Crash and Burn

If you're lucky enough to live in NYC: stop reading my blog and get down to the Joshua Liner gallery!
As well as housing modern art from artists across the world, if you go at the moment, they have the 'Crash and Burn' exhibition by Canadian artist Ben Tour- a collection of 15 mixed media pieces. Most of the paintings (as you can see above) are energetic portraits of women- capturing the facial features perfectly, but making them his own his brooding grey and blue washes, heavy shadows and sporadic splashes of vibrant colour.
Although the overall composition is quite frenetic, it's clear to see a lot of work has gone into each piece- shown by the layers of acrylic, ink, Flashe, marker, and spray paint.

If you head to the exhibition page, you can find not only an online gallery of Tour's work, but some accompanying notes on his portraits, such as Shroud:
"Shroud, a second, even darker work on canvas, depicts multiple perspectives of a shadowy figure combined with the more explicit narrative element of a telephone (a ‘noir’ish, pulp-fiction attitude is present here and elsewhere in the show)."
Check it out!