Pop Goes the Easel

As Art Director of W and an aspiring art collector myself I’m always interested in checking out the work of up-and-coming artists. One talent I’ve been following is a New Yorker by the name of Carlyle Stewart, whom I first met at a benefit art auction last May. Carlyle creates collage paintings, photo montages and drawings. A lot of his work deals with American society, identity and the media. He explains his style as “a meditation on the malleable nature of what constitutes authenticity in today’ s society.”

The artist’s most recent drawings incorporate an assemblage of iconic styles from artists including Warhol, Da Vinci and Disney. The result is a ravishing abstraction where it’s hard to know whose line is whose. Carlyle’s latest painting series (already sold out) is based on—no joke—the TV show Seinfeld. He told me that he plays the episodes one after another as he continually paints; each canvas is inspired by multiple episodes. The result has an uncanny resemblance to the work of Francis Bacon.