Charles Bierk doesn’t reveal much in the biography of his online portfolio: he was born in 1987, graduated from OCAD with a focus on drawing and painting in 2011, and lives and works in Toronto. Instead, to learn a bit about the immensely talented painter, one has to do some digging to find out that he was raised in Peterborough, has a number of artistically-minded siblings like himself, and is the son of famous American-born Canadian painter David Bierk.
But background details become unnecessary when confronted with Charles’s work. Instead, the minutiae that matter here are nearly microscopic: his paintings are so painstakingly built by small details that they appear to be photographed portraits, even on close inspection. The result communicates Bierk’s interpretation of his subjects in a more personal and less documentary nature than most photographs—instead of being simply presented with the subject, we’re given that subject filtered through the mind of the artist. The result is a creation somehow mechanically human, yet something that no machine could ever build.
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