ure stud­ies, por­traits, and “scenes from every­day life.” In each case, I fol­low my instinct to pro­duce paint­ings that are iden­ti­fi­able as “mine.”

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My process is to take a pho­to (or down­load an image) and to begin to edit. I have a sense of direc­tion and because of the advent of dig­i­tal pho­tos and pho­to manip­u­la­tion, I’m able to shift colours, back­grounds, body shapes and posi­tions, etc. before I trans­fer the image to canvas.

Fig­u­ra­tive art needs a strong basis in real­i­ty; but I don’t believe it has to be “accu­rate.” It’s pos­si­ble for cre­ative expres­sion to mar­ry itself with my artis­tic vision.

I like that I (final­ly!) found my niche. It’s actu­al­ly a bit fun­ny. I occa­sion­al­ly try to shift things up, and as I paint, I cor­rect myself, so the end prod­uct match­es my vision.

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Now retired (I spent 32 years as a psychotherapist) Darbella and I have spent the last decade travelling. (And then Covid-19 hit…) 

Dar tends to be the “scenic” pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and she’s amaz­ing at it. 

I look for peo­ple and sit­u­a­tions that inter­est me, and then turn the pho­tos into paintings.

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Please do look around at both my paintings and a representative sampling of my photography.

You’ll also see that I’ve added my art­work to cloth­ing and acces­sories. And some of my paint­ings and pho­tographs are avail­able as lim­it­ed edi­tion prints and wall art.

My style flex­es back and forth between real­is­tic and fig­u­ra­tive art. I’ve worked to learn to “see” the colours in the shad­ows… my art Prof was on to something!

And I’m proud to be a fig­u­ra­tive artist!

Please, enjoy!