Aidan Barker-Hill

My name is Aidan Barker-Hill and I'm a fine artist and fine art instructor living and working in Brooklyn, New York. I was born in Reno, Nevada. My grandpa is an architect and would take me sketching when I was a child. He showed me artists like Rembrandt and Andrew Wyeth. This early exposure instilled in me a love of realistic figurative art, and at 18 I chose to go to art school at Laguna College of Art and Design. The program had a heavy emphasis on developing technical skill, and my favorite subject was portrait and figure painting from a life model. The exhilarating experience of trying to accurately capture another person directly in front of you is something I will never tire of.

I went to graduate school at the New York Academy of Art. The MFA program introduced me to a much wider spectrum of contemporary art and the broad, eclectic art world of New York as well as the numerous world class museums made the city the most exciting place I've ever lived. I have a studio in my apartment in Brooklyn and am building a body of work promoting the idea that masculinity can coincide with beauty, aestheticism, and sensitivity. I am enormously fortunate to teach life painting classes at NYAA and I'm represented by Arcadia Contemporary in Manhattan.