Biography

Born in 1979 the son of a painter NicEllis Withey learned about art and painting at a young age. His childhood blended Rembrandt and Titian with sesame street and He-Man cartoons. He began consciously studying art early in high school and began exhibiting his work by the age of sixteen.

He studied painting, sculpture, printmaking, and philosophy at college eventually earning his MFA in painting from the University of Buffalo. Influenced by the European masters, Julie Heffernan, and Georges Bataille to name a few, his work blends Baroque theatricality and mannerist attenuation with an innate whimsy and often dark humor.

Of his recent work he says. “I draw much of my work out of a decontextualized dialogue with painting from the renaissance, mannerist and baroque traditions. I have a fascination with paintings of that period, as objects pulled from their historical context, in which meaning has largely atrophied into opacity leaving a complex and engaging visual puzzle. These works were created to be read, with a complex lexicon of symbols and associative meanings now useless the best of these paintings plead almost mutely for interpretation. For me these works take on a character that is almost monstrous, both powerful and pathetic in the strength of their insistence and the depths of their impotence. I attempt in my work to create a contemporary expression of this unique space.“

for a more complete artist statement click here