Vincent Desiderio

• "Couple", 2009  Oil on canvas  14 x 11 inches
  

• "Figure Ascending Staircase", 2009  oil on paper mounted on board  17 x 12 1/2 inches
  

• "My Father Fallen", 2009  Oil on paper  13 1/4 x 16 inches
  

• Mourning and Fecundity, 2007  Oil on canvas  97 7/8 x 148 inches
  

• "Portrait Before Orozco", 2010  oil on paper on prepared board  64 x 48 inches
  

• "Abstract Study After Michelangelo (Study for Sleep) III" 
  

  2009 Oil and mixed media on paper mounted on panel  8 x 10 1/2 inches

Usually I try to post artists who are busy trying to promote themselves, trying to make some small headway in the usually thankless task of making art a career. But every now and then I find out that I've been completely ignorant about a very well established artist. just google Vincent Desiderio and you'll see what I mean. Anyway, as you can tell from the work above, he is primarily a realist painter, whose unafraid of abstraction. The best abstract artists are realists at heart anyway (if I may be so bold). But his realism is often highly narrative, something you don't see all that often on the museum walls these days. The narratives, not immediately obvious from my examples, seem to be mostly dark, disturbing, sometimes downright grim depictions of adult life with occasional studies of the innocence of childhood where the weighty shadows of the future seem to hover around the frame. His pallette is mostly ochres & umbers, brighter colors coming in occasionally to set off the gloom of his psychologically shadowy world.

Like I said there's a lot of places to look at his art, but this gallery (www.marlboroughgallery.com) is where I got the images above and they have quite a few more.