"Rizwan Smiling" Artwork

I am a New York based artist. I received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bard College and an M.F.A. from Yale University. I have exhibited in numerous exhibitions and have work in various public and private collections including the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I live with my family in Brooklyn, New York.




The New York Times:
Evan Sklar, a Photographer, Paints Brooklyn Without a Brush
By JOHN LELAND OCT. 7, 2016


"Milton Glaser, the graphic artist, once said that drawing was for him a way of distinguishing what was real in the world from his preconceptions of it. “If I look at you now and make a decision that I’m going to draw you, I suddenly see you for the first time,” he said. “I haven’t seen the gradations of color between the bottom of your nose and the top of your lip, but when I decide to draw you, I have to. And so drawing becomes the means by which I understand what I’m looking at.” For the photographer Evan Sklar, drawing was a reaction to the images he saw on Instagram, which had all started to look the same to him.

Mr. Sklar, would use his mobile phone to take pictures of the buildings around his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and then email them to himself. Then, using an iPad and an app called Procreate, he drew the images. No brushes to clean or pencils to sharpen, no crumpled pages to throw away. It was the world’s most primitive art form, reconceived through several levels of digital technology.

The process, he said, was much different than photography, which captures an entire scene in a split second. With drawing, by contrast, he might spend long stretches working on one detail. “It’s layered,” he said. “It takes a long time, and you put it down and come back to it. You have energy to do it in spurts, then pick and scratch at it until it’s done.”

He worked at dusk or after, he said, because “that’s when everything starts to glow. The sky is glowing, and the interiors of the spaces start to glow.” A selection of his drawings, “Brooklyn at Night,” is on exhibit at the bookstore Powerhouse on 8th through Jan. 10."