Tinie Tempah by Kelvin Okafor
You'd be forgiven if you thought that these are photographs. In fact, they are "photo-realism" art, drawn with charcoal and graphite pencil by London-based artist Kelvin Okafor. It took him about a hundred hour to do each drawing. Color us impressed!
Zoe Saldana
Princess Diana
King Hussein of Jordan
Mother Theresa
As you see above, Kelvin has drawn celebrities and famous people, but his work that struck me the most are those of ordinary folks. Take this drawing of Aisha II, which Kelvin has posted on YouTube:
A model named Mana (as blogged by Kelvin):
Or of his friend's dog named Storm:
the point is similar to the blank canvasses and white cubes of the minimalist art of the 1960s: to erase the hand, or identifying marks of the maker, from the art. It's a kind of artistic suicide. By rendering the drawing indistinguishable from a photograph, the artist removes any evidence of himself from the work. Chuck close did this kind of drawing in the 60s. This is a continuation of the modernist tradition beginning with painters like Piet Mondrian and Walter Gropius.