Steven Assael paints modern-day figures in haunting, quietly psychological portraits. A leader in contemporary figurative painting, Assael works exclusively from live models, fusing his modern subjects—goths and teens, men and women in costume—with an Old Master style and traditional tableaux. “Even though art is dead as we have known it, painting is not,” he has said. Assael’s work has been compared to that of Thomas Eakins, and reveals a similar interest the human figure both as aesthetic form and as vehicle for emotions and psychological states.