Originally from Calgary, Canada, illustrator and gallery artist Joseph Adolphe now lives and works in Connecticut.
His painted illustrations have an immediate, painterly quality that almost seems casual, with paint laid on in dabs and chunks, rough textured backgrounds and a loose, comfortable command of his materials. Many of his illustrations blend drawing and painting, with varying degrees of the two deftly mixed in his compositions.
His drawings also often retain a rough, informal feeling, with lines deliberately retaining a sketchlike quality and areas of the image suggesting different degrees of finish. He works in a variety of media, pen and ink, graphite, oil, acrylic and collage. He also often takes his illustrations created in traditional media into the computer for additional digital modification.
Adolphe is an associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts at St. Johns University in Queens.
He maintains a website for his illustration work, though I found his work easier to view on the site of his artist representatives, Gerald & Cullen Rapp.
He has a separate website for his gallery work, which ranges from recent work in which figures and ground are interworked in great scraping sheets of texture, to older pieces that are more straightforward figurative compositions, portraits sketched and painted on index cards, still life and painterly urban landscapes.
