Jeremy Geddes

Jeremy Geddes is an Australian artist that creates surreal oil paintings that are amazingly photo-realistic. Even though Jeremy studied painting in the early 90s, he had initially started out as an art director for video games. He went back to painting full time in 2003 and has had great success with his work since then. 

Jeremy's works often portrayed human figures suspended in mid air, free-falling or exploding out of buildings like fireworks. To achieve this level of reality and detail, he sometimes takes up to 6 months for one painting, depending. Jeremy is always looking for ways to improve the efficiencies of his rendering methods as like most artists, he always has a lot more images waiting that forms in his mind than he can produce. In the process of seeking ways to speed up his work, he's also mindful about details. He wants his paintings to be just as captivating up close as it is when viewed from afar.

Jeremy does not think that paintings are meant to be a way to express fully formed ideas. They should, instead, be able to put the viewers in a situation where there's a question to be resolved. The charm of a painting comes from the amount of information the artist gives to the viewers to help with the resolution.

Even though Jeremy uses photographs or life experiences as references to kickstart his paintings, he feels that they will only get him this far and he needs to find a way beyond it. To achieve that, he uses music to connect and show the progression of emotions he wishes to portray in his paintings.

Initially, Jeremy was more focused on figurative paintings and he was drawn to works of artists from the 19th Century like Leon Bonnat, William Bouguereau and modern painters

like Phil Hale, Kent Williams, Steven Assael and Ashley Wood. However, as he progressed and started seeing figures as an element in a much larger picture, he moved on to artists like Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper and Antonio Lopez Garcia. While referencing these works, he tries to view them as minimally as possible and find his way in his images as looking at other artists' works tends to distract you from your focus. 

Serge Marshennikov

Serge Marshennikov was born in 1971 in Ufa (Bashkiria, USSR). Since he was a kid, he has always been drawing, painting and sculpting from any material he had access to. With his mother's support, he was under the wings of a succession of private teachers and attended art studies starting from a young age. After Serge received various awards for his early watercolor and pastel paintings as a kid, he made his decision to be a professional painter.

He finished his studies in The Ufa Art College in 1955 and continued to further his education at the prestigious Repin Academy of Fine Art in St. Petersburg, Russia. Serge graduated with flying colors as one of the top students from the academy and was invited to stay at the studio of the Academician, Rector of the Academy, Professor Milnikov for post-graduate studies.

 Serge held his very first solo exhibition in the gallery “Sangat” of his native UFA in 1995, the year he graduated from the college. Following the success of his first show, he was invited to exhibit at the Union's Art Gallery. Since then, Serge exhibited regularly on a semi-annual basis in both St Petersburg and Ufa. His graduation work attracted the attention of faculty members from Brownwood University as well as Hardin-Simmons University and exhibited in the prestigious art departments of those Universities during his post graduate years. 

He's most inspired by Andrew Wyeth and Lucian Freud, two magic realist painters from the !9th century. Serge's sensuous and realistic paintings fully portrayed his subject's virginity with its dignity. The play of light and exquisite detailing in his paintings creates something between his art and the eyes of the viewers that captivates them and keeps them glued to his work.