Gayle Madeira

I am a contemporary artist based in Queens, New York City. My artwork is contemporary realism paintings, drawings, and sculptures of people, often in a landscape. I create portraits and figurative work. My art captures moments of beauty in a timeless fashion, transcending any real place and time and placing the viewer in a parallel reality. My style is influenced equally by old masters and contemporary art. It is naturalistic yet subjective and imbued with a relatable melancholy. My art shows an exceptional attention to detail and applies techniques that distinguish it. My paintings are highly detailed and possess both painterly and graphic qualities. The colors used are lush, intense, naturalistic, inviting. In many of my paintings, the language is in the eyes of the subject who look back at the viewer with a powerful gaze, and the backgrounds are often almost dream-like. My subjects are myself, my friends, and my family who pose for me. I choreograph them in hours-long sessions where I instruct them about how to move, taking thousands of photos. After that, I cut and paste pieces together in photoshop, make sculpture maquettes to work from, and sketch ideas before settling on the final pose. Sometimes I have a different model for the top half and bottom half since the original model might not be available for further information. Often I use myself or my boyfriend to model a specific body part that I realize I want later when the model is gone. I'm drawn to place people into scenes of nature with oceans, water, mountains. I like to isolate the subject, mainly painting solitary figures who interact in an intimate way with the viewer. I'm also drawn to movement, often painting and sculpting people flying or in a moment of movement.