Discovery: Robert Liberace, painter

Starting school at George Washington University with a baseball scholarship, Robert Liberace had his eyes set on pursing athletics. As it happened, a figure-drawing class taken on a whim ended up completely altering his life: He was fascinated by human anatomy and by Renaissance art. Teachers encouraged him to pursue studies in that area, and he ended up staying at George Washington University to obtain both his BFA and MFA. Throughout the years, he has garnered much acclaim for his classical, figurative drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Currently, he is represented by a number of galleries and his prices range from $4,000 to $11,000. He currently teaches figure drawing and anatomy at The Art League of Virginia.

His technique is fairly conservative: watercolor-toned papers, red chalk under-drawings, conté block-ins, etc; as well as his subject matter: nude studies, portrait work, biblical and mythological interpretations, and so on.
His work has the blatant presence of Renaissance artists like Michelangelo and DaVinci, as well as the expected influence of the French Academics, such as Gêrome. His portrait work (in particular the studies) are constructed in a manner similar to Nikolai Fechin and perhaps even John Singer Sargent (although Sargent’s methods are generally unknown), —however, unfortunately, finished portraits for clients tend to look a bit overdone. Liberace’s style strength is intense and loose, and it’s best kept that way. Trying to give the viewer too much, or trying to tame things down, and his whole aesthetic seems to stiffen and break. That in mind, his strongest pieces are those set to motion, especially his motion studies featuring multiple stages of a figure (think Bargue meets Muybridge). 

Liberace is, perhaps at his worst, a bit of an era-chaser: meticulously painting Italian plazas in a monochrome watercolor, spending hours making nearly invisible hatch marks on a from-life figure sketch, etc. His work seeks to attain the forever lost, nostalgic triumph of an art era long extinct. Luckily though, his slight deviations to the poetry of motion (something not explored by the academics), is a trait that properly contextualizes Liberace into the contemporary art sphere.