19th Century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres created portraits that posess subtle anatomical distortions that simulataneously give his figures a sense of vitality, and also an otherworldly cartoonishness. In this series I pay homage to Ingres by pushing those distortions near the breaking point - the figures are warped with digital tools, and then painted using traditional methods employed by Ingres in his own time. Not only is the figurative/spacial axis distorted, but also the temporal one - mixed with portraits of French nobility from the 1800's are products from 20th Century advertising, fragments of cartoons from childhood, and elements pulled from digital culture. Each piece in this series is a lense through which we can appreciate the past and also a mirror that reflects our own disorienting present.
