American artist Fred Tomaselli creates intricately detailed and highly colorful works that are both representational and decorative.
Tomaselli utilizes both painting and and collage techniques; the latter including unorthodox (and sometimes even illegal) materials like flowers, herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants. He will also use photographic elements and direct painting in gouache; and adheres the collage components to the panel with resin.
His subjects are often birds, plants and other natural themes, as well as less directly representational images. He states that his intention is to be hallucinatory and transportive.
Sometimes his themes carry over into the collage elements, as in an image of a woodpecker whose bill is composed of photographic collage of hundreds of other birds beaks.
His use of illegal substances, even though locked in resin, has caused exhibits to be confiscated and locked up at customs, leaving gallery walls for a scheduled exhibit in Paris blank.