Barnaby Furnas

Barnaby Furnas grew up a teenage graffiti artist at a Quaker-based commune in Philadelphia. After graduate school, he burst onto the art scene with paintings depicting American Civil War battles infused with a cartoon sensibility: riots of motion and pigment evoke violent blood splatters, dismemberments, and attention-grabbing "retinal sizzle." Furnas deftly merges his conflation of fantasy and history with his formalist concerns of material realism and a guerilla misuse of watercolor. From portraits of well-to-do nicotine addicts to epic-sized landscapes of floods of blood to the escalating energy of rock concerts, Furnas conjures states of ecstasy as both joy and agony.