Anastasia Rudenko’s Photographs Of Russia Is A Searing Documentary Of A Society In Trouble

moray mair | Photography | June 4, 2013

Anastasia Rudenko‘s photographs from her ‘Visual Dictionary Of Russia’ give us a fascinating insight into a complex country, a nation that has dominated modern history, a nation made up of many cultures.

Rodenko started life out as a mathematician but has since reverted to her love of art. She began taking photos inspired by experiences in her own family as a child before moving on to documenting families affected by domestic violence, including members of her own family and people she met through the police. This move into societal issues and documentary photography has led her to explore everything from the army to disability, politics to rural life.

In ‘Visual Dictionary Of Russia’ Rudenko has been creating what she calls a contemporary guidebook or set of travel postcards in which she gives us snapshots of contemporary Russia, pictures of today’s reality.

60 total views, 1 today

Scarlett Hooft Graafland’s Photographs Of Land Art Installations Are Magical

moray mair | Photography | June 4, 2013

Scarlett Hooft Graafland‘s photographs are a document of the magic that happens when you produce land art in a remote location where the inhabitants have been forced to adapt to the natural conditions of place, that is intertwined, nature and man. Over the years Graafland has travelled all over the world seeking places that have an authenticity and a connection to the land, to the past.

Her site – specific installations are always inspired by local traditions and materials and she arrives with no pre-conceptions. no fixed idea. Rather she waits until clarity arrives, until that spark is lit. As she says herself:

I am filled with nostalgia for places where people are very close to nature, places where people have barely interfered with nature. The wonder of nostalgia for places you have never been to. The wonder of creating situations that have never existed before and will probably never exist again. Situations that are possible but very unlikely to occur again. Magic realism.

66 total views, 0 today

Cain Caser’s Paintings Are A Psychedelic Blast Of Raver Culture And Graffiti

moray mair | Art and design | June 4, 2013

Cain Caser’s paintings are a psychedelic blast of raver culture and graffiti, a hyper active feast of neon hallucinations and garish figures as if portraiture is on a rush, a love burst of epic proportions, the face almost obliterated, abstracted in the delirium of life. Influenced by Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat and William Burroughs his paintings are a mixed media assemblage that begin with a cut up.

I draw on paper, cut the drawings up and rearrange them until something appears which I then use as a model for the painting. With each piece I’m looking for a portrait but I don’t want to deliberately make it, I’d rather it presents itself to me.

57 total views, 0 today

Amy Bessone’s Paintings Are A Riff On The Female Nude Of Art History

moray mair | Art and design | June 3, 2013

Amy Bessone’s paintings are a riff on the great nude of history, that perfect female form that has been painted by male artists for generations. In Bessone’s hands though the female form makes a cacophonic burst from tradition and is pushed through a blender that spits out modernist references from Impressionism to Cubism, Fauvism to Abstract Expressionism. And while her bright neon colours and sensual bold lines – that are rendered in an almost Japanese style – are consistently directing us towards the culturally revered representations of women throughout at history, her approach is almost one of parody that prevents us from intellectualising her work.

55 total views, 0 today

Elise Boularan’s Photographs Are Poetic Pictures

moray mair | Life in a cultural petri dish | June 3, 2013

Elise Boularan‘s photographs are complicated images, layered with meaning, are abstract pictures in the sense that she doesn’t give us an image of a physical reality rather she attempts to elicit a truth out of our perception of the world. Perhaps one could call Boularan’s photographs poetic, using the visual image rather then a phrase to create metaphors and allegories that pertain to our everyday existence.

Looking at her pictures one cannot help but be drawn into the ethereal aesthetic of image, there is a glow, a romantic yearning that wants to be acknowledged, a silence that wants to be heard.

69 total views, 0 today

Joseph Loughborough’s Charcoal Drawings From ‘Defence Of the Absent’ @ The Galerie Grand Rue 13th June – 13th July, 2013

moray mair | Art and design | June 3, 2013

Joseph Loughborough‘s wonderful charcoal drawings have appeared in this blog before but this time round I’m posting up work from his latest series’ Defence Of the Absent’ which will be on show at the Galerie Grand Rue in Poitiers, France from the 13th June. These expressive, violent, scratchings, these charcoal attacks are not quiet, rather Loughborough seems to channel the urban disquiet, the mechanical life we lead into his portraits of people, half hidden in the shadows of a unsafe world, a place full of disquiet and fear.

What I’ve always loved about Loughborough’s drawings is that they instinctively make me write, as if in a rhythm, his drawings so visceral that words flood, emotions collide, energy fills up and lets go.

55 total views, 0 today

Dragomir Misina’s Paintings Are Rich In Expressive Colour

moray mair | Art and design | June 3, 2013

Dragomir Misina‘s paintings are a whorl of fresh, bright, colourful and expressive marks, his vigorous canvases layered as if ripped out of a sketchbook, a heavily graffitied wall. Misina wants us to step into the whirlwind of his vibrant world that screams of life and activity, freshness and summer.

Somewhere underneath the layers of paint and marks lies a narrative waiting to be found out, told, explored and Misina does it with a lightness of touch and much brevity.

50 total views, 1 today

Cristina Troufa’s Paintings Use Negative Space To Deal With Identity And Self

moray mair | Art and design | June 1, 2013

Cristina Troufa‘s paintings have a common theme, one that has been grappled by artists for millennia, identity and self. So yes, Troufa treads along a well worn path but she has also managed to find her own space by approaching the composition of her paintings in a new way. By utilizing negative space she gives her subjects room to explore and us, the viewer, the opportunity to create a narrative through which we can question ourselves, look into our own selves. What’s more her technique is accomplished; her use of extreme perspective, a clean line and a soft colour palette being the perfect counterpoint to her rendering of intimate moments, often unseen and private. Here’s what Troufa has to say about her own work:

The theme of my work is about my life, about myself and my beliefs. I explore in my work the self-representation in the looking for my inner self, my self-portrait.

80 total views, 0 today

Mr William’s Illustrations Are A Play On 1950′s Fashion And Iconography

moray mair | Art and design | June 1, 2013

An illustrator who works under the moniker of Mr William from Santiago, Chile sent me in these beautiful illustrations. As a designer he’s passionate about the fashion and cultural iconography of the 1950′s which gives his designs a certain elegance, a nostalgia for hat once was. What’s most striking about Mr Williams illustrations is his use of subtle collage techniques and use of colour and pattern which is rich. bright and bold.

84 total views, 0 today

Mark Kent’s Industrial Art, Posters And Album Cover Designs Emanate From A Single Recurring Dream

moray mair | Art and design | May 31, 2013

Mark Kent is an Irish artist and designer based in Holland who recently sent me in his studio work; a series of computer generated posters and album cover designs. Kent has a wide remit often using 3D modelling software to create his work. The commonality that runs through his sculptures, installations, posters and graphic design is architecture; the building of structures, the interlinking of objects, of negative and positive spaces. Kent’s designs have an industrial aesthetic, seem to be a juxtaposition of organic and mechanical, a technological enigma, maps of some kind, floor plans, blue prints. When Kent sent on his statement it all became clear.

This work, all of his work, emanates from a single dream, a recurring dream in which he finds himself in a large house constructed in wood, forever falling apart, in a constant state of disrepair and collapse, without support. This strange space has occupied him for many years and now, as an artist, he is exploring the surreal narrative of his inner self through drawing and 3D computer programs.

105 total views, 0 today

Sally Mann Photographs Are Beautiful, Empathic And Technically Accomplished

moray mair | Photography | May 31, 2013

Sally Mann is one of America finest photographers, her work is beautiful, empathic and technically brilliant. Mann has been shooting photos in the American South since the 1970′s producing series on portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life. However it wasn’t until she produced her book ‘Immediate Family’ that she became a household name.

The book, published in 1992, focused on her three young children and caused uproar as many of the pictures of them playing, sleeping and eating also alluded to the larger themes of death and cultural perceptions of sexuality. However, like all great artists Mann has never let criticism get in her away and has always let the pictures speak for themselves, the empathy she imbues in each picture a testament to her brilliance as an artist and craftsman.

119 total views, 1 today

Andrea Burgay Collages Are A Playful Exploration Into Human Decay

moray mair | Art and design | May 31, 2013

Andrea Burgay‘s collages are an extension of her paintings, sculptures and installations, a part of her desire to find connections between organic forms in nature and the human body. This is work as play, an exploration, a journey into the unknown where materials such as found images, text, fabric and fragments of her own drawings and paintings interweave with each other to create a picture that both repulses and attracts, alludes to death, the life cycle and spiritual ceremony.

Burgay’s collages have a painterly aesthetic and textural quality that gives them an added dimension, a greater sense of purpose than the ubiquitous found image cut and paste collages created by many artists. You might say that Burgay’s collages come out of a fine art process, rather than an illustrative one, they are kinsmen to a more traditional art practice.

95 total views, 0 today

Paul Morstad’s Paintings On Maps Reveal Our Attempt To Order The Natural World

moray mair | Art and design | May 31, 2013

Paul Morstad‘s paintings are deeply influenced by his growing up in rural western Canada, in the provinces of Saskatchewan and British Columbia. For someone living in a large unexplored part of the American continent nature was always around him, a vast wilderness filled with birds, wild animals and an untamed landscape. Therefore it’s no surprise, that in his work as an artist and illustrator, Morstad has turned to what he is innately connected to; nature and the human organisation of space in the form of maps.

Before beginning each painting Morstad treats each map with gum shellac – to keep the paper thin and delicate – and slowly layers the background and foreground together, weaves them, meshes them so both the map, the topography and the subject matter become intertwined to create a woven tension between land and animal life as he puts it:

102 total views, 0 today

Adrian Lockhart’s Drawings Bring The Joy Of The Beach To Life

moray mair | Art and design | May 30, 2013

Adrian Lockhart’s drawings, paintings and prints bring to life the joy of the sea and the wonderful stillness and timelessness of a day lying on the beach. Lockhart has been in love with surfing and drawing for decades and it emanates from everything he does. Simple compositions, often in charcoal and light washes, that pick up on the nuances, somehow express that calmness and careless abandon that comes with a day on the beach.

Lockhart has a beautiful drawing style and his ability to capture the beauty of the human form and changing moods of the ocean with a minimal flowing line is superb and reminds me of Picasso’s bather series. He is a gifted artist who is able to express the languid pace of leisure, of wading out to sea, of drying oneself on the beach, strolling along, catching some rays, chilling out, far removed from the relentlessness of everyday life.

This is work that that exists as a pause. A moment of cessation. Of beauty and life. It is the work of an artist who has been drawing for years, who is utterly immersed in draftsmanship, who understands the poetic nature of line and its ability to conjure up stillness and sense of quiet.

114 total views, 0 today

Charles Harbutt’s Photographs Are A Lesson In Composition And Light

moray mair | Photography | May 30, 2013

Charles Harbutt’s photographs are a lesson in composition and light, his street photographyas exceptional as his earlier work as a photojournalist.

Harbutt has been at the top of his game for over 50 years and for the first 20 years of his career was well known for his political and socially aware photo essays so much so that he ended up being invited to Cuba in 1959 by Fidel Castro to document the overthrow of the Batista regime. In the 1970′s he was twice president of Magnum before leaving due to the increasing commercialisation of the famous photo agency. Since then he’s been teaching and exhibiting his work around the World as well as taking pictures, always taking pictures, his work an extension of the boundaries of journalism into the realm of the everyday.

His photographs are a wonderful example of the power of the black and white image, of how composition can tell a story and how technique is critically important when printing an image, of lifting an ordinary subject to a level where it becomes a metaphor, a unique moment full of emotion, pathos, humanity.

136 total views, 1 today

Page 4 of 1791 2 345 6 7 8 9 10 Last ››

search our blog

check out our skills bank

Check out our bank where we pool all our skills for the benefit of our mutantspace members. It's free to join and registration only takes a minute

submissions to our blog

we're always delighted to publish your work in our blog. So If you want your art seen by thousands of people then go to our submissions page to get more info

Anastasia Rudenko’s Photographs Of Russia Is A Searing Documentary Of A Society In Trouble

Scarlett Hooft Graafland’s Photographs Of Land Art Installations Are Magical

Cain Caser’s Paintings Are A Psychedelic Blast Of Raver Culture And Graffiti

Amy Bessone’s Paintings Are A Riff On The Female Nude Of Art History

Elise Boularan’s Photographs Are Poetic Pictures

Joseph Loughborough’s Charcoal Drawings From ‘Defence Of the Absent’ @ The Galerie Grand Rue 13th June – 13th July, 2013

Dragomir Misina’s Paintings Are Rich In Expressive Colour

Cristina Troufa’s Paintings Use Negative Space To Deal With Identity And Self

Mr William’s Illustrations Are A Play On 1950′s Fashion And Iconography

Mark Kent’s Industrial Art, Posters And Album Cover Designs Emanate From A Single Recurring Dream

Sally Mann Photographs Are Beautiful, Empathic And Technically Accomplished

Andrea Burgay Collages Are A Playful Exploration Into Human Decay

Paul Morstad’s Paintings On Maps Reveal Our Attempt To Order The Natural World

Adrian Lockhart’s Drawings Bring The Joy Of The Beach To Life

Charles Harbutt’s Photographs Are A Lesson In Composition And Light

search our blog

check out our skills bank

submissions to our blog

go on you know you like us

eat from our feed

blog categories

help us make this work

posts from the past

latest skills in our bank

participate

about us

Submissions

get a room