Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy is an extraordinary, innovative British artist whose collaborations with nature produce uniquely personal and intense artworks. Using a seemingly endless range of natural materials—snow, ice, leaves, bark, rock, clay, stones, feathers petals, twigs—he creates outdoor sculpture that manifests, however fleeting, a sympathetic contact with the natural world. Before they disappear, or as they disappear, Goldsworthy, records his work in suburb color photographs. His pieces are really something beautiful to look at and experience.

Gavin Taylor

Depicted is an ancient african sculpture from 2,000 years ago.  It was discovered in the mud and made from terracotta.

choros

Choros, a short film by Michael Langan and Terah Maher, is an amazing piece of visual art. The short fill has all these fluid movements and they are all done by one dancer. The way that the film is edited reminded me of photographs by Edward Muybridge. The repetition is a really nice effect.

http://vimeo.com/langanfilms/choros

I Talk White

Rashid Johnson’s I Talk White, 2003 made quite the “talk”. His unique black and white photography work touched on a lot of race and racism and the importance of where the colors in the photograph sometimes do not literally mix in real, true life. The large scale photograph was sold at an auction on October 25th, 2008. 

The photograph itself looks as though someone took paste and went ahead and wrote “I TALK WHITE” on top of the photograph as if they were a two year old, and that is how the subject matter relates. It is a subject matter that we should not even have to deal with at this age. Minority should not even exist, but it does because we bring it up, and because we make a big deal of it. That is the only reason behind it all.


-Ally Parfene

On a current spanish artist fix!

My research paper is on Doris Salcedo (a columbian artist). So I thought why not research another spanish artist who is alive, still kickin' AND still making art? So I present:

Jose Merello!

A self taought artist, he is from Spain and was inspired by the Prado museum (PICASSO! Can you tell from his work?) I immediately saw influences of Matisse and Picasso in his artworks. Most of his subjects are women (oh that romantic spanish man lol) and he actually claims his chice of subject is due to his spanish nature! His artist statement is "The painting does not need so much circus not so many intellectual pretension. She must sprout of the clean soul of the man.”

It is a modern expressionism in my opinion and you can see that this is a current (as in the last 10 years) art piece. His color palette speaks to me since I love color and try to use it as often as possible. 

Theresa Brazen- Un/ Becoming Beautiful, 2006

I want to introduce Theresa Brazen. You may or may not have heard of her since she is from here. I have kept up with her though out the last 10 years and have watched her progress and grow as an artist. I enjoy her use of color, exaggerated features and text to explore intimate human emotion in her paintings and her willingness to explore the raw emotion that make some people uncomfortable and run away from.

If you go on her website you will experience videos that will show her pushing the boundaries of the human spirit. What is beauty? In the video Un/Becoming Beautiful, Brazen shows the everyday concerns and insecurities that women have. As she puts on more make-up to become the commercialized idea of beautiful she still says to herself that she is not beautiful. Then as she begins to aggressively take off the mask she reveals the true beauty that is her.

In 2011 Brazen, with no words spoken, she skillfully portrays the communication or the lack of between two people in Open House. I the video you watch the pain that happens when one's affections are misunderstood and then the blissful happiness when then his affections are reciprocated. 
www.brazenart.com/about.htmL
CHECK HER OUT! lI Lost My Appetite For You, 2007
UN/ BECOMING BEAUTIFUL,2006- VIDEO

Love

 


















A prominent artist of the pop movement was Robert Indiana. He called himself a sign painter, he incorporated symbols, signs and letters throughout his art. Indiana created poems, sculptures, paintings, silk screens and posters. His most famous sculpture is called Love and it was created in a time when the United States was consumed by the Vietnam War and it was more a symbol of Peace as well as one of the most celebrated works within the pop art movement around the world.

Neil Dawson- Horizon

Neil Dawson's sculpture here is displayed at Gibbs Farm along with many other site specific installations in New Zealand. He studied at Canterbury University School of Fine Arts, Melbourne. Dawson produces large sculptures made from welded and painted steel. This one specifically is called Horizons and was produced in 1994. The beauty of this sculpture is that from afar it looks like a simple painting done in the sky and almost looks unrealistic because of it's simple yet unique beauty. Horizons was one of the first works commissioned for the Gibb's Farm. Also it sits on one of the highest points of the farm making it possible to see from the road. It has a tromp l'oeil effect that "fools the eye" from a distance. It is ironic that something so mechanical and so sturdy can look so gentle, flowing in the wind.

http://gibbsfarm.org.nz/dawson.php

Daft Punk - Make Love

I have noticed that there has not been a lot of information up on the blog about music. It is as important to artistic creativity as well as the entire creative process. I felt it was necessary to post some information on the band Daft Punk. These 40 year old guys began gaining popularity in the 90's and decreased in the 2000's until the past little while when the techno era emerged again in popularity. Although now there is a vast difference of techno music and the different styles that came with it. Daft Punk is still one of the most original and artistic bands that can really help you work diligently and efficiently. Especially for me working as a VFX student here at SCAD. I am always behind a computer and I constantly need something to keep me working diligently. Daft Punk keeps me on beat while not distracting me with pop lyrics. The long song lengths also help to get you into a working rhythm. I hope you all enjoy this song remix called Make Love.

Daft Punk - Make Love - HLM Remix

RIP Richard Artschwager

I'm kind of seeing a morbid theme to my posts.....
Another artist bit the dust this year-

Richard Artschwager died 2013

He died on February 9th to be exact. He was a 60's artist who dabbled in paint and sculpture (I guess a bit of pop art and conceptual?). 

I would best describe these as weird versions of art furniture. He played with perspective and shape playing with his viewers perceptions. Shame he died, his stuff looks interesting. I wonder what prompted him to play with these odd shapes and why furniture like pieces? Is he challenging our thought and physical space of what we see as a chair?

Tara McPherson

Tara McPherson is one of my favorite illustrators, I actually just wrote a paper on her for another class. One of the reasons why I enjoy her work so much is because jest blends the world of fine art and graphic art so beautifully, and a lot of her has a modern version of surrealism to them.

McPherson has her BFA in Illustration, but she also minored in Fine Art when she was in college. I think this is one of the reasons her style is such a great mix of fine art and graphic art. She has her foot planted in the communication art world as well as having a grasp on amazing painting and drawing techniques. She is simply amazing, and I highly recommend checking her out if you like clean and beautiful artwork, that is a little strange at times. x

Judy Chicago - Power Play Series

Judy Chicago was born in Chicago on July 20, 1939. She considers herself an "artist, author, feminist, and educator" and has had her books published in foreign editions because of the fact that she exhibits her work all over the world such as Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

Her Power Play series was created from 1982-87 and took on the role of a criticizing feminine standpoint on masculinity. The series consisted of drawings, paintings, weavings, cast paper and bronze relief. They are confrontational pieces that force the viewer to realize the issues of power and powerlessness that she is trying to get across between the male and female genders. Some of the pieces involve objects like guns or sexual dominance or abuse, but mainly they are faces of men portraying different emotions. The emotions are mostly anger, weeping, or a struggle for power.
She does a lot of disfigured male faces, and the way Chicago portrays them is very unpleasant, obviously stating in her work that she is a feminist artist.

http://www.judychicago.com/gallery.php?name=PowerPlay+Gallery

Jose Guizar

This project is called “Windows of New York.” Every week, Jose walks the streets of his city streets in New York and documents the neighborhood windows. After picking out windows of interest, he takes them into illustrator and makes magic happen. In his own words: ”I’m into all kinds of visual things, sharing good stuff with great people, and apparently, staring creepily at windows.”  According to his website, the artist states that the project is a product of countless steps of journey through the city streets, this is a collection of windows that somehow have caught my restless eye out from the never-ending buzz of the city. This project is part an ode to architecture and part a self-challenge to never stop looking up.  From SoHo to Hell’s Kitchen all the way up to the UES, New York City’s different flavors are all captured in Jose Guizar’s Windows Of New York series.  This artist was so fascinated by windows his hometown that he decided to keep track of them in a visual diary.  Each week a different window highlights the spirit of various Manhattan neighborhoods, and stirs our curiosity as well. left, 94 Bank St. in the West Village. As his website says, "I am a young Mexican graphic designer in New York City. Driven by curiosity and a constant desire to learn and evolve –among other more material things, of course–, I'm a devoted pursuer of the well-rounded designer utopia. I strive to create playful, clever, yet strong messages that let others communicate, and let me play entertainer."

The high museum of art is hosting the works of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The exhibition is here from February 14 until May 12. The exhibition is featuring over 75 works from Frida and Diego. Most of the works are coming from galleries and museums in Mexico but some are also coming from the United States and Canada.

photo- cine-marina.blogspot.com 

Chase Westfall

The paintings of Chase Westfall are pleasantly elusive.  His work often toes the line between abstraction and figuration.  He seems to often swing from sunny imagary such as flowers or rainbows to that of mutilated animal carcasses.  However, he never gives it entirely away.  The imagary often is obscured by a diamond grid work or its own abstraction.  The viewers eyes constantly shifts between deciphering the images and inspecting the pattern, neither resolving the other.  His oil paintings are executed on linen contrasting the soft surface with his hard edged geometric shapes. The war imagery and other, at times violent topics, which Westfall paints in color, are in sharp contrast to the organic and natural feel of the linen canvas and the neutral tones used for the grids. The images are even more powerful when partly hidden as we are questioning what is missing, what is obscured and covered. Westfall reveals and conceals simultaneously, using both modes to provide visibility and create an aesthetic and conceptual interaction.  Westfall plays with opposites to explore anthropological concerns. He juxtaposes his intricate colorful and conceptually heavy figurative renderings with the neutral, rigid, perfectly harmonious grids and forms but his work goes beyond literal opposites. In Westfall’s art tradition meets contemporary minimalism and secularism meets spiritualism as the artist tries to make sense of the internal struggles between the opposites using both a modernist and simultaneously and anti-modernist mode. His artistic endeavor has pulled him in the direction where culturally, violence is thought to align with other concepts as spirituality, progress and morality. His source imagery are found from areas such as slaughterhouse, war, animal sacrifice or medical operating rooms. He states, in each case, he “subjects that imagery to a kind of simplified rationale by overlaying it with geometric structures, obscuring or veiling it, placing physical barriers between it and the viewer, or simply isolating it and removing it from its context.” Through his artistic process, Westfall transforms his material and creates a new meaning. 

Looking for Superman

Watch the video here:  http://vimeo.com/15673277#

Back in 2010, John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design gave a speech at 99u. "At 99U, Behance's education arm, we focus on what happens after inspiration -- researching the forces that truly drive ideas to fruition. Our profiles of proven idea makers, action-oriented tips, and annual conference are all designed to help you translate ideas from vision to reality." In this funny and relevant talk, he relates to the creative community and our struggles of legitimacy as workers. He addresses the stereotype that people who are "creative" are typically lazy, whimsical people who exist to make paintings that no one gets. 

Amie Brink 

Nicola Bolla

Italian artist Nicola Bolla collaborated with photographer Sergio Alfrendini to produce this series of photos documenting his glittering Swaroviski crystal-covered sculptures. Nicola takes sometimes-sinister objects and coats them in the sparkling crystals. Placed in haunting and dark scenes, the photographs accentuate the disturbing but glamorous nature of the sculptures. His work is arresting in its contrasts.  The artist often fashions sculptures of straightforward (and morbid) objects that are then covered in sparkling crystals.  The glamorous glitter of the crystal is juxtaposed against the utilitarian nature of many of the objects they cover.  These are further contrasted in these images taken by the photographer. The dilapidated house provides a strangely ideal setting to emphasize these brightly dark sculptures. He  is best known for transforming beautiful materials into memorably crude sculptures that explore mortality. We loved his hauntingly compelling installations that involved skull heads, piles of loose bones, and other death-related objects that are completely coated with sparkling Swarovski crystals. The Swarovski Sculpture toilet is unforgettable too. You can find more of Nicola Bolla work in his book entitled Empireo. These images will take you on a visual journey through his work.

Alicia Martin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E9Ey1nt-VgA

Artist Alicia Martin's books shoot out a window like a burst of water from a giant hose. The Spain-based artist's sculptural installation at Casa de America, Madrid depicts a cavalcade of books streaming out of the side of a building. The whirlwind of literature defies gravity and draws attention with its grandeur size. There have been three site-specific installations, thus far, of the massive sculptural works in this series known as Biografias, translated as Biographies, that each feature approximately 5,000 books sprawled out around and atop one another. Creating a wire and aluminum structure with thousands of books attached to the outside frame, Martin’s creates a waterfall of literature that spill into the streets as if a crazed librarian turned on the mother of all book faucets. Pages and book jackets flap in the wind mimicking the spontaneous and erupting movement of water materialized in solid form. 

Fractal Art

Fractal art is produced via specialized software that sets up fractals, calculates them and produces images. Obviously, these same processes created through fractal-generating software aren't directly involved in the design of some architectural designs, but one can see how the designs of fractals themselves can influence some forms of buildings.

Fractal Art and Architecture Photography

Matthew Stone

“Optimism is the Vital Force that Entangles itself with and then Shapes the Future.” - Matthew Stone

Born in 1982 London, Stone still lives and works in there. The artist's multifaceted work addresses culture as a whole. 

Matthew Stone is an artist and shaman. These two interconnected roles are defined by his activities as photographer, sculptor, performance artist, curator, writer, Optimist and cultural provocateur. Stone’s work and thinking goes far beyond the remit of his art, and his power of existence is recreating the role of the artist in the 21^st century. Though perhaps most known for his painfully beautiful photographic nudes, most exciting is Stone’s recent move into video, where he has begun to direct his own video-based artworks. 

In 2012, he published 1,000 copies of his book, in which he shares striking monochrome photographs of naked nubile bodies entwined and submerged in water from his collaboration with Japanese fashion designer Yuima Nakazato. Created to celebrate Nakazato's spring/summer 2012 collection, inspired by the perhaps contrary theme of a “utopian nudist colony,” the series was shot over two days while camping in a country house garden and has been released as a limited-edition art book, The Body Beyond, by Vogue Homme Japan's Junsuke Yamasaki. 

"Essentially, for me optimism is creativity, it’s the force that enables or motivates people to do something rather than nothing."

Charles Ray

Ray studied sculpture at the University of Iowa, school of Art and Art History where he was exposed to many of the developments of modernist sculpture, in particular the constructivist aesthetic of contemporary artists. Over the past 30-plus years, Charles Ray has produced successive bodies of sculpture that superficially appear quite different from one another. There have been works performed for the camera that employed the artist's own body as a sculptural element. There have been conceptual variations on minimalist forms. For more than five years now, Charles Ray has been making sculptures based closely on the human figure. Ray's retrospective illustrates the shifting idea of conceptual art. Even when his art relies on the object's uniqueness, its physical nature becomes a shorthand for multiple hypotheses, changing movements, and distinct leaps of the imagination. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer’s perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways. Ray fixates on how and why things happen, to say nothing of wondering what really does happen in the field of vision, and how such events might be remade as art.” This and the level of art historical awareness behind his works has led many critics to call Ray a sculptor’s sculptor. Nevertheless, his art has managed to find a large audience, thanks in part to its often striking or beguiling nature.