CRANBROOK ACADEMY OF ART GRADUATE DREGREE EXHIBITION 2025  
GRADUATES \\ WORK \\ ABOUT \\
JOSHUA
RAINER
DEPARTMENT
PAINTING
ORIGIN
DETROIT, MI


I am a hyperrealist oil painter. I carefully apply different colored thin layers of paint, the consistency of room temperature butter on top of and beside one another. While the paint remains wet, nudging different colors into one another with dry, fuzzy brushes blurs their boundaries and conceals brush strokes. On the surface, I hide how each painting is made. It is therapeutic. Working this way and thoroughly scrubbing wet paint onto thin layers of dried paint, I piece together an image that can appear more photographic than painted.

I think the world of warm black. I am enthralled by blurry core shadows. I have a penchant for impossibly smooth gradients and simple but unusual shapes like the ball of one’s nose; the veins in one’s hand; the tricep of an extended, twisted arm.

In my work, I draw and paint: doubles of a single figure in conflict with one another; like Jacob wrestling himself in lieu of an angel. In my work, I paint my surreal dreams— of carjackings, of being stuck in a runaway elevator— as clearly as I remember them. In my work, I draw and paint the hands of different people caught in moments of embrace, confrontation, and reflection.

I am fascinated by the real and imagined boundaries that distinguish the self from both the unconscious and the other. I am fascinated by things’ unknowability and the ubiquity of the unknown. I am interested in Antti Revonsuo’s Threat Simulation Theory, what Helmut Plessner calls “Unfathomability” and what Martin Buber calls the “I-Thou Relationship.”

My work is at once a meditation on these phenomena, an exercise in self-transparency and an invitation for us better understand ourselves and others.
   




Contingent
2025, Oil on canvas, 38" x 66" 
Imperative
2025, Oil on canvas, 53" x 100" 
The Dream Where in Flight's Unsurprising (The Flying Dream)
2023, Oil on canvas, 46" x 102"

The Dream With a Wayward Freight (The Elevator Dream) 
2025, Oil on canvas,  65" x 50"