Vincent Castiglia literally bleeds for his work. The 30-year-old New York artist has been creating paintings using his own blood for the past 10 years and has just opened his fifth solo exhibition in New York. "Resurrection" is a collection of work spanning a decade. It was really just inspired by my need to connect with my work on the most intimate level, you know. Every painting is a part of me, and that way it really dissolves the barrier between art and artist in the most literal sense," he says. Working with blood is as old as art itself, and Castiglia is just one of many working with the medium today. My first large-scale painting took well over three months, it took about three and a half months to complete. Using paint might be safer. Castiglia was hospitalized in 2008 while preparing for his first solo show at the H. R. Giger Museum Gallery in Switzerland. But then, it is traditional to suffer for one's art. I probably lost track of how much I was collecting at the time because I was more concerned with the work then anything. I was pretty weak and then my lung happened to collapse and I had some pretty invasive surgery to correct that. Depicting, rather than using blood, is a somewhat trickier affair. For a stunning example of that, you may want to click here http://antiworldnews.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/artemisia-gentileschi/#jp-carousel-3476 More about: Art, USA