I work realistically, in fact I work from life. I've always painted and drawn from single point of view. I started to make drawings from muliple points of view. Now I'm painting the Estate Sales using multple points of view.

Contemporary San Francisco painter Henry Riekena fuses the energy of graffiti and graphic art with the deep, meditative mindset of abstract expressionism, resulting in mesmerizing canvases that one can wander around in for hours. “The first thing you need to understand about my work,” he says, “is that I'm not painting a 'thing,' I'm creating an effect. You spend some time, let your eyes start to flow around the piece, your focus shifts back and forth between all of the different compositions, and once you get a little bit lost and your brain clears out—that's when the magic happens.”

Looking at Riekena's work, the viewer first notices the energetic quality of his line and composition, and the balance and subtle control of color learned over a lifetime spent obsessed with visual art. But taking his cue and spending a little more time with the work, another dimension opens up, as the visual space becomes plastic and hypnotic, and the viewer begins to feel almost intoxicated. “There is a very intentional mental element to it, I am very consciously trying to take your brain into a certain state. I see a lot of my peers obsessed with irony, surface, and the minutely specific and personal, but I'm maybe old-fashioned—I'm trying to be earnest, go deep and universal, to get people on kind of a zen level and share something that's really hard to describe.”

This idea is most completely expressed in his recent monumental work A Nice Way to Travel 3 Hours Into the Present, a “Walk-in painting” consisting of a single 7' x 60' canvas that wraps around the entire inside of an 18' diameter circular yurt. Nearly a year in the making, the installation cuts the viewer off from the outside world, enveloping them in an environment of endless pathways that swirl through the work, shift, and re-emerge, creating a space that is as incomprehensible as it is beautiful.

Riekena still considers himself an emerging artist, but has shown his work throughout the Bay Area, as well as showings nationally and as far away as the Chianciano Museum in Italy. The 32-year-old cites many varied influences in his work, including the graffiti art prevalent in his adopted hometown, the meditative abstract expressionist works of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, the playful juxtaposition of line and color in the work of Paul Klee, and contemporary masters such as Mark Bradford. "I don't think of abstract expressionism as a mid-century movement.  That's maybe when a lot of the parameters of it were laid out, but there is still a lot on the table there, a lot of opportunity to take the goals and mindset of those seminal abstract painters and continue to push them forward with new ideas, new tools, and create really powerful contemporary artwork.  And I'm not the only one who is proving it."

My current work is a series of labor intensive, realistic oil portraits of the detached heads of women.

The cognitive mechanism of the “uncanny valley” occurs when the human likeness produces disquiet and disturbance rather than empathy because it triggers the salience of morality, defies human norms, throws mate selection, and challenges the religious definition of identity or “soul.” The more familiar the likeness is, the more sublimely eerie it becomes.

 The uncanny valley is associated with a more general psychological occurrence in which perception is distorted by categorization. Painting and its relationship to “beauty” is fraught with a history of categorization. I find the subject of “feminine appearance” and assumed aesthetics to be culturally unreal (braindead), and therefore an inviting subject for realism and investigation. 

These are paintings of those I know and care about, and working slowly and deliberately on their portraits offers a meditative space to examine the human head. 

I also teach wet-into-wet oil painting technique. My works smaller works on paper and linen are done onsight from live models, they show the energy of working from life, among other painters. In these works, am interested in creating a psychological and emotional space in an abbreviated image. I work on scrap material and leave the edges unfinished to emphasize immediacy. The backbone of my painting practice is combining technique with contemporary thought. 

I am a San Francisco based artist.  My work is a reflection of the dynamics between the external environment and my internal world.  I find inspiration in the elements of nature and the patterns that reverberate through all forms of life.

My preffered medium is dry pastel on paper, I am mastering and constantly challenging myself with it; I also paint.  I prefer to work in large scale or multiple surfaces at once: I always feel like there is not enought space on a piece of paper or canvas to "say & express" everything I want to.  

Instead of a full artist statement, which you can read on my website (www.elvira-artist.com), I would like to capture a thought about one of the works presented in this portfolio: esrevinu travelers: She Is Bridge.  Here goes it:

A woman of landscape - 
She acts as a bridge.
A bridge to a steep, deep
Canyon - the way to escape & a way to connect
To view the abstracted & the city's landscape.
She holds it together with her body, her flesh.
She holds them together: the edges, the earth;
She lays in the landscape relaxed yet steadfast.

For me, she is larger than I,
For her, she is taller than sky,
For them she is deeper than emerald, green, grey, blue & the high.

  My paintings are an ongoing exploration of the spaces where "inner" and "outer" meet, whether the setting be human or celestial. From the mysteries and metaphors that I find in familiar subjects, such as my ships and dancers, to my cosmological studies of a complex and seemingly impersonal universe -- in the heart of my creations lies the familiar made abstract, and the distant made intimate. 

A note on the "Inner Space" series:
I am fascinated with the analogy of space with human consciousness. The vastness of space, with its mysterious and oft-dazzling beauty, and the highly complex "inner space" of human consciousness form the focus of my work. Layers of color and texture illuminate my visions of planets and stars as points in a vast continuum, radiating life and emotion of their own. I think of each painting as the result of various “encounters” with these places, revealed in boldly colorful, multi-dimensional and sometimes sensual paintings that simultaneously evoke a sense of space intertwined with psychic tension.