German painter Alpay Efe portrays a contemporary beauty in his works, but he isn’t interested in perfection. His paintings of still life, nudes, and modern figures focus instead on the ever so slight smile or the way light touches a form as he sees it. Influenced by Zeitgeist art and pop culture, he paints figuratively and realistically, using primarily oil paint on wood panel. The background in many of Efe’s paintings shows his art studio in Oberhausen, Germany. His studio is what you might expect- towels on the easel, cups of coffee and half-eaten doughnuts, and there is a certain attitude and specificity to the way he captures it. For example, he will attach objects to ropes to make them float and create an interesting shadow. To break the spell of its realism, he adds strips of white masking tape to the piece, bringing the scene to a more tangible realm. “It looks exactly the scene in the studio, as I see it or have seen, and not what the viewer should see them reality,” Efe says. “For what can be seen later in the image shows neither what happened nor what needs to do or go through an artist to make the picture complete. But those same thoughts I find very interesting, and I remember this duality, in which the image shows the working process.”
Brooklyn based artist 
England-born, Toronto-based painter 
For more than thirty years, Kerry James Marshall has been creating art to inspire important conversations about African American history and identity. His paintings follow the grand traditions of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, but with new narratives in which black people are the central figures. While Marshall initially began his career as an abstract artist, his dramatic shift to figurative painting occurred in the 1980s when he realized that African American artists and subjects were being excluded from major art museums and galleries. Marshall decided he would use the techniques of the Old Masters so revered in those institutions to create a new dialogue, in which black perspectives are given greater visibility within the art history canon.
When asked how to describe the human figure, artist