What can I say?- I'm obsessed. This is from a show they had in NYC this summer.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
SWOON
This is an amazing interview with one of my favorite graffiti artists.
click here to check it out:
http://swindlemagazine.com/issue04/swoon/
Monday, December 17, 2007
LamsfuB
German artist Ulrich LambsfuB (b. 1971) is amazing. His brush work is thick and expressive, yet precise. His imagery is explosive, though he is apparently more interested in the reproduction of the images he works from, giving the paintings a traditional feel.
"I like the old, the classical, 'sublime' as a clearly recognizable tool of fiction."
FFFFOUND
I found this website- its ffffull of interesting stuff to look at. check check check it out
www.FFFFOUND.com
Kara Walker
Kara Walker (b. 1969) is a contemporary artist who deals with African American sterio types. She is amazingly innovative, and has had shows in the Whitney, MOMA, and the Guggenheim. Very Impressive!
Here is a video someone has shot of her Whitney show.
Also, here is an interview with Walker herself!
Here is a video someone has shot of her Whitney show.
Also, here is an interview with Walker herself!
Monday, December 10, 2007
Clayton James Cubitt
http://www.claytoncubitt.com/commissioned/galleries.php?gid=5
I was shown this link by a friend. Stunning and very personal point of view.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Purging Pope
"Purging Pope" - Zane Lewis. This is vinyl and acrylic. This is also awesome. Very innovative- I love when people push the limits of painting, and it doesn't look like crap.
His Artist statement:
"I attempt to explore the power of cultural icons and their relevence to contemporary equivalents of the religious sublime. By
using personas that range from the charasmatic to the unsettling to the worshipped, i throw into question the cultural
paradigms of contemporary culture."
Friday, November 16, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Zak Attack
http://www.zaxart.com
Zak Smith is an interesting character; he attended Cooper Union and Yale for painting… and is also a porn star. Obviously he has a rather interesting relationship with women, and this is undoubtedly reflected in his work (and by work I mean artwork… I have no idea about his relationship with women in his movie work). His artwork is reminiscent of Klimt as well as Graphic illustration. There is an ambitious use of color, shape and pattern which is both charged and stimulating.
Keith Perelli
Keith Perelli was an enormous influence on my decision to become a painter. During my attendance at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts he truly inspired me, pushing me to really fall in love with painting. I recently checked up on his work and they are as marvelous as ever.
His work is represented at:
www.docsgallery.com
www.keithperelli.com
Art and Design
In the world of design there seems to be an explosion of artist related works- with an actual emphasis on the artist. I recently stumbled on a website of Ipod paraphernalia that uses the work on contemporary artists and illustrators, and rather than passing them off as pretty decoration owned by the company they had actual blurbs on each artists work. In a world of endless information just clicks away this new accessibility is precious to artists.
www.gelaskins.com
Friday, November 9, 2007
Freudian
Lucian Freud has been a long time favorite of mine. His art is honest, it is raw- it does not work to beautify the human form, but rather searches to find the human nature within the form. His work is all about the search, thickly layering paint to work and rework the fleshy form and building up color. It pushes the line toward abstraction, we find ourselves concerned with the beautiful physicality of paint and forget the body we are actually seeing.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Graffiti's Biggest Sell-Outs
Banksy and Shepard Fairy are world’s two best-known graffiti artists. They have become wildly popular and are working to erase the divide between fine art and street art. Unfortunately, with this comes accusations from street art fans who believe they’ve sold out.
What makes graffiti, graffiti is the condition in which it is made; it is illegal, largely looked down upon, and followed by few. Its an exclusive club, with its own language, techniques, and hero’s. In the beginning these artists weren’t known, paid, or encouraged, and what makes the work so enthralling it that because of how hard it is to do on a large scale the artist must really stand behind what they’re doing and believe in it.
It is odd seeing these artists juxtaposed with the fine art world- a world that these artists originally mocked, and whos art was once thoroughly rejected. What was once painted over is now being sold for thousands -Banksy’s work even made a cameo in the blockbuster film Children on Men. The art world, in all its ugliness and hypocrisy, does bring with it fame and fortune and acceptance, and for those street art die-hards out there who feel a little abandoned its understandable, but why else is graffiti made if not to spread a message to the public. If seen buy no one what good is tagging a side of a building or wheat pasting up images? If the art world is going to use you, why not use the art world? Graffiti artists should put them selves out there, Graffiti is a new and exciting artistic media, with elements of performance art as well as great political implication. With hype also comes new ways for young artists to see what’s out there are bring it to a whole new level.
So now that Banksy and Shepard Fairy are being paid by anyone who can afford them to paint or print on whatever they like- we should let go of the comfortable exclusiveness and appreciate the level of respect they are allowing to the graffiti world.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Jenny Saville!!!
It takes a lot to really blow my socks off. This weekend I was more blown away than I have been in a LONG time by a painting. I finally took the long overdue trip to the Brooklyn Museum to see the Feminist Show (Remix!) and had my fist experience with Ms. Saville. I knew her work but I had never seen one in real life. I just stood there- start struck, truly in awe and totally geeking-out. “Jenny Saville, known for big paintings of big fleshy nudes, seems to have learned that paint has a life of its own,” Roberta Smith from the New York Times explains, “Saville's general strategy is to exaggerate the age-old artistic obsession with the female nude -- reflected in Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Ingres, for example -- to extremes of imposing wall-like massiveness, where the body's and the painting's surface become one.” At only 29 her work is impressively mature, her painting has an exciting freshness, as well as superb sense of color and space. “[Her paintings] are artistic cadavers being both dissected and reconstructed in a process that links different paintings or parts of paintings to photography, sculpture and abstraction, as well as suggesting darker analogies like surgery, deformity and torture,” explains Smith. She truly is one of the most exciting contemporary figurative painters, and she has a long career to look forward to.
Good Art?
I spent last Friday in Midtown visiting galleries smugly judging the art. I mean, what’s the fun in spending all you time learning about art is you can’t smugly judge it?? Most of the work I came across wasn’t very impressive- which is fairly common in the hit-or-miss nature of NYC galleries (or any galleries for that matter). While on one had I find this infuriating- on the other I have to say it is somewhat up lifting. If these idiots are selling their works for $60,000 a pop then maybe there is hope for the rest of us!
The work shown above I found especially nauseating. Painted at monumental size by William Beckman, this was the centerpiece of the show at the Forum Gallery. The series consisted of several self-portraits and a few landscapes painted in meticulous, photorealistic detail. Obviously the works technical quality is VERY good… undeniably so… but this is one of those examples in the art world where technical ability doesn’t make a “Work of Art”. The rest of the work were identical replicas of Beckman’s own face cropped down so we are unable to ignore any of his meticulously painted detail- Beckman is obviously self obsessed- and not to mention, proud of his motorcycle- yet the actual content of the work is meaningless. Yes, you can paint Beckman…. Now what? Why should I care? Good painting has been done; we have hundreds of years of art history to prove it- so now we need more. Content is everything. To make a work that is going to really make us think- to really make the art world move forward we need work that is more than superficial.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Death in Art
A few weeks ago I visited the Dutch Masters exhibit at the met. It was an impressive collection, though I have to admit that art from the 1600 doesn’t entirely seduce me- however I do find it fairly interesting. One work that caught me attention was Pieter Claesz “Still Life with a skull and Writing Quill”. It is a traditional Dutch, vanitas still-life exploring the popular theme of the transient nature of life. Conventional symbols are used to represent death, as a reminder of its inevitability, as well as the brevity of life, and the futility of pleasure.
It was painted in 1628, known as the age of Rembrandt, where artists, philosophers, and laymen were all very well acquainted with the fact of death. Death was more abundant; with less medical knowledge and unhealthy lifestyles people died earlier and more frequently. For this reason philosophy and religion also played a larger and more influential part in everyday life. Today, with the surge in medical knowledge and technology we seem to suppress the reality of death. It becomes a concept that we choose to edit from our daily thought, causing us to feel increasingly immortal. This is even reflected in the art world, as subtle depictions of death are sparse. In their place, we see unrealistic and overly dramatic visualizations of death in the media, which only makes death seem more artificial. Pieter Claesz work “Still Life with a Skull and Writing Quill” may seem metaphorically simple, but today it serves as an unexpected reminder of the simplicity of the universal quality of death.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Hmmm...
In today’s world graphic design is everywhere, and I think much of where it is going it looking great. The computer is opening amazing doors to what we as artists can do and what kinds of imagery we can produce. More importantly, computers allow for new ways for art to be shared. It is easier than ever for us to share our own work and find influences by viewing others work.
The question is- does this take away from fine arts? Will painting suffer??
My answer is no!! When photography came around in the 1800’s people though that is would change the art world- that it would be the end of painting… obviously they were wrong. In fact I believe photography gave painting the momentum it needed to push it away from a way to just document the world around us- to a true way of expression and conceptual exploration.
So if we look at what graphic arts do for the art world- who knows what it will push painting to become…
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