Lisa Yuskavage is this week’s Studio Sunday artist! Yuskavage is a figurative painter known for her use of techniques that emulate classical and romantic styles of painting, with mainly female figures that are cartoonish, physically exaggerated and overtly sexualized.

In this photo, the artist’s studio seems expansive, though with all the accoutrements of a painting studio. I like how gallery-like the opposite wall appears – the floors are clean, and paintings are hung in a straight, linear fashion, spaced at even intervals apart from each other.

I like seeing the huge amount of brushes the Yuskavage has lined up on her painting table behind her in the photo. It looks like she has at least one, if not two or three brushes of every imaginable size. Considering that her paintings include both fine detail and expansive, misty backgrounds, I think it’s safe to assume she gets plenty of use out of most of these brushes.

The painting table also contains many different tubes of paint, and on the other side of it I see a bottle of oil, probably for mixing oil paint pigments. Overall, though, the studio still appears surprisingly clean. The easel on the left-hand side of the photo is empty – perhaps Yuskavage began a new painting immediately after this photo shoot.

Yuskavage started her formal study of art in the early 1980’s, and her practice pays homage to multiple time periods within the history of painting. Her works have a surreal, narrative quality to them, with characters that express introspection almost to the point of narcissism. As a contemporary painter, Yuskavage is a definite force in the resurgence of figurative painting. 

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