Alexey Steele: Oversized Drawings for Monumental Works show-case the artist's full-scale drawings for the privately commissioned ceiling painting entitled " The Soul of the Hero", featured in M. Stephen Doherty's article in the Spring issue of American Artist. California artist, Alexey Steele, has been making cartoon drawings measuring 10ft. to 33ft. in preparation for large scale paintings since the 1990s. The creation and preservation of such detailed preparatory drawings, known as "cartoons", is a traditional practice traced back to the Old Masters of the 15th century. Although in less widespread use today due to its extensive time requirements, Steele finds that the process enables him to resolve issues of foreshortening and create a dynamic composition of complex figural scenes. His sanguine colored Conté crayon drawings are the foundation for transferring his fully-conceived composition onto monumental canvases which he completes in oil paint. The 21 classical figures in "The Soul of the Hero" encompass the circular shape of the 20ft. diameter ceiling and portray the five stages of the human soul's journey to fulfill its destiny.
Alexey Steele's remarkable ability to draw monumental figures in foreshortened positions reflects his art training at the Surikov Art Institute of the Soviet Academy of Arts in Moscow, which was based on 19th century methods of the Russian Imperial Academy where students drew first from plaster casts of classical sculpture and then from live models. Steele was born in Kiev in the Ukraine in 1967 and began his art training early as an apprentice to his father, Leonid Steele, a distinguished artist of the Soviet Realism Movement who graduated from the Repin Art Institute of the Academy Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. The Steele family moved to Los Angeles in 1990, where Alexey became a signature member of the California Art Club and participates in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions.
See some drawings of A. Steele at www.morseburggalleries.com/Steele.html