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