Old Master Influenced Fantasy
About
Surreal or fantastical contemporary paintings whose imagery and style is reminiscent of the costumes, settings, and color schemes found in paintings of the Old Masters. For example, American artist Ingrid Dee Magidson uses Renaissance imagery in her mixed-media paintings, adding numerous translucent layers of paint and other media to create ghost-like portraits, while the contemporary Italian artist Nicola Verlato combines the drama of the Baroque with an aesthetic drawn from video games. Works in this vein are often characterized by an emphasis on observed detail, dreamy settings rendered with precision, and nymph-like creatures, thus merging the realistic with the symbolic and the established style of historic European painting with a novel playfulness.
