Ira Upin is the Traditional Artist Spotlight winning artist for the month of November 2020. He is an award-winning artist based in Pennsylvania, USA.
Ira’s Solo Art Exhibition will be featured on the website for the month of November 2020. The gallery will promote Ira and his work on the Fusion Art website, individual online press releases to hundreds of outlets, email blasts to over 5,500+ buyers, collectors, galleries and art professionals, in online event calendars, art news websites and through the gallery’s extensive social media outlets. Fusion Art’s objective is to promote the Artist Spotlight winning artists, worldwide, to art professionals, gallerists, collectors and buyers.
Please read Ira’s Artist Statement below as he describes his history and inspiration in his own words. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see his exhibition.
The images included in this exhibition come from 2 series of paintings. The first 10 come from the series “TMTV” (Too Much TV, Modified Visions from the Tube). Thick black frames that are intended to simulate the blackness of a flatscreen TV surround the paintings. The paintings attempt to portray how at times people feel both guilty and engaged by what interests them while watching. Guilty because there is the criticism in our culture of it being a waste of valuable time, better spent on other things – yet engaging (especially now with the advent of hi-def flat screen technology) because of the visual, illuminated panoply of images that are constantly at our fingertips.
The second set of 10 images are from the series “Strong Man”. The paintings in this series also have black frames, but they are less dominant and act as a window that the images are seen through. These paintings attempt to consider and portray the loss of the powers of youth as the aging process causes a man to reconsider his true individual strengths and weaknesses. They are about the process of aging and the adjustments required to an individual’s ego, self-image, physical, emotional and mental abilities.
If you are interested in purchasing any of these award-winning pieces, or to see more of Ira’s work, please visit his website.
Also, please visit Fusion Art’s YouTube Channel to see Ira’s Solo Art Exhibition Video.
Thank you to all the artists who participated in the Artist Spotlight competition and congratulations to Ira and the other Artist Spotlight winning artists.
Artist Statement
I think about the making of art in a number of different ways. There is the element of nature, what you are born with in both the physical and mental aspects of life. Then as you age, you need to decide what to do with those abilities to make sense and purpose out of your life. I always try to make sense out of reality, to see things clearly and not shy away from the truth of things, to make sense of things so life works. In a way for me, my art is like personal psychotherapy, a way to understand my own contrarian personality.
As I developed my skills, I always found myself trying to tell a story. A lot of it was sort of a running narration of my own existence. However, I would always try to make the story have some sort of metaphorical meaning. I want the viewer to be encouraged to ponder the image and have it impart some value of thought regardless of whether that thought was what I as the artist intended.
At the elemental level of life itself, if you stop and think, everything is essentially something we do to keep ourselves busy between birth and death. The in between is the variable from one person to the next. Are you decent, are you compassionate, do you seek truth and a clear understanding of reality? Those are the questions I ponder to justify my life and what I do with my time.
