In the first of our artist interviews, we spoke to Pete Nawara about life and work. Pete, 28, was raised in the west suburbs of Chicago, although he spent a good deal of his summers traveling the globe with his family. His first 11 years were spent in Naperville before moving to Oak Brook, Illinois.

Pete mentions that he's always been a visual person and has been interested in art for as long as he can remember. As a child, he was often in trouble for drawing over his school papers. Realising that creativity was choosing him, he went to school in Chicago thinking he would study graphic design but soon found that he couldn't get away from the more artistic side of things. He would skip class to go free life-drawing classes. He then moved on to San Francisco where he studied graphic design and sculpture. From San Francisco he went on to Paris where he obtained his fine art degree with a focus on painting.

Pete now finds himself working and living back in Chicago, but only after a 2 year spell in London. He spends as much time as possible in the studio, where he is happiest, but tries to remain sane with a fine balance between everyday life and studio time.

I asked Pete about the motivation behind his work:

"The portraits are really an investigation of people and the ego and self consciousness. I find it fascinating how people regard themselves. Generally the people in my portraits are friends whom I know quiet well. Sometimes they're just acquaintances, and lately of been particularly fond of painting people I am meeting for the first time. It's interesting to note the difference in how I paint someone who I know and someone who I know not at all"

Some of the artists that have inspired Pete are Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt but he has many more inspirational sources outside of them including "Winsor McCay, Sandro Botticelli, Johannes Vermeer, Banksy, Doze Green, Vik Muniz, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, Cecily Brown, Alex Katz, Francis Picabia, Amedeo Modigliani, Alphonse Mucha, Barry Mcgee, Kurt Vonnegut, Herman Hesse, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Maurice Sendak, Bill Viola, Mikhail Bulgakov..." to name but a few.

Movies are always a great insight into a person, so if there's anything left to know about Pete, maybe these will help:

RAD, Night of the Hunter, A Hudsucker proxy, Office Space, The Jerk, The Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, A Night in Casablanca, A Night at the Opera, any of them really), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Where the Buffalo Roam, Rushmore, Royal Tennenbaums, Popeye (the movie), Beverly Hills Cop I, II, & III, Les Triplettes du Belleville, Les Naufrages de L'ile aux Pirates, The Mack, Life Aquatic, Brewster's Millions, The Searchers, Blade Runner, The Planet Of The Apes, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes, Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, Battle For The Planet Of The Apes, The Graduate, Fantasia, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Blue Velvet, Raging Bull, Brazil, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Airplane!, Groundhog Day, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, Grizzly Man, The Warriors, Idiocracy, and ANYTHING narrated by David Attenborough.

As for commercial success, Pete has some advice which I am inclined to agree with.

"Get it out there anyway you can. What's the point of making anything if no one gets to appreciate it with you. I'm all for 'making art for art's sake', but remember that you DO have an audience and that you should try to show them as much as you can. I take a lot of pride in what I do and am always eager to show as many people as possible."

You can see more of Pete Nawara's artwork on his ArtFlock.com Profile or at his own site www.petenawara.com