About Ileana

Ileana Hernandez is a figurative painter influenced by artists such as Lucian Freud, the London School of Art and the Bay Area Figurative Painters. She renders the human figure to emphasize the complexities of the flesh and form. Through color and the application of the paint, using photo-based information, Ileana exposes the way the lens affects the viewer perception of the figure. She attended the school of art at Bowling Green State University and graduated with a BFA in Studio Art. She has exhibited her work in the Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati in 2019. She also attended Studio Arts College International in Florence in 2018 and the New York Academy of Art Artist Residency in New York City in Summer of 2019 which enhanced her skills and techniques to classically render the figure.

Artist Statement

I have come to believe that the role of an artist is to reveal the world and its perplexities in a different light through their distinctive perceptions. Changing because of the use of photography in today’s visual culture, human perceptions and interactions are no longer solely reserved to the mind. My body of work attempts to comment on contemporary society’s dependence on the lens and how it alters how we interact with our surroundings and one another. 

As a painter, in creation of the paintings, I employ the lens of a digital camera as a third filter to manipulate the form of my model through cropping and distorting which leads to unexpected changes of perspective, color, and composition of the figure within the picture plane. By using a lens as a third kind of assessment of the body, I am able to create a loss of the usually authentic connection of artist and model, therefore portraying a more skeptical view of form and figure to the viewer.  

By taking the time to paint the distorted images of the figure, I attempt to coerce the viewer to notice details within my brushstrokes. The process of painting ultimately opposes the fast-paced behavior that the digital age takes to consume media and photos. This certain demeanor for immediacy is affected by the lens which produces a confused and manipulated connection between the human and what they are seeing. By being surrounded by this fractured connection with the human figure through the lens’s influence, I believe, as an artist and participant of the digital age, that this exploration through painting is crucial.