Jacob Hicks (American) is an oil painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY. His paintings are a collage of cultural and personal history and symbolism.
He is currently creating a series of female icons in a project called 100 Women, started in 2016 as a form of resistance to misogyny and racism. This series features referential and memory-based figures in imagined locations and costumes. The paintings allude to Primitive Flemish, Italian Renaissance, Spanish Baroque, and English painters. He studies patterning from specific biology, including amphibians, cephalopods, and tropical botany and incorporate a multitude of natural design and imagined patterning into the material world of each image. 100 Women owes a great debt to Francisco de Zurbaran’s paintings of Catholic female saints. Hicks wants the series to represent a vision of Utopia, of celebrated cultural pluralism and empowerment. As each new work progresses, Hicks is presented with exciting technical and material challenges as well as opportune windows to research works of inspiration in art history and important historical and contemporary female role models.
Hicks believes painting is a vital from of self-expression. He uses his studio practice to nurture and progress his relationship with painting that has the ability to define and express who he is.