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/

artist 43

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. The daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith grew up in New Jersey. As a young girl, one of Smith’s first experiences with art was helping her father make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures. This training in formalist systems, combined with her upbringing in the Catholic Church, would later resurface in Smith’s evocative sculptures, drawings, and prints. The recurrent subject matter in Smith’s work has been the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling. In the 1980s, Smith literally turned the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms, and the human nervous system. This body of work evolved to incorporate animals, domestic objects, and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death, and resurrection are thematic signposts in many of Smith’s installations and sculptures.

Welcome to the twilight zone. Kiki Smith might just be one of the creepiest artists I have ever encountered. From the (really creepily made) video interview (link below) of her life and her work, I have deduced that Kiki Smith is slightly unstable and might have family wounds and past hurts that haven't been dealt with or healed. Her interests are a little strange, which is fine but all of them come through in her art work because she has made art everything in her life. Maybe that is what is so strange about it. She makes sense of the world by putting her own brokenness out into it through art. Her art passes beyond the span of opinion and commentary. It is a way of life, a way of speaking out the inner hurt and deep feelings that she is trying to make sense of.

Maybe not, but that's just me expressing my opinion:)  The video is a little long, but very interesting if you want to check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aRhXY0wQiE&feature=player_embedded

artist 42

James Siena

James Siena was born in California in 1957 and received his BFA in 1979 from Cornell University.  He is an American Abstract Expressionist artist based in New York City. Siena's art is typically created through a series of self-imposed constraints also sometimes referred to as visual algorithms —rules Siena decides on before sitting down to work. In most of his work he establishes a basic unit and action and repeats it indefinitely. The patterns remind me of a visual eye trick book we used to have, which used math and colors to hide 3D images in the pictures.  

Siena creates paintings, drawings, and prints in which hand-rendered procedural abstractions, methodically executed, cover a wide range of modalities and produce multiple visual and psychological effects.  Siena's work stimulates both the eye and the brain. As Roberta Smith wrote in an early review of his paintings: "Mr. Siena is unusually adept at translating the mental into the visual. His paintings think as good as they look." The jewel-like surfaces of his paintings become equally compelling when transformed into the medium of intaglio printmaking. Tactile, compressed and intricate, the work is above all emphatically physical, as seen in the raised surface of the etched line, and the attentive use of color. 

I admire Siena's work and attention to detail.  It reminds me of the work of another artist that I am very close to, my little brother Isaac.  Since I am aspiring to become a teacher, he is my best chance at practicing my skills.  However, Isaac thinks very differently than I do.  He works with permanent markers to make elaborate, methodical, extremely detailed pieces, just like Siena's.  However, he is also twelve and thinks he knows everything and therefore has nothing to gain from looking at the work of others or branching out from what he knows.  I hope to teach him about what he can evolve into by showing him James Siena's interesting paintings and prints.  

http://www.harlanandweaver.com/bio.htm#section_12

jackson pollock

Jackson Pollock

I couldn't finish this blog without doing one about the man that they were all inspired by, the visual genius of Jackson Pollock. We have seen and admired some of the finest painters and artists come and go over the last century. And Jackson Pollock is one such artist who has remained as one of the most influential artists of the past fifty years. Creating a unique style, Jackson Pollock left critics in awe.  Today, Jackson Pollock prints continue to dazzle new audiences that never heard a bad review or a negative comment.

Pollock was born on January 28, 1912. He became a leading artist in the Abstract Expressionism movement and is famous for his technique of dripping and pouring paint onto his canvases. He was married to artist Lee Krasner, and was known for his extreme alcoholism. Pollock was taken before his time in an alcohol-related car accident in 1956.  He was only 44.

In 1939, Pollock discovered Pablo Picasso's show at the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso's artistic experimentation encouraged Pollock to push the boundaries of his own work.  Another interesting tidbit I found was that Pollock preferred the fluidity of commercial enamel house paints to the more viscous texture of traditional oils. This choice allowed him to weave a more intricate pictorial web, flinging swirls of paint onto the canvas.  How cool is that, since I have tried using enamel house paints in some of my own work and I have absolutely loved it!

I wish I could have known Jackson Pollock.  I feel like I maybe could have learned so so much from him.  If he was alive today, I would totally follow him around all the time, just like Raphael did to Michelangelo.  He would most likely think I was totally annoying.  It's ok though, I would forgive him because he was so cool:)  Here are a few quotes from the boss:

“On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in it, work from the four sides and be literally ‘in’ the painting.”   -Pollock, 1947

"When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well." -Pollock

"Every good artist paints what he is." -Pollock

Just for fun, I included this portrait of Jackson Pollock, by Vik Muniz (all the way from blog #1!) done in CHOCOLATE!!!  If you ever have your portrait done in chocolate, instant boss status ;)

artist 40: the big one

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1976. Koons lives and works in New York City.

Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects.  Even the uncultured can appreciate Koons's giant metal balloon dog, or balloon swan.  The images are so iconic now that the tiny balloon animals that they once imitated now are the imitators.  

The subject of art history is a constant undercurrent in his work, whether Koons elevates kitsch to the level of classical art, produces photos in the manner of Baroque paintings, or develops public works that borrow techniques and elements of seventeenth-century French garden design. Organizing his own studio production in a manner that rivals a Renaissance workshop, Koons makes computer-assisted, handcrafted works that communicate through their meticulous attention to detail.  Attention to detail is crucial for someone as famous as Koons, who is constantly in the spotlight for his amazing creations.  

Among the awards he has received are Officer of the French Legion of Honor (2007); the Artistic Achievement Award from Americans for the Arts (2006); and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2002). Recent major exhibitions have appeared at Château de Versailles, France (2008); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2008); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2008); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2002); and other institutions. Koons has participated in the Bienal de São Paulo (2002); Venice Biennale (1990, 1997); Sydney Biennale (1990); and the Whitney Biennial (1987, 1989). He was elected as a Fellow to the American Academy for Arts and Sciences in 2005.  This isn't even a full list of Koons's crazy trophy shelf!  

My one tiny question about this art mob boss is this:  Is this the kind of artist one has to become in order to be considered "successful?"  Koons is eccentric, he is devoted to his work, and to the very idea of art.  It is his religion.  In an interview of Koons from several years ago I found two of his answers to be very insightful to his psyche... 

What is your main interest as an artist?

Koons: I’m interested in the morality of what it means to be an artist, with what art means to me, how it defines my life, etc. And my next concern is my actions, the responsibility of my own actions in art with regard to other artists, and then to a wider range of the art audience, such as critics, museum people, collectors, etc. Art to me is a humanitarian act, and I be-lieve that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to affect mankind, to make the word a better place (this is not a cliche!).

Where do you get the ideas for your work?
Koons: It’s a natural process. Generally I walk around and I see one object and it affects me. I can’t just choose any object or any theme to work with. I can be confronted by an object and be interested in a specific thing about it, and the context develops simultane-ously. I never try to create a context artificially. I think about my work every minute of the day.

"I think about my work every minute of the day."

Woah.

http://www.jeffkoons.com/ 

http://www.jca-online.com/koons.html

artist 39

Jim Dine

Jim Dine is an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, illustrator, performance artist, stage designer and poet. (Whew!  What a boss)  He studied art at the Cincinnati Arts Academy and the Boston Museum School and Ohio University.  In 1958 he moved to New York. Dine’s first involvement with the art world was in his Happenings of 1959–60. These historic theatrical events took place in chaotic, makeshift environments built by the artist–performer. During the same period he created his first assemblages, which incorporated found materials. Simultaneously he developed the method by which he produced his best known work—paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures that depict and expressively interpret common images and objects (what we now know as pop art)

Clothing and domestic objects featured prominently in Dine’s paintings of the 1960s, with a range of favoured motifs including ties, shoes and bathroom items such as basins, showers and toothbrushes.  He was equally preoccupied with the elements of his own profession, for example palettes, paint-boxes and brushes, as well as with a variety of tools, which he regarded as extensions of the hand.  Dine’s method involved repeating his theme again and again, often in several mediums. Through a process of exploration and reinvention the common image lost its place in the public domain and was stamped exclusively with the artist’s signature, becoming his vehicle for communicating a range of emotional and aesthetic intentions.  He is often considered a modern individualist. While he was part of a group during the time of the Happenings and was linked with the Pop art movement through his use of subjects from everyday life, he was at odds with Pop’s deadpan style and then with pure abstraction, Minimalism and conceptual art.

While Dine has remained devoted to the depiction and incorporation of common objects, elevated to an almost iconic stature, his changing expressive intentions and his experimental approach towards technique have yielded different stylistic results. Although Dine’s stylistic shifts do not follow a clear, linear path, it can generally be stated that his work of the early 1960s is characterized by the aggressive, haphazard energy of his Happenings and the heritage of the Abstract Expressionist gesture.  What I find to be the most interesting about the evolution of his work also can be frustrating when you yourself are going through a metamorphosis.  Dine's work is really something to behold, all of it.  He will remain a prolific artist until the day he dies.

artist 37 and 38 (buenos dias from south america)

Doris Salcedo

Salcedo, whose main medium is sculpture, was born in 1958 in Colombia.  She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Universidad de Bogotá, Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1980, before traveling to New York, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia, and is generally composed of items of furniture.  Salcedo often employs objects from the past, objects imbued with an important sense of history and, through these contemporary memory sculptures, illustrates the flow of time. 

“The way that an artwork brings materials together is incredibly powerful. Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life…then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.” -Salcedo

Salcedo takes ordinary objects and uses their embodied histories, evolved forms and sheer quantities to impress upon people the weight of time and meaning inherent in everyday items. She has a fondness for domestic and commonplace materials – from textiles to wood furniture – that show wear and tear over time.  To further charge her work she frequently puts it right in public view, displacing a space people normally think of as empty to send her (open-to-interpretation) political, economic and historical messages.  An example of one of her larger scale furniture sculptures is her Installation at 8th International Istanbul Biennial, done in 2003. Here, she has stacked 1600 wooden chairs on the corner of the street between two buildings. 

Eugenio Dittborn

Dittborn was born in 1943 in Chile, and now lives and works in Santiago de Chile.  However, his paintings don't necessarily live and work there with him.  Since 1984, Eugenio Dittborn has been making works that he calls "Airmail Paintings." They are constructed collages made of cheap, lightweight materials: photocopied images and text, culled from a wide variety of sources, sewn onto clothes-lining fabric, sometimes with the addition of printed or painted marks and messages. The large panels are then folded and packed into specially made envelopes and sent off on their travels.

These itinerant artworks collect meanings like souvenirs, as they journey from place to place, across borders, over time. Made, in part, in response to Santiago's place at the periphery of the international art scene and partly to circumvent the oppressive and regimented structures of Chile's military government, (as well as to reflect previous periods of colonization and repression) these mobile visual messages are free to go anywhere and initiate an evolving dialogue with their global audience.

Isn't that fascinating?  Dittborn uses his country's history and his own understanding of the cultural and political struggles that have been and continue to be an issue as a platform to create.  This would be old hat if it weren't for the physical act of sending these issues abroad, setting them free, allowing the paintings to experience a life outside of Chile while he remains in his hometown.  It reminds me of a message in a bottle, or a musician creating music in order to set free the thoughts and conflicts inside his own heart.  

"...Travel is the politics of my paintings; and the folds, the unfolding of that politics."  -Dittborn.

http://www.iniva.org/dare/themes/space/dittborn.html

piece 2

sooooo frustrating.... the more i work on these pieces, the more ideas i have about ways i can take my project.  anyways, here is piece number 2, and i must say... painting is way way WAY more fun than blogging..... ;)

artist 35 and 36

Marcel Dzama

Marcel Dzama‘s work is inhabited by an expansive cast of recurring human, animal, and hybrid characters. Typically manipulating a distinctive palette of muted browns, grays, greens, and reds, the artist has developed an immediately recognizable visual language that penetratingly explores human action and motivation, often by means of the violent, erotic, grotesque, and absurd. His practice unleashes a universe of childhood fantasies and otherworldly fairytales, drawing equally from folk vernacular as from artistic influences that include Dada and Marcel Duchamp. (which is funny because his name is almost a combination of the two!) Widely known for his works on paper, Dzama has in recent years expanded his practice to include sculpture, painting, film, and dioramas. In the latter, he constructs intricate, complex, three-dimensional scenes using his signature drawings, collage elements, cardboard, and occasionally ceramics.

Born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Canada, Dzama received his B.F.A. from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. Since 1998, his work has been represented by David Zwirner, New York. 

http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/marcel-dzama/biography/

Jockum Nordström

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgaleNlWmLw

Nordström is known for his collages, paintings, drawings and sculptures that knit together references to folk art and outsider art, jazz, surrealist collage, furniture and architectural design,  human sexual habits and maritime lore.  He has also written children's books and designed album covers. (although I'm not sure I would hire him for a children's book if he is also known for his human sexual habits work;)  His work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Moderna Museet and Magasin 3 in Stockholm, and the Gothenburn Art Museum.  

Having tried printmaking once without exactly liking it, I would like to give major props to any artist who takes so much painstaking time to create prints and collages out of small pieces of paper.  However.  I do like his work.  I think it is lacks the feeling and conviction I've seen in so many of the other artists I have been studying lately.  In the video I have attached that details an interview of the artist, he seems so dry.... so much less alive.  I want my work to make people feel alive.  Maybe that is why I want to be a teacher.  Teaching art is all about bringing creativity to life.  Life in art is one of my biggest ideas for senior sem this semester.... finding new life, discovery, dreams, and purpose.  

artist 34

Dan Sternof Beyer

Dan was raised in the rural Nevada desert with no formal training.  His art, rather, was born from restless creativity.  Now a city dweller, his music is influenced by the pace of urban life and thought.  For example, his Wet Quintet, shown in the video below, is a beautiful display of sound, sculpture, and interaction with the people.  Self described as a Public Artist, Beyer's works include interactive social spaces and sculptures. Creating music has always played a meditative role in his life.  Another interesting sculpture is his huge bronze cast set of upside down feet.  I am inclined to wonder what his inspiration was for that sculpture.  I mean, a fountain that plays music is a beautiful idea.  What, however, does two gigantic feet have to do with... well anything?  I think that question might just be the answer.  When a person sees something that makes no sense, isn't it their natural tendency to investigate?  Two giant bronze feet are highly likely to attract much attention and interaction from spectators.  

Curiosity compels me to ask the question, is this the kind of artist I must become if I am to succeed in this business?  A musician/large-scale-art/installation/computer art/crazy ideas/philosopher???  It seems like a pretty hefty job, a bit harder than I maybe thought.  Do you need more than just raw talent to succeed in this business?  Can one make it on dreams alone?  Or is it just like any other job, outdoing yourself and clawing your way to fame and fortune.

I hope not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvuervud47E
http://thehinge.net/projects.htm

artist 33

Adel Abdessemed

Adel Abdessemed was born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria.  He is a conceptual artist who now lives and works in Paris.  Abdessemed attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, Algeria from 1987 to 1994. Due to political unrest in Algeria, he moved to Lyon, France in 1994. He continued his fine arts education at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, before completing his studies in Paris, France in 2000. The following year, he enrolled at the International Studio Program at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.

Abdessemed transforms everyday materials and images into unexpected, charged, and sometimes shocking artistic declarations. He pulls from a plethora of sources- personal, social, and political- to create a visual language that is simultaneously rich and economical, sensitive and controversial, radical and mundane. Many situations created by Abdessemed are based on singular and deliberate actions, or, as he calls them, acts, which are testified, more than documented, with videos and photographs, and are often later juxtaposed with a sculptural remainder from the action itself.  

Abdessemed is an example of a contemporary conceptual artist.  For more than a century, artists have given up on idealization, the dominant aesthetic vision at least since the Renaissance. Instead of showing us what we could be, artists have reflected back to us an imperfect image of who we are and the world in which we live. This shifting attitude has resulted in a variety of artwork that is troubling, ugly and rooted in the baser instincts of human nature.  Abdessemed shows us a new side of art, he takes us into a new realm of the art world that seems to be more and more commonplace these days.  

It kinda scares me a little bit to be honest.  

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9407E0DF143BF934A35751C1A9619C8B63

new piece

hello artist friends.  this is my first piece from the summer.  i do not have much to say about it, i guess we will find out when critiques start in two weeks right?

basically, i'm trying to show that even though ethiopian orphans are fading from view, invisible, and commonplace (why i paint the kids in coffee), they have just as vibrant a heart as any other kid.  their spirits are alive and their hopes and dreams are full of color.