There’s something about Grace Weinrib‘s paintings that I really like. I don’t think she’s quite found her style yet – well it’s either that or she is happy using a variety of styles and techniques in her work – but I do love looking at her pictures. They’re playful, simple, bright, joyful and poppy. This might have something to do with the fact that she grew up under a Californian sun and now lives in Chile where she’s an assistant professor in the Art School of Universidad Finis Terrae.
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Virginia Leonard‘s paintings are, like much of the work I’ve posted up on this site, a riot of colours, swirling masses of paint, a mix of gouache, acrylic and resin on canvas. Her primary interest lies in the realationships between form and the illumination of resin. Here’s what she says about her work:
Paint is laid on paint, mark is laid on mark. The subject becomes less important as the painting progresses. Often the sheer thickness of the paint, between the small valleys and crags of paint add to the paradox of realised space.Sometimes the subject is formed by the drama of colour – forms caught up in the method of paint laid upon paint.
Often in the painting I invent visual ideas and images that are summoned up by the automatic gesture, where the marks have no specific reference purpose. It is a play of mind and imagination.
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Laurence Demaison‘s photographs are mostly self portraits – very dark, twisted ones. Despite what you may think her images are not the result of post -production digital manipulation. No. Rather Demasion works as all photographers once did, in analogue, using the art of light, speed and the darkroom to create incredible images. Demaison seems interested in both the image – in all its distorted, reflected, refracted glory – and the act of photography itself, the technique, the concept, playing with exposure times, letting chance take a hold of the final image, drawing over the negatives and so on. The work, without a doubt, reminiscent of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy.
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Chris Trueman‘s abstract paintings are all about colour and abstraction and in his latest collection, ‘Stripes’, he’s been exploring the difference between the physiological process of sight, of what we see, and the how we perceive that colour, form, object.
Like many painters – most artists in general for that matter – he’s always asking the question; how do people create stories? How do they interpret space? How do they find meaning in the perception of what they see?
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Daniele Buetti‘s latest photo series, ‘oh boy oh boy’, takes documentary photographs of terror, war and conflicts – such as those from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo – and turns them into beautiful innocent pictures that look like mosaics, stained glass windows.
The work is really a story of two parts; the technical beauty of the work – which involves removing sections of the original image and replacing the discarded pieces with coloured shapes – and the concept of taking a harrowing photo, stripping it of its story, it’s meaning and turning it into a a pleasing image. An image which we are forced to re-interpret.
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Kim Westfall‘s paintings are not about representation rather they are about paint and its very materiality. Her brush strokes are loose and energetic, her colours vibrant. Her approach to art making renders beautiful paintings, work that the Japanese would describe as ‘heta uma’ (which loosely translates as good sense and ‘bad’ technique).
Westfall’s compositions are a celebration of colour, form, the very act of painting, using a brush. The kind of painting I love.
If you’re in New York you can see her work at BAM, the Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn.
Via Juxtapoz
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You got to love these wonderful illustrations by Spanish designer Ana Albero. Besides illustrating for numerous magazines she co – runs ‘Edition Biografiktion’ in Berlin wiith two other illustrators and publishes her own comics and fanzines.
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Rae Martini‘s paintings hark back to his time as a graffiti artist when he spent many years painting on the streets and trains of his native Italy. Today he makes abstract paintings - a graffiti expression on canvas – which actually look like images of ruined walls, metallic surfaces covered and layered in graffiti, tags, posters, etc. To create the wonderful textures in his paintings he often uses fire and dirt giving his work a real grit and bite – a natural progression from the street to the gallery.
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Guy Yanai‘s paintings remind me alot of David Hockney’s work – his work flat and brightly coloured, his ideas coming from the everyday – his surroundings, his family home, photographic, print media and film – all rearranged and broken down into shape and colour. When looking at his work you wouldn’t really think that his primary influences are the early Renaisance painters but, having said, that their obssession with perspective might explain certain aspects of Yaniai’s work. I find his paintings refreshing, bold and bright and would love to have one hanging in my home.
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Joe Baglow‘s illustrations are about the quirkiest I’ve seen – not unlike Shrigley’s work – they’re childish, kind of cute in a weird way. There’s not much more I can say about his work other than it’s alot of fun but here’s what he has to say about it:
A lot of my own work is based around narrative and story telling. I enjoy dreaming up fictitious worlds and situations in which these stories can evolve and develop. Because of my background, I do not feel that I am just another illustrator, by studying both design and illustration and being interested in both of these fields respectively, I hope to create work that looks beautiful but is also logically constructed and conceptually sound.
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These collages by Elena Johnston are very different from her usual illustrations and designs – in which paint is the predominant medium – but are wonderful nonetheless. They are incredibly simple. Almost like a primary school project. The work of a child delighted to be playing with coloured shapes. In many ways they remind me of Matisse’s paper cut outs – a love of pure colour and abstract form.
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The incredible Italian street artist Blu has recently finished a political mural in Madrid, Spain. An indictment on our consumerist, capitalist culture. This piece, in true street art style, is full of big, hard hitting images designed to get the idea across in a sceond, to punch you in the guts, to make you laugh and gasp at its visual ingenuity. A runaway train becomes a metaphor for us, society, while behind it a long line of cars; waste, military hardware, consumer goods and oil follows – and the money we spend to sate our greed used to fuel the engine that is heading right off a cliff.
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Tomokazu Matsuyama’s paintings and sculptures are a clash of contemporary art and pop culture, a mash up of western images and Japanese art from the Edo and Meiji eras. Brought up in both Japan and America his work derives its strength from this duality of East and West, the cultural clash of both traditions. His style and subject matter constantly questioning the notions of national and individual identity.
Here’s what he has to say about his work:
Within my work, I hope to render traditional icons and imagery within a broader ether of an international intermix that has become the evolution of what seems to be the urban-ideal of the global contemporary. Reinterpretation Edo period imagery as well as contemporary motifs and patterning, I hope to blend what is seen as Eastern and Western aesthetics into one that resists categorization and cultural belonging.
As cultures become increasingly entangled within another through the fluidity of the pathways of travel, the internet and other ways of communication and connection, urban centers are becoming increasingly familiar, with a patchwork of intermingling cultural signifiers that then become our everyday lives. It is a chaotic mix that has become everyday. However, with this mixing, so has the traditions, local signifiers and cultural identifiers begun to dissolve into an endangered species, seeming to leave behind a trail of homogenization. However, the realities are not as such. As a Japanese national living between the U.S. and Japan, I can only believe that my experience is much like many of those who are now caught within these urban zones. Yet what remains is this struggle between reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global. My work is equally pended as such, between worlds — they are not completely blended, but instead still a patchwork of a controlled chaos trying to evolve into something close to cosmopolitan, yet not so idealized.
While my work is about integration into a new world order of urban cosmopolitanism — what remains are the underlining of specific iconographies that inform my cultural, historical past as Japanese. Yet, it is all placed non-sensibly into another context, where I am constantly trying to reinterpret what the image means within a shifting world dialogue.
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I’ve posted up a series of Ben Giles‘ flower collages for two reasons; one, because the leaves are falling off the trees and after the summer we’ve had there hasn’t been much chance to see anything blooming, even the blackberry season was dismal. Secondly, because his collages are so rudimentary, so lacking in artiface, are old school and have so much joy in them.
He obviously has a thing about flowers and I for one am glad. Why not. Bring it on Giles the more flowers the better. We need as much colour and vibrancy as we can get in the cold, wet, miserable months ahead.
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What you’re looking at isn’t what you think. That’s right. These are not pictures from a strange photo collection of weird kids. No. They’re actually tiny pencil drawings by Paul Chiappe who specialises in creating five square centimetre drawings that don’t look out of place in a museum of horrors.
His technique is such that you’d swear you were looking at vintage black and white family photos and school portraits except for the fact that the images aren’t quite what they seem, look closely and you’ll see Laurel and Hardy in a school portrait, Adolf Hitler making an appearance at some school play and other kids dressed up in strange animal masks. They all generally look unhappy or plain odd.
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