2nd Place Winning Entry, 2024 Portraits Competition
Jackson Wrede, Girl Wearing Fur, oil
Jackson Wrede
Grand Rapids artist, Jackson Wrede, earned his master of fine arts degree and just three years later competed against some of the top portrait painters in the world in the Portrait Society of America's 2024 International Competition. He received a Certificate of Excellence, placing in the top 50 out of 3,000 entries. He has won awards in national art shows and was featured as one of Southwest Art Magazine's "21 Under 31, Young Artists to Watch" in 2023.
Jackson Wrede, Self Portrait in a Cowboy Hat, oil
Wrede's painting, Girl Wearing Fur, has won 2nd Place in our Portraits Competition. Here he discusses the inspiration, technique, and purpose behind it:
"I'm fascinated by how the artists from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries depicted their subjects in contrast to our contemporary perspective, where photography, popular culture, and other technologies have such a stranglehold on how we think about portraiture.
“Rembrandt, Vermeer, Reubens, and others established the conventions of beauty that I'm still trying to chase in my work today. In this portrait, I'm referencing a Titian painting called Girl in a Fur, giving it a contemporary twist. My fiancée, Gillian, was the model.
“My process includes creating a mockup of what I want the portrait to look like, starting with a photoshoot and then using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. From that, I create a detailed pencil drawing on the canvas, with ink lines that remain as I paint. I apply thin, scrubby passages of oil paint, increase richness of lights and darks, and build texture as the painting develops. I want the finished surface to be a mystery of various layers of interacting pigment.”
Jackson Wrede, Elevate, oil
"My goal is to achieve an accurate likeness, but I'm also trying to convey that the standards and techniques of traditional painting methods are valuable and worth preserving, and contrary to Modernist convictions and the pressure to be new and innovative with each artwork, it's okay to look to the past and use the Old Masters as a scaffolding to express your own twenty-first century artistic ideals."