Artist Alexandra Manukyan (American artist)

 

Artist Alexandra Manukyan 

Celaborate attire with which I adorn my figures. Heavy metal girdles, structured corsets, transparent tulle skirts and other theatrical costuming that add to the performative, and dramatic quality of my subjects’ gestures. I'm trying to create powerful, emotive, expressive and passionate artworks with an exceptional craftsmanship, and I want my work not only to be seen by the viewer, but also be felt.When you approach my paintings to examine closely, you realize that realism of the oil paintings breaks down, revealing expressive, variegating, energetic, emotional brushstrokes, with thick impasto on lights of the skin of models, and on details and elements of clothing. The enigmatic backgrounds I use in my paintings ad certain mystery and complement the powerful characters. My goal is to encourage the viewer to spend time looking at the painting in order to find hidden clues, textures and expressive elements.While being so real and classic, my paintings are also very modern. I focus on combining traditional oil painting techniques with surrealist symbolism to explore the presumably dystopian landscape of emotional and physical scars carried all too often amongst the female characters.  However, the subject of my paintings refuse to fall into victimhood or self-loathing; instead, the women that often preoccupy my paintings figuratively and literally wear their wounds with resounding pride and empowerment. The mistakes of their pasts, the festering wounds of pain and loss, and the hauntingly icy stabs of betrayal, none of these specters weigh them down or define their destinies.The fierce female protagonists, in my paintings cast my heroines in dramatic scenes that hint at pivotal moments in their paths of fate.