Portrait Commissions Available

Portrait commissions are available. No modeling experience needed, and no need to sit for long periods of time because reference photos suffice! Contact Lucas Novak for more details.

48” x 36”, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2021

Here is an example of a figure painting completed in January, 2021. The balance between beauty, vulnerability, and mystery is a timeless feeling, like finding a wild flower beside a waterfall on a cold mountain. A quiet peacefulness with a trace of sadness. It is not something people experience every day, but it is something people remember. What I enjoyed about painting this subject was the way she crossed her arms and feet, with downcast eyes and tilted head, holding her body in a manner that suggested vulnerability or sadness. She sat naturally and gracefully as the sheet flowed over her like water or cream.

Her pose also evokes mystery because the viewer wants to see her eyes and full figure which is blocked only by the loose flowing sheet. What is hidden just as important as what is revealed. Like an enigma.

Detail of face.

Detail of hand and sheet.

Philosophy Of The Eternal And Universal

How to create art that is timeless? I think it must represent the eternal and universal. In my endless mission to create more meaningful work that transcends cultures and borders, I went back to a few philosophers for guidance.   

Although it appears that Arthur Schopenhauer was a cynical sexist asshole, he had some interesting thoughts about art: 

The deliverance of knowledge from servitude to the will, the forgetting of the individual self and its material interest, the elevation of the mind to the will-less contemplation of truth, is the function of art.

A work of art is successful in proportion as it suggests the Platonic Idea, or universal, of the group to which a represented object belongs. The portrait of a man must aim, therefore, not at photographic fidelity, but at exposing, as far as possible, through one figure, some essential or universal quality of man.  

For example, tragedy may take an esthetic value, by delivering us from the strife of the individual will, and enabling us to see our suffering in a larger view. Art alleviates the ills of life by showing us the eternal and universal behind the transitory and the individual. 

The title of this painting is Tell Us Where The World Went. Over the summer of 2017, I camped in and just outside of Yosemite with some friends. I took a photo of them and used it as a reference for this painting. Only a few days after we left, a huge fire broke out and destroyed the area and thousands of acres and homes. The year 2017 is going to prove devastating with regard to wildfires. 

Tell Us Where The World Went, 36.5" x 48", oil and acrylic on canvas over panel, 2017.

Note: The title of this piece comes from a line in The Road by Cormac McCarthy, p. 166.

3D Painting

Over the past few months the wave for creating stop-motion videos has once again grabbed me, and clay is typically an essential material in their creation. By exploring different concepts and experimenting with various ways of presenting them through visuals in the videos, it's shifted me to a different way of painting. I'm exploring new terrain in my paintings by creating a form of terrain on the flat surface.

A Visit, 35" x 24", 2016

By forming a three-dimensional surface, with both subtle and distinct shapes and texture, the piece blurs the lines between sculpture and painting. I like the effect of the properties of clay, such as its natural color, its cracked surface, and the way the paint adheres to it. As the clay dries, it cracks naturally, creating an effect that resembles decay, a reminder of our own vulnerability in this world. 

What's a bit disappointing though, is that in this day of social media and the ubiquity of the internet in everything we do, art benefits when the image of it transfers nicely to our computers, tablets, or phones. Here I go again . . . Maybe most painters/sculptors are somewhat disappointed with how their works transfer to a computer? But in this case, I think much is lost (more than usual) of the painting when seen only through the "lens" of your screen; when seen in person, the three-dimensional nature of the painting changes its look based on the lighting or the angle of the viewer as a result of varying highlights, shadows, and the nature of some of the pearlescent paints used here. 

Detail A Visit

This painting references Pablo Picasso's famous blue period, particularly, one of my favorite pieces at LACMA: Portrait of Sebastia Juñer Vidal (1903). 

Detail: A Visit

The Portraiture Concept

Many of us have probably strolled through halls or white rooms with portrait after portrait of seemingly the same portrait over and over, dulling our overall impression of the concept of portraiture. But if we free our minds of categorizing, historical chronologies, and overbroad groupings, by isolating each work of art as its own entity, then I think the dullness of the portraiture idea disappears. 

I think the concept of portraiture will never vanish as it applies to painting. There is an intrigue with the way a person can interpret and represent another person through lines and colors -- it's organic and human -- something that can't be replaced by machines or any other form of art. I don't mean to say that artists should just repeat what's been done in the past; to the contrary, the challenge remains, as it does with all forms of art, to create something fresh and original. 

Freshness and originality are not defined by mere subject matter. They just require creating something beyond what is known. Whatever that means. Undefined by their very nature.

Here are two styles I've been working on. Whether these paintings are fresh and original, I'll let you decide.

Left: Seated Woman, 24" x 18", oil, acrylic, ink, canvas. 

Right: Woman On Couch, 50" x 36", oil, acrylic, ink, canvas.