A Collection of fashion oil paintings, “Fashionable People & Fashionable Pets”, Debuts at Art Expo New York, 2015 by leading fashion artist, Barbara Tyler Ahlfield. This Collection is her newest following her nomination as one of The Top 50 Emerging Artists of 2014 in Art Business News.
Fashion art of people and pets have long been companions in art from the days of early painters in hunting and rural scenes to John Singer Sargent portraits and today’s contemporary advertising illustrations and prints.This collection, Fashionable People & Fashionable Pets, is a marriage of fabric and fur in large format contemporary oil paintings based on the premise that people choose the pets that reflect their lifestyle and fashion image. People and their pets can be mirror images of each other but while one might expect a couture wardrobe with an elegant lean canine or cat, not all gowns choose hounds or Persian cats. Gowns with working dogs and alley cats make equally strong fashion statements as do gowns, tuxedos and borzois. Cats in fashion are simultaneously portrayed with haut couture, as little black dress accessories or as a punk peek into an edgy, dark side.
Best Friends Rendezvous Portrait, Art Expo 2015
Fashionable People & Fashionable Pets integrates many key elements of fashion illustration including dramatic posing, elongated figures, “romancing” of fabric and beautiful, on-trend characters. Pets are integral to the tableau of the canvas as co-equal elements, innately fashionable with their own unique style, palette and presence. The bond between pet and owner energizes the canvas and gives us a glimpse into the unique relationship between pet and owner.
This collection of fashionable people and their pets caps Barbara Tyler Ahlfield’s 30 years of experience as one of the country’s top female fashion illustrators to an expanding body of work in fashion painting and contemporary art. Barbara’s career has witnessed an evolution from retail drawings of seasonal fashions used for print advertising into a stand-alone art form in the contemporary art word. Her work has recently evolved to large oil portrait commissions as featured in this 2015 Art Expo collection. Fashionable People & Fashionable Pets seeks to show pets are innately fashionable and born with a unique style, design and palette which always renews itself. This contemporary art collection captures the interconnectedness and companionship between people and their pets who are always beautiful and in style in contrast to a less nurturing outside world.
About Barbara Tyler Ahlfield:
For more information on Barbara Tyler Ahlfield and her illustrations, please visit:http://www.fashionillustrationandmore.com/.
Barbara started drawing at the age of two and was soon decorating her bedroom walls with crayon fashion drawings. As a child, she was fascinated with the glamorous fashion she saw in vintage black and white films on Television as well as the formal portraits she studied during children’s classes at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery. Following college, she united her loves of art and fashion into a career that spanned 30 years as one of the leading, award winning retail fashion illustrators in the country.
The archive of Barbara’s illustrations is one of the few existing collections of American fashion illustration over the last quarter century and offers a retrospective of the American woman’s changing sense of style as well as changing illustrative styles. Her full page illustrations appeared in many of the major newspapers in the country including the New York Times, Chicago Sun Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, etc. showcasing top American fashion designers for the major US department stores such as Lord and Taylor, Nordstrom, Dillards, John Wannamaker and many more. In 2014, Barbara was featured as one of “The Top 50 Emerging Artists” in Art Business News. She will be exibiting at Art Expo New York 2015 showcasing her collection of Fashionable People & Fashionable Pets.