Hayley Quentin
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About the Artist
Hayley Quentin was born in Los Angeles and attended Otis College of Art and Design, receiving a B.F.A. cum laude in 2008. After graduation she spent 7 years living and working in the UK and France before returning to Los Angeles in 2016. Hayley's paintings challenge the conventional representation of male beauty and eroticism in art. Working primarily in oils, she repurpose traditional art making processes to create a lens through which the viewer sees the painted body. Hayley has exhibited both nationally and internationally including with CB1 Gallery, Soft Core LA, and at the Bergamot Station Arts Center in Los Angeles (TAG Gallery), Ro2 Art in Dallas, and Musee d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (in collaboration with Juliacks) in France. Her work has been featured in various art publications, including Create Magazine, Art Maze Magazine, and Full Blede. She is a featured artist with Artisster, an international art collective based in Hamburg, Germany. Hayley’s studio is based in The Beacon Arts Building in Inglewood, CA.
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Artist Statement
I paint calm male nudes in a palette of light fleshy pinks, sheer indigo blues, cool grays, and bright crimson reds. My paintings are a vision of pomegranate stained lips against bone pale skin, flushed cheeks and under-eyes like bruised peaches, or rose-bloomed throats and impossibly red hands against an otherwise washed out surface. Simply, I like to look at men, recreate the pleasure of looking with the pleasure of painting, perhaps conflate the two, and then multiply this yet again when the viewer takes pleasure in looking at the paintings. I want the viewer to feel compelled to look. I want to create something so beautiful that they can’t look away. My paintings are an elaborate myth of depth, and I find it very appealing to have signifiers of this illusion- overly saturated colors, changes in the thickness of paint, changes in application of paint. Taken on their own, each element or representation could be believable, if only for a moment. I want to rest right on the edge between illusion, believability, just on the cusp breaking the spell.
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