There is a lot of superb contemporary realism being made these days; this article by Brandon Rosas shines light on a gifted individual.
The sights and scenery of Europe have long influenced New Jersey-based artist Patrick Okrasinski (b. 1996), beginning with childhood visits to his grandparents’ farm in Poland, where the picturesque countryside inspired his love of nature.
As a teenager, Okrasinski became interested in concept art for film and video games, enrolling in a traditional university to study illustration. “Digital art was a real gateway,” he says. “I had always appreciated historical paintings in textbooks, but when I started learning about painting digitally, I found so many people pointing to the Old Masters and oil painting.”
Midway through his sophomore year, Okrasinski stumbled upon the blog of the landscapist Marc Dalessio (b. 1972) and was thrilled to learn that artists were still earning a living by painting outdoors. Within the month, Okrasinski was taking a landscape painting workshop led by Stapleton Kearns, and by the fall he had transferred to the U.S. branch of the Florence Academy of Art in Jersey City.
Under the tutelage of such instructors as Jordan Sokol, Amaya Gurpide, and Edmond Rochat, Okrasinski became adept at both portraiture and landscape painting. After graduating in 2019, he was selected by the Fondation Claude Monet to become an artist-in-residence at Giverny, where he painted in the impressionist’s famous garden and in the countryside nearby. Except in 2020, when the pandemic delayed his taking up of the prestigious Donald Jurney Traveling Fellowship, Okrasinski has painted in Europe every year since.
Travels in Italy inspired “Trevi Fountain,” a tour-de-force of color harmony evoking the grandeur of this iconic Roman landmark. “This piece was a wonderful exploration of color, light, and material,” Okrasinski recalls. “The effects of light were an absolute joy to tackle as reflective light, ambiance, and optical effects allowed me to find moments of purple, cobalt, red, and gold.”
Despite his skill with a brush, Okrasinski does not consider technical mastery an end in itself. “I remember seeing the Prado’s display contrasting Ilya Repin and Diego Velázquez and noticing that neither of them seemed to care about showing us how clever they were,” he says. “There was something to the quiet truth and beauty in their paintings that I want to find in mine. As Monet once said, ‘Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.’”
View more artist and collector profiles here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.
![Pinterest](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://fineartconnoisseur.com/2025/10/contemporary-realism-patrick-okrasinski/&media=https://fineartconnoisseur.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Okrasinski-Trevi-Fountain-scaled.jpg&description=Travels in Italy inspired the artist's contemporary realism oil painting "Trevi Fountain," a tour-de-force of color harmony evoking the ...){kind=link}