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He reimagines 13th–17th century European portraits by transforming the work of old masters into abstract oil paintings.

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She challenges stereotypes of African Americans. Amy paints the other sides of black lives that are not represented.

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She uses both contemporary art and traditional Japanese craft painted unto wooden panels.

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She creates Mixed media works that resemble contemporary versions of Gustav Klimt works.

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Vengeance is mine … a detail from Judith and Holofernes, representing Gentileschi and the man who raped her. Click here to see the full image. Photograph: Rex / Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples

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Vengeance is mine … a detail from Judith and Holofernes, representing Gentileschi and the man who raped her. Click here to see the full image. Photograph: Rex / Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples

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This painting depicts what Gentileschi felt when she was raped. (Anger and Hatred for those that wronged her.)

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Armed with a brush … Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting, by Gentileschi. Photograph: Royal Collection Trust

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Armed with a brush … Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting, by Gentileschi. Photograph: Royal Collection Trust

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Gentileschi painted what it felt like to be a woman in the 17th Century. With words and images, she fought back against the male violence that dominated the world she lived in.

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Juan de Pareja (1606–1670)1650 Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez) Spanish

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Juan de Pareja (1606–1670)1650 Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez) Spanish

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Velázquez most likely executed this portrait of his enslaved assistant in Rome during the early months of 1650. He depicted his sitter in such a proud and confident way

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Edvard Munch's "Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu," 1919

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Edvard Munch's "Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu," 1919

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Munch studied psychoanalysis and created art that unraveled the mysteries of the psyche.

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Modern & Contemporary African Art. She completed the portrait in the Bonham's sale in 1946 during her second trip to the Belgian Congo. The woman depicted, a member of the Tutsi (Watussi) aristocracy.

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Edvard Munch’s “Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu” (1919).

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Edvard Munch’s “Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu” (1919).

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He showed his face deformed with each stroke of the brush.

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Digital/ Acrylic on wood, 2019 of Zendaya. Artist Unknown

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Digital/ Acrylic on wood, 2019 of Zendaya. Artist Unknown

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Use as Reference

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Balthasar, 2017 By Tai Shan Schierenberg. Oil on Canvas.

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Balthasar, 2017 By Tai Shan Schierenberg. Oil on Canvas.

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"Men without Women" Artwork by Tai Shan Schierenberg

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"Men without Women" Artwork by Tai Shan Schierenberg

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This is an interview based on one of his paintings. He is a British Portrait Painter based in London.

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COLOR THEORY - How to Paint Dark Skin Tones - Oil Painting Tutorial with Demonstration

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portrait painting tutorial - how to paint a face

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How to Paint: FOX FUR | Long Red Fox Fur Tutorial with Oil Paints

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Enjoy Curated Selection of Exquisite Artworks

Collective Pinterest boards are growing at a steady pace. With the number following a collection of artworks entitled Best Painted Portraits now exceeding 24K, it seems appropriate to highlight noteworthy contemporary artists.

We love art as much as you do. Wherever possible, links to the original artist websites are included in each pin. Because of the narrow-width Pinterest format, images may be cropped for maximum impact.

ClinicalPosters receives no compensation or profit from the promotion of fellow artists in this manner and promptly removes upon request any who do not wish to participate. Direct interest in art commissions or purchases to the artists or their representatives. With nearly 2K pins in the Best Painted Portraits, every artist cannot be named here but there are some that routinely get repinned and others that are recurring personal favorites.

Contemporary Artist Biographies

Desktop computer users, hover below alphabetical artists' names to view cropped sample image. They should automatically collapse. They may either be fully visible or require a tap on some mobile devices. Click respective names to visit full image on Pinterest:

1. Patrick E. Kramer (American, b. 1981), patrickkramerart.com
Kramer channels his OCD into extremely detailed hyperreal paintings of people, landscapes, and still life.

2. Malcolm T. Liepke (American, b. 1953), arcadiacontemporary.com/artists/malcolm-t-liepke
Easily one of the most popular contemporary painters, maintaining some 20 to 30 figure paintings in progress at once, Liepke conveys captivating emotion on each canvas.

Links change for various reasons-usually site redesign. We are discovering broken links to many pins sourcing collections of high-resolution images at Kai Fine Art. We are progressively correcting such links. Where possible, artist websites are included within descriptions even if the actual works cannot be found therein.

It should be emphasized that these are 20 of the best not necessarily portrait painters. We have only scratched the surface of thousands of talented artists. Digital illustrators and artists using pastels, charcoal, and graphite are excluded from this list. We hope you will follow the works of these and other contemporary artists. Let us know in the comment section below if you would like to see additional featured artists. There are many more to explore on Pinterest.

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20 of the Best Contemporary Portrait Painters

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Collective Pinterest boards are growing at a steady pace. With the number following a collection of artworks entitled Best Painted Portraits now exceeding 24K, it seems appropriate to highlight noteworthy contemporary artists. We love art as much as you do. Wherever possible, links to the original artist websites are included in each pin.

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The Face of Portrait Painting

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Arts and Letters

Painters like Jordan Casteel, whose 2017 painting "Yvonne and James" is seen here, have found success with a form that was long considered unfashionable. Credit... Oil on canvas. Photo: Jason Wyche, courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

THE OFFICIAL PRESIDENTIAL portrait began with George Washington, who was painted in 1796 by Gilbert Stuart, among the pre-eminent American artists of his time. This tradition, of a painter depicting a president, usually soon after the end of his final term, continued after the advent of photography mostly as a matter of ceremony. For hundreds of years, the presidential portrait was a ho-hum affair, failing to generate headlines or even a worthy anecdote, with the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt, who was so displeased by Théobald Chartran's 1902 portrait - he thought it made him look too coy - that he first hid it in a less-trafficked corner of the White House before finally burning it.

Rarely do these commissions make any kind of larger statement about American art, but last fall, when Barack Obama selected Kehinde Wiley - a figurative painter who deploys the techniques, poses and patterns of the grand tradition of Baroque European paintings to portray contemporary black and brown men he finds on the street - to paint his official portrait for the Smithsonian, it at least reflected the Obamas' well-developed connections to the world of culture. The Obamas are connoisseurs - they were the first presidential family to display work by African-American painters like Glenn Ligon and Alma Thomas - and yet their choice stood out, because Wiley is an artist whose stature in the art world comes close to matching Obama's in politics. When he first started showing his work in the early 2000s, Wiley's reversals of classical figuration were an outlier at a time when most painters dealt in abstraction. His ascent was swift; he had not one but two shows at the Brooklyn Museum, in 2004 and in 2015. More recently, his works were featured on the hip-hop television series "Empire," a show that also has featured portraits by artists like Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas and Barkley Hendricks. But what might be most important about Wiley's selection was that it seemed to signal contemporary portraiture's new relevance, the reconsideration of a mode that had been thought out of fashion, if not downright taboo, for decades. Long confined to historical museums and musty mansions, it seemed like portraiture had suddenly been rushed out of storage.

Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley. Credit... National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, via Associated Press

For centuries, of course, portrait painting was art. But by the second half of the 20th century, it had almost disappeared. By this time, critics routinely announced the death of painting with every new technological and aesthetic innovation. First there was the proliferation of photography, then the ready-made. Then there was the internet, and social media, whose rise seemed to render the medium of painting - not to mention portraiture - completely irrelevant: Why paint someone's picture in the age of the selfie? Most painters responded by getting weirder, more abstract, more experimental; representational figurative art was anachronistic, inert, crusty - a form of vanity exclusive to the rich.

And yet portraiture - in the classic, realist sense - has become increasingly essential (and visible) in the last few years. You saw it at the Baltimore Museum of Art's fall 2017 solo show by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, who paints intimate scenes of herself and her husband lounging around their house; at a September 2017 solo show at the Casey Kaplan gallery in New York by Jordan Casteel, whose humanizing portraits often depict black men in everyday situations (scrolling through a phone, walking a dog, sitting on the sofa); at the extremely popular Martin Wong show at the Bronx Museum in 2015, where the artist walked a line between playful and gritty in his social realist paintings; at a show organized by the critic Hilton Als at David Zwirner in New York last February, where portraits by Alice Neel, who died in 1984, looked as urgent and as vital as ever, the lonely eyes of her subjects holding a kind of mirror up to life, "pouring in energy from both sides - the sitter's and the artist's," as Als wrote in his essay for the exhibition.

So why is portraiture returning now? For one, there is an institutional urgency to speak to a more diverse audience with painting that depicts the black community, the Asian-American experience, the Latino face, to attract the various people who had been excluded from the museum by remaking the history of figurative painting, this time with color. Not that the trend toward realist portraits is exclusive to artists of color. It is evident in the rococo renderings of Sam McKinniss, who paints pop culture figures - Prince, Lorde, Flipper - like hallowed aristocrats. It was clear in a series of self-portraits by Justin Vivian Bond - who is best known for experimental cabaret performances - that were displayed at the New Museum last fall, and seemed to casually but definitively announce Bond's identity as a trans artist.

And there is another reason for figurative paintings' resurgence as well: We live in a time in which reality is almost daily warped in ways that were unimaginable even 18 months ago. We have swiftly entered an era where the very notion of truth, or facts, is considered fungible. As we reassess the various power structures that landed us here, it is stabilizing and reassuring to look at the work of an artist who is clearly in control of her craft, who is able to depict a reality that is material and grounded in recognition - of seeing, in the Facebook age, a painting that looks like who it is meant to.

THE CURRENT GENERATION of figurative paintings owes a debt to Kerry James Marshall, whose 2016 multicity retrospective cemented the artist's often-stated goal, one that is as straightforward as it is enormous: to put blackness into art history. The painter's brilliantly simple gambit, one that has allowed for decades of elaboration, was to literalize that blackness. Starting in 1980 with a mischievous little egg-tempera - "A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self," which features a grin missing a crucial tooth - Marshall has painted his African-American subjects mostly in unmixed black paint. Ever since, these figures have been seen - boldly and yet barely - in a variety of settings: the artist's studio, the hairdresser's, parks, bedrooms, outer space. Their blackness makes each inclusion subtly register as an exclusion.

This idea is expanded upon in the work of Amy Sherald, who was Michelle Obama's choice to paint her official portrait. Sherald uses grisaille - a method of painting in gray monochrome - for her subjects' skin. Because her gradations slyly allude to the mixed and often unacknowledged backgrounds of African-Americans, Sherald's paintings make an important statement about our racial history. One 2016 image, "Listen, You a Wonder. You a City of a Woman. You Got a Geography of Your Own," features a woman wearing a skirt dotted with black flowers. As if to underline the point, she is suspending a black purse in front of her belly.

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"Untitled (Studio)" (2014), by Kerry James Marshall, whose 2016 museum retrospective helped usher in a new era of realist figure painting. Credit... Acrylic on PVC panels, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation Gift, Acquisitions Fund and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Multicultural Audience Development Initiative Gift, 2015, © Kerry James Marshall

Artists like Marshall and Sherald suggest that in its exclusion of people of color, the issue of representation in painting is really a matter of misrepresentation. The best portrait painters working today introduce something new into art not through stylistic innovations, but by whom they choose as subjects. Aliza Nisenbaum, who was among the most prominent artists in last year's Whitney Biennial, looks at undocumented immigrants from Latin America in her work. The artist, who hails from Mexico City, shifted her painting practice from abstract to portraiture around 2010, while working with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera's Immigrant Movement International, an art project in Queens which provides social services to the neighborhood's large immigrant community. Nisenbaum realized that the portrait process - long, slow, intimate - gave her a way to get to know this community. Additionally, she recognized that painting these people's pictures would be one way to address their erasure in other areas of life. Nisenbaum has since expanded the project to include portrait-making workshops for the immigrants themselves. As if to complete the circle, the 2017 work "Wise Elders Portraiture Class at Centro Tyrone Guzman. En Familia hay Fuerza with mural on the history of immigrant farm labor to the United States," shows the students holding the portraits they themselves learned to draw.

Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald. Credit... National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, via Associated Press

What's most surprising about the recent return of classical portraiture is realizing how utterly absent it was from the art world for so many years, to such an extent that Andy Warhol - one of the people ostensibly responsible for killing the form - helped found the New York Academy of Art in 1982 in order to salvage the kind of technical fine arts training (most notably figure drawing) that seemed at the time in danger of becoming extinct. The Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s - led by painters like Julian Schnabel and David Salle - helped popularize abstraction by making it into a desirable commodity, but it also rendered the realism of a painter like Alice Neel passé. But painting, perhaps because it is so old, seems unusually inclined to rebirth, to responding to its time in surprising ways. As the commercialism of the art world expanded in the 2010s, painting became a subset of interior decorating, something that was easy to mass produce and inoffensive to live with: paintings marked by bold colors and forms, sometimes literally depicting flowers (the work of Nate Lowman) or sunsets (Alex Israel). In 2014, at the peak of this stylistic moment, New York's Museum of Modern Art hung its first survey composed exclusively of contemporary painting since 1958, " The Forever Now," a show that responded to the current age of distraction, in which contemporaneity was constantly being replaced by something newer. Only the works of Amy Sillman and Nicole Eisenman, who both have portrait-painting practices, hinted at the fact that in our next, emphatically historical moment, something old would be doing the replacing.

But an ever-widening chasm exists between 2014 and today. If the news of the world feels every day more like a pulpy political thriller with an unhinged plotline, painters have responded by grounding their work in observable, human reality. Most of this work isn't overtly political on its surface - there is Henry Taylor's monumental 2012 portrait of a woman grilling chicken on a barbecue, or Celeste Dupuy-Spencer's 2016 painting of a man making a playlist on his laptop, a cigarette-filled ashtray in front of him. But they also suggest that, in a time of chaos, there could be nothing more necessary - more defiant - than simply showing life as it's being lived.

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Arts and Letters THE OFFICIAL PRESIDENTIAL portrait began with George Washington, who was painted in 1796 by Gilbert Stuart, among the pre-eminent American artists of his time. This tradition, of a painter depicting a president, usually soon after the end of his final term, continued after the advent of photography mostly as a matter of ceremony.

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Gerard Sekoto - father of South Africa's modern art