Cole Puetz

Nerdrum shares Puetz's commitment to large format figurative oil painting using classical technique, with a strong emphasis on warm skin tones, muscular human forms, and a brooding realist sensibility rooted in Old Master traditions.

Fischl's contemporary realist figure paintings explore the human body with psychological weight and compositional cropping, paralleling Puetz's interest in modern figurative work that examines form and flesh with unflinching directness.

Saville's large format oil paintings of the human body focus intensely on skin tones, musculature, and cropped anatomical studies in ways that closely mirror Puetz's approach to the figure as a monumental and visceral subject.

Freud's unflinching figurative realism, obsessive attention to flesh and musculature, and use of warm tonal oil paint on large canvases are foundational touchstones visible throughout Puetz's body study work.

Rubens established the classical language of depicting the male and female nude with dynamic musculature and luminous warm skin tones in oil, a tradition that Puetz draws upon directly in his anatomical figure studies.

Eakins pioneered rigorous anatomical study combined with realist portraiture and figure painting in the American tradition, and his disciplined approach to depicting the male nude in oil paint resonates clearly with Puetz's practice.