Ann Strassman is best known for her iconic portraits of famous faces. Strong brushwork, earthy colors and sensuous textures breathe new life into images that are part of our collective memory. Her version of familiar faces seem to take us both inside their well known façades and beyond. The artist’s skills are equally apparent in her not-so-famous faces, birds of prey and trees. Those figures, as she renders them, rise to the level of icons that are arresting without any assistance from celebrity status. Regardless of the subject, there is a recognizable palpable fleshiness to her painting reminiscent of painters like Freud, Pearlstein and Fischl.
About the Author
Alan Strassman
astrassman
Massachusetts
Alan Strassman took his first photographs with a Brownie Hawkeye in 1949. An avid amateur for most of the six decades since, it is only in the past few years that he has begun to exhibit and sell his work. He has studied art history, drawing, sculpture, ceramics and photography at Princeton, Westchester Art Workshop, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [SMFA] and the Maine Media Workshops. His work, owned in numerous private collections, has been exhibited at the SMFA, the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University and the Mercury Gallery (Boston and Rockport).
Strassman's work stands out in sharp relief against the background of conceptual work dominating gallery walls today. A neo-modern photographer in the truest sense, he aligns himself with early 20th century departures from Pictorialism - sharp, unmanipulated, unromanticized images of the real world - and applies his aesthetic in the 21st century, rejecting the self-absorption of conceptual post-modern art.
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