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Method | Teaching | Biography | Contact: aldolira@aldolira.com | |
Aldo Lira paints narratives and portraits using the techniques of the Old Masters. He acquired his skills at the New York Academy of Art, where he received his MFA, Painting in 2002. While at the Academy, he studied with Steven Assael, Vincent Desiderio and Ted Schmidt, among others. He also studied at the Art Students' League of New York and briefly with James Childs (a pupil of Richard Ives Gammel) at the Drawing Academy of the Atlantic. In addition, he worked for one year in Mark Kostabi's New York City Painting Factory where he had the opportunity to work alongside and learn from a number of Bulgarian and Russian master painters who were trained in the technically rigorous art academies of Eastern Europe . His paintings have appeared in exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Northern California, and in Rosario and Santa Fe, Argentina .
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Photo: Maggie Law Beyond Time Studio, New York, NY |
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I make narrative paintings. The subject matter of my recent narrative paintings reflects my interest in accounts of spiritual or mystical encounters through the ages. Some years ago I read a number of works written by scientist and author Jacques Vallee. He recounted and compared a large number of such accounts from ancient and Medieval times with contemporary descriptions of encounters with what are considered to be alien entities. Vallee was struck by the similarities found among these accounts, as I was after reading them. I am especially fascinated by the importance of Light as a factor in all of these accounts: Light seems to be a signifier of the celestial or divine. It exists both as a tangible physical and experiential element and also as a metaphor for the inner illumination that is often the result of these encounters. Since I feel that there is something timeless or archetypal about this type of experience, there is a certain ambiguity of time and place in my paintings. The appearance and technical aspects of my paintings, an important consideration for me, reflect my interest in the materials and techniques employed by painters during the High Renaissance and Baroque. My current painting technique involves the building-up of images through successive layers of semi-transparent and transparent layers of paint. I often utilize powdered glass of various types to achieve greater levels of transparency and purity of color. This allows a correspondingly higher level of light to reflect from the ground back through the layers to the surface, thereby creating a more luminous surface. In my upcoming paintings I plan to explore and incorporate iconographic elements of an archetypal nature, and transpose certain pre-Modern schemas of composition within a contemporary context. .....AldoX XXX |
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