Chris Hood, a native of Atlanta, Georgia, was born in 1984. Currently working in a large studio in Manhattan’s trendy East Harlem neighborhood, Hood is an artist, fully and unapologetically a product of his era.

The artist received a degree from the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy in 2003, a Degree from the Welch School of Art in Atlanta, Georgia in 2008, and a master’s degree in Studio Art, from the San Francisco Art Institute, in San Francisco, California in 2010.

Known primarily for fun 21st century “Pop” works – replete with applied emojis, graphic comics, and other clippings – Hood also paints his works in a sweepings colorful gestural style.

Yet it is a unique technique he discovered that truly sets him apart. When Hood begins a work, initially he paints the reverse of his canvases first; allowing the pigments of the “wet oil” he prefers to “bleed through” – creating a “tabula rasa” upon which he then begins.

After he turns the canvases around, first he paints them in a gestural, loose Expressionist style, and finally he peppers them with clippings, cuttings, comics, and any other graphics that strike his fancy. One feels they are watching a new 21the Century “Pop Art” style coming to fruition.

He even loves applying emojis, mixing them with cartoons of, as he says, laughing: ““You know stuff like these zombie monster things – and little characters with angry eyes and smoking hearts.”

His choice of emojis, once explained, does make sense; As he fully understands, in an age in which acronyms and reductive language, have begun to take over social discourse, emojis, photos and short “text” and captions” have become the communicative currency of our time.