A crush on a girl, who was an art major, introduced Dylan Eakin to the world of art. This small step proved to be the life-changer for him, as he got hooked to art. It led him to graduate in Sculptural Art from the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas, the USA in 2013. And in 2018, he was already a recipient of the Figurative Art Award of the Artzine Prize for his piece ‘Portrait in Precipitate’!
Eakin’s forte is photorealism. He chose this line because it was cheaper than pursuing a career in figurative ceramics. So, what is photorealism? He answers this in his interview in artzine.com, thus, “With this (photorealism) genre, the art is so much more than the final product. For me, it’s an exploration of medium, an exercise in precision and self-discipline, and an attempt to engineer myself and my tools to produce work of a machine.”
Eakin’s idol is Ron Mueck, a hyper-realistic sculptor. He considers himself self-taught and credits Chuck Close for precision, Emanuele Dascanio for light and shadow, and Eloy Morales for image quality translation. He possesses the ability to capture every last detail of an image, which makes it difficult to make out whether his creation is a photograph or a painting or a drawing.
Eakin’s medium remains black and white for creating his detailed portraits. It takes him about eight days of intensive work to produce an 18-inch by 24-inch portrait. He’s currently based in Seattle, Washington, USA, and has a sizeable following on the internet.
Dylan Eakin
