person under a blue umbrella, oil on canvas

Contemporary artist Jordan Kasey is a painter who creates surreal and sculptural paintings, usually dealing in some way with the human body. Her latest works offer looks at human-esque forms that are proportionally skewed and off-coloured into abstraction, yet still, oddly and distinctly human.

We looked at Kasey’s paintings in a previous inspirational post. These paintings with a sculptural bent are stunning – it looks as if an amazing marine or coral ecosystem has sprung up in the head of a mannequin! Many of the artist’s most recent paintings depict figures at the beach, though only traces of a recognizable beach are ever shown.

I find these works really interesting as an exercise to see how much of our perception of an artwork is dependent on its title. Would we ever be able to determine that Person at the Beach, for example, is in fact a person at the beach - without that title?

person at the beach, oil on canvas