LAST ONE (yesssssssss)

Alex Katz

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927.  In 1946, Katz entered The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan, a prestigious college of art, architecture, and engineering.  There he was trained in Modern art theories and techniques. Upon graduating in 1949, Katz attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine.  As he grew, Katz moved towards greater realism in his paintings. He became increasingly interested in portraiture, and painted his friends and family. He embraced monochrome backgrounds, which would become a defining characteristic of his style, anticipating Pop Art and separating him from gestural figure painters and the New Perceptual Realism. Katz also began to experiment with landscape as his skills progressed. Alex Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions internationally since 1951.  He now works at an artists’ cooperative building in SoHo, New York City (of course).

Katz's paintings have been described as flat, elegant, and realistic. A maverick from the beginning, Katz came of age when Abstract Expressionism still reigned, yet he turned to painting landscapes and the human figure. Over time, his paintings got bigger. Taking cues from Cinemascope movies and billboards, his highly stylized pictures also anticipated Pop Art. His deadpan evocation of flat, bright figures had an everyday quality that linked them to commercial art and popular culture.  Even though Katz is now in his eighties, he still paints like a boss and his works are still in high demand.  

http://www.alexkatz.com/home

My Hero

Dr. Patricia Mercer Hutchens has been painting since college.  She studied at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; and Wheaton College, Illinois.  Since then she has taught at Northwestern University, Wheaton College, George Mason University, Lord Fairfax College and Northern Virginia Community College, as well as the Corcoran College of Art and Design.  Her specialty is painting and constructed art works. Parallel with this concentration in visual arts has been a passion for the origins of communication and symbols, which resulted in completion of a PhD in Theology with a concentration in Hebrew, and publishing a book, “Hebrew for the Goyim.”

For some years Pat's primary genre has incorporated large sculpted vehicles (mixed media, approximately 5’ x 5’) as the means of expression for her work and ideas. More recently, however, she has been working on a series of historical paintings of Northern Virginia, as well as a series related to the Auschwitz/Berkenau concentration camps.

Pat also started Washington Artworks in 1982, concentrating on fostering visual arts and supporting worthy causes in the Metro area and elsewhere, with donated art works of her own and from students and colleagues.

Pat is also is my adopted granny, friend, and teacher for two years.  Her works have been my inspiration and her words have been my encouragement for years.  I remember the first time she taught me how to paint in oils when I was thirteen.  She set up a still life for me and my cousin and let us use her own paints, checking on our work every so often to give a brush stroke here, or a thought there.  She is kind and wise, and has always been so generous with her supplies, providing me with the kind of materials I could never afford on my own.  Pat is currently battling brain cancer, but her faith and spirit are the same as they have always been.  She continues to be my art hero, and always will be.  I wanted to finish my blog with her because of all the artists in the world, I gotta say... she's the best.

Forgive my sentimentality.... but, I love you Granny!!!

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2011/01/27/pat-hutchens-work-brings-holocaust-victims-back-to-life.html

http://www.greatfallsstudios.com/member-details.php?ID=48

artist 49

Allen Ruppersberg

Allen Ruppersberg was born in 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio.  Ruppersberg graduated with a bachelor of fine arts from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now California Institute of the Arts) in 1967.  From the beginning, Ruppersberg was fascinated with pulp fiction novels, magazines, posters, and films.  He drew his inspiration from the stuff of everyday life and culture.  He is one of the first generation of American conceptual artists that changed the way art was thought about and made. His work includes paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations, and books. He now lives and works in New York and Santa Monica, California.

Allen Ruppersberg's philosophy is to use language as a means of expression in its own right. He has drawn on all the different sectors of the mass media and the consumer society from a critical viewpoint.  For an artist interested in the cultural mythologies, narratives, and common truths of everyday life, his collection of materials, featuring mostly items from American popular culture of the mid 20th century, has frequently served as fertile source material in his work. 

An early example of an installation that Ruppersberg created was Al's Café, in which Ruppersberg created a functioning café for 3 months.  The point of the café was to memorialize the time period through one of the most popular and beloved motifs.  The Cafe was intended to be a limited-run restaurant, staged once a week—Thursday nights from eight to eleven—in a rented location in downtown Los Angeles. It was to function socially as a meeting place for friends, members of the art world, and anyone else who wanted to drop by. In direct opposition to what one might have expected from a young artist at the time, the decor was familiar to the point of strangeness: hyperfamiliar, you might say today. The look was as crafted as a movie set, true to the period, though the period could have been anywhere from 1925 to 1969. Against all Minimalist, Post-Minimalist, and Conceptualist expectations, this cafe was not an idea as an idea as an idea; it was sumptuously filled with romantic detail, suggesting a cafe that had existed for a lifetime of years and was filled with Middle American memorabilia—posters, nature calendars, fishing paraphernalia, pinups, picture postcards, and autographed photos of movie stars and sports heroes. The patterns of the tablecloths were everyday plaid, the counter and the tables and chairs were traditional. Odd bits of advertising novelties were everywhere, souvenirs of past events abounded, and the waitresses were beautiful. This was Al's Cafe, the American cafe of all American cafes, looking as if it had been nurtured for forty years by a caring cafe-owner, filled with memories to be shared with generations of patrons. It was a place where any American would have felt at home. It was exorbitantly familiar.

But once one recognized this, and once one was comfortable, a strangeness was invited to the table. The menu supplied by the beautiful waitress was on the outside perfectly normal-looking—but the "dishes" were rather odd. The first offering ("From the Broiler") was "Toast and Leaves." The second offering was "Desert Plate and Purple Glass." And so on. From salad to desert, Al's Cafe mediated nature into sculpture, brought the forest and the desert to your table.  When a person ordered a "plate," the waitress brought the order to the "kitchen" behind the counter, the "cook" (Ruppersberg) put together the dish (of nature art), and the order was delivered to the table.

Ruppersberg's art café lasted three months.  I wish I could have gone, it is such an interesting and, well, kooky idea.  To express the essentials of art through something as commonplace and normal as an old American café... classic.

http://www.gms.be/index.php?content=artist_detail&id_artist=34

Artist 48

Richard Tuttle

Richard Tuttle is an American post-minimalist artist.  Post-minimalism is an artistic field used for work influenced by or attempts to go beyond the aesthetic of minimalism, or the work that is set out to expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts.  Tuttle himself is known for his small, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line. His works span a range of media, from sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and artist’s books to installation and furniture.

Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1941, and lives and works in New Mexico and New York. He received a BA from Trinity College, Hartford. Although most of Tuttle’s prolific artistic output since the beginning of his career in the 1960s has taken the form of three-dimensional objects, he commonly refers to his work as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive scale and idea-based nature of his practice. He subverts the conventions of Modernist sculptural practice—defined by grand, heroic gestures; monumental scale; and the “macho” materials of steel, marble, and bronze—and instead creates small, eccentrically playful objects in decidedly humble, even “pathetic” materials such as paper, rope, string, cloth, wire, twigs, cardboard, bubble wrap, nails, Styrofoam, and plywood.

Tuttle also manipulates the space in which his objects exist, placing them unnaturally high or oddly low on a wall—forcing viewers to reconsider and renegotiate the white-cube gallery space in relation to their own bodies.  He understands only too well the importance of space in any installation, and uses directed light and shadow to further define his objects and their space. Influences on his work include calligraph, poetry, and language. A lover of books and printed matter, Tuttle has created artist’s books, collaborated on the design of exhibition catalogues, and is also a printmaker. 

Richard Tuttle received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; and Museu Fundação Serralves, Porto. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a 2005 Tuttle retrospective.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/richard-tuttle

Artist 47

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer was born in 1950. She is an American conceptual artist who received a BA from Ohio University in Athens (1972); an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1977); and honorary doctorates from the University of Ohio (1993), the Rhode Island School of Design (2003), and New School University, New York (2005). Holzer now lives and works in Hoosick Falls, New York. She belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects.

Holzer is mostly known for her large-scale public displays that include billboard advertisements, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, as well as illuminated electronic displays. The main focus of her work is the use of words and ideas in public space. Originally utilizing street posters, LED signs became her most visible medium, though her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches and footstools, stickers, T-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, sound, video, light projection, the internet, and even a race car. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, describing torture, or lamenting death and disease, Jenny Holzer’s use of language provokes a response in the viewer. While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations.

http://www.jennyholzer.com/list.php
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/jenny-holzer

Artist 46

Mike Kelley 

Mike Kelley was an American performance and installation artist. He completed a BFA at the University of Michigan School of Art, Ann Arbor, and an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, after which he settled in Los Angeles (Go figure, not New York!).

As a student at Cal Arts, Kelley was influenced by the conceptual approach taken by teachers such as Jonathon Borofsky, John Baldessari (woohoo!) and Douglas Huebler. 

His first acclaimed performance work, staged in Los Angeles in collaboration with David Askevold in 1979, was Poltergeist; it included photographs, objects and black-and-white drawings combining image and text in comic-book style.  The counter-cultural, critical energy and concentration on themes of dysfunctionality and repression in his early works became more focused in the mid-1980s, when he began working with found objects, specifically soft toys. 

As Kelley's work morphed from performance into more installation using found objects, his focus tightened as well.   Where at first his works commentated on public or culture, his later works became something more biographical.  Many of his pieces reflected on the way personal tokens and totems of affection can be invested with desire and repression, and can form part of a person’s psychological development. In contrast to earlier work in which his individuality would be complicated and obscured, biography became increasingly important for Kelley in the 1990s, albeit an openly fabricated biography.  In 1995 he produced an architectural model of the institutions in which he had studied, Educational Complex based on incomplete memories. The sections that were missing suggested areas in which trauma events occurred, referred to by Kelley as ‘repressed space’. By basing his work on a regression to troubled periods in childhood and adolescence, he underlines his view of art as a dysfunctional reality which, through a re-enactment of traumatic events, can have therapeutic ends. 

Kelley's journey through creation was a journey of self-discovery.  And I find his later works truly inspiring.  Unfortunately, by the end of his life, it doesn't seem that he found what he was looking for.  Mike Kelley died earlier this year.  He was only  57.  Kelley was found at his home in South Pasadena in what seemed to be a suicide following a serious depression.  It breaks my heart when an artist with so much talent doesn't make it, like Sebastian Horsely or Jackson Pollock.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/arts/design/mike-kelley-influential-american-artist-dies-at-57.html?_r=1 

artist 45

Bruce Pearson

Bruce Pearson is an abstract painter who attended the San Francisco Art Institute.  His large-scale works, made more monumental by their deep relief quality, look a lot like swirling coral reefs and hallucinatory 3D landscapes, rapturous fields of color and highly textured surfaces of well-calibrated, but ambiguous meaning. Cast from phrases literally or figuratively clipped from, among other sources, fashion magazines, product catalogs and bad television, Pearson's dense, hallucinogenic pictures are carved from modest styrofoam, then painted a welter of clashing or complementary colors.  The text of each piece is hidden in plain sight, carved in the styrofoam and then painted over.  Often, the text is painted into the piece so that if you looked at it a certain way you would be able to read it, but if you looked at it another way, you would see the image but not be able to read the text.

In an interview of the artist, Pearson said this about his textual inspirations:

"Well, it's amazing how much stuff you can simply get from the newspaper. I get quotes from all over, from journals, from books I'm reading. I compile the stuff, put it into notebooks. I work on about eight different series of paintings simultaneously. They are different as paintings and also as ideas. Each series has its own conceptual structure and the series are interrelated. I find text for each series. Then I do a drawing. I lay everything out in the drawing and make sure things are working as I want them to. If the drawing engages me, then I move into the painting."

I always thought that keeping an art journal meant doing sketches all the time, but this artist keeps a detailed journal of words and phrases.  Each person's research must be intrinsically connected to that artist's passions and goals.  For instance, if I was going to keep a detailed art journal, then ideas about teaching kids, how to communicate to them using art or what kind of pictures kids will most connect to, would be the main thing you should find in there.  

Pearson's works are really quite stimulating.  Looking at them small scale on my computer can be a little sickening because of the bright colors and hallucinogenic patterns.  Go ahead and check it out!

http://www.brucepearsonstudio.com/

artist 44

Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack was born in 1931 in New York (of course).  She holds a graduate degree and an honorary doctorate from Cooper Union in New York City, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University. She attended New York University's Institute of Fine Arts where she studied the history of art.  Originally, her work was abstract (probably in an attempt to branch out and become her own person, apart from all the paintings she was studying in art history) 

Gradually, however, Flack's work became more and more realistic, until she crossed that final threshold into photorealism.

She was awarded the St. Gaudens Medal from Cooper Union, and the honorary Albert Dome professorship from Bridgeport University. She is an honorary professor at George Washington University, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. 
 Flack has taught and lectured extensively both nationally, and internationally. 

A pioneer of Photorealism and a nationally recognized painter and sculptor, Ms. Flack's work is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Museum of Art in Canberra, Australia. She was the first photorealist painter to have work purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.

Flack received a lot of negative criticism for her large-scale photorealistic paintings in the seventies.  Critics called them feministic and too personal, since Flack would paint the things that surrounded her as well as the people who were personally important to her.  The bright colors and high gloss medium she was using also sparked a constant flow of negative comments from her art "superiors."  However, she was soon accepted into the realist world.  She has since become one of the most important and influential artists in her field, simply for sticking to her guns and being who she is.  Go Audrey!

http://db-artmag.com/en/54/feature/audrey-flack-breaking-the-rules/