BETHEL, CONN.- Louis Markoya, a 5-year collaborator and protégé of Salvador Dali, whose artistic mission has been to take Dali’s surrealism and Nuclear-Mysticism to the next level, has just completed an astonishing series of “liquified” portraits of international luminaries.
The 12 oils on canvas, all 12” x 12”, are part of Markoya’s “The Influences” series, which pays homage to a disparate selection of famous individuals who’ve influenced the 67-year-old Connecticut artist’s life and work. Not surprisingly, one of the portraits is of Dali.
“Dali introduced me to Surrealism, Nuclear-Mysticism, and the power of the image,” says Markoya, who, among other efforts, helped paint some of the multi-colored cubes in Dali’s highly popular “Lincoln in Dalivision” painting in the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. “Working with him for five-plus years was an amazing journey,” Markoya added.
Of Markoya’s primarily black & white painting of Albert Einstein, he remarked, “The mind of Einstein set a goal for the rest of us. His inquisitive thought and problem-solving changed the world for all of us.”
Regarding his portrait of Bob Dylan, the artist points out that the songwriter-musician was “my first intellectual influence,” while he credits Ed “Big Daddy” Roth – artist, cartoonist, custom car designer/builder, who’s also part of the series – with being his first artistic influence.
“There is space between matter…but this space is not hard or rigid, it is soft, fluid, and because it contains air, somewhat gaseous,” Markoya explains. “This causes at the edge of anyone’s ‘solid’ matter a transition state, where they are more fluid than solid.”
Also in the series, which took Markoya four months to complete, are Jimi Hendrix, Benoit Mandelbrot, father of the fractal – a technique Markoya has applied in several key paintings, including the Mandelbrot portrait; Iris Van Herpen, Dutch fashion designer; Thom Yorke, front-man for Radiohead; Don Miguel Ruiz, Mexican writer and philosopher; Friedrich Nietzsche, and Lee Alexander McQueen, British fashion designer and couturier.
Markoya is working on details regarding a forthcoming exhibition of his unique portraits and expects to announce details soon.
