Arts Visuels
Rob Ryan
Here is the description from the Paul Smith:
If you believe in love, but find it difficult to explain – this is for you.
-Rob Ryan
Rob Ryan has been cutting pictures out of paper for many years. He has exhibited all over the world, and recently collaborated with Paul Smith
This book is a limited edition of 500. It contains an exclusive signed and numbered Rob Ryan screen print presented in a gift envelope.
‘An enchanting, rare book that is a pure delight from beginning to end’
Sophie Dahl
[PS- If you started reading this blog right before Valentine's Day, you probably thought I was posting a lot of lovey stuff just because of the holiday. Well, as it turns out, I have a general obsession with all creative ways of expressing love, all year round... things I call sentimentia... creative bits of sentiment.. hope you enjoy it too!]
Arts Visuels
Bon Weekend
Arts Visuels
Gone With the Wind
Jim Denevan’s exacting and graphic earth works are tediously created, only to be destroyed by the elements.
discovered via Pixels & Arrows
Arts Visuels
Loving the work of…
In the kitchen?
Arts Visuels
Paper heART
Discovered via Lost At E Minor
Arts Visuels
Lola
Photographer Joshua Scott was hired to do the product shots for Marc Jacob’s new Lola perfume. Instead, he was inspired to, as he said, “attempt to photograph the product without actually photographing the product but rather the ideas and emotions that combine to create the product.”
According to Scott, since all perfume shots are just shots of liquid in a bottle, he wanted to do something different. Pretty clever way to capture the intangible effect of a scent!
Arts Visuels
Fool's Gold
Would you have guessed this is an oil painting?? Carly Waito‘s hyper-realistic paintings of metals and gems had me at hello.
Interesting that when so much contemporary art is focused on getting away from illusionistic, representative traditional approaches to painting and shocking the viewer with the new and the “is it art?”, that something purely representational can appear so incredibly fresh.
Really, at it’s most basic, this painting (with a very clever spin) has many highly traditional attributes: it is an effort at depicting something realistically, and it depicts something beautiful and even worshipped, much as art from the 15th-19th centuries illustrated religious scenes, beautiful landscapes, and wealthy patrons.
via Pixels & Arrows
Arts Visuels
Yard Work
Creating a dwelling out of sticks sounds primitive, basic, and even instinctual– after all, people have been doing it since the beginning of time. But artist Patrick Dougherty, who was a capenter before becoming interested in art, infuses wonder, whimsy, and delight into his stick structures.
Though Dougherty is classified as an Earth Artist or Land Artist (which seems obvious given his medium and installation sites), to me he actually seems more a part of a decorative arts and architecture trajectory… though not an applicable or practical step forward in architecture, his vision echoes the long history of people taking pride in their dwellings.
To me, he rather seems like the Frank Gehry of primitive architecture. Gehry looked at buildings made of modern materials and asked why they could be more imaginitive and fluid, while Dougherty essentially did the same thing with the most basic building materials.
Arts Visuels
Poker Face
Francoise Nielly‘s abstracted portraits …are… striking. Loud. Almost brash. And somehow also intimate. And beautiful. Which is interesting given that their proximity, as in, how close-up the viewer is brought to the subject, is uncomfortable. The subjects almost always appear suspicious of their viewer. And yet there is a vulnerability to them. You get the feeling of an undercurrent of tension revolving around the subject’s exterior persona vs. interior life.
This is amazing to me: Nielly paints these based on black and white photographs, meaning she has an incredible ability for translating dark and light into unexpected colors and values that our eye will still translate as a 3D form.
Also, she paints in big, simple, uninhibited strokes using a palette knife. Watch the video at bottom to see her process– it will invoke envy at her ability to look at something and translate it almost instantly, instinctually, into the forms and colors that she does.
Click the jump for the rest of the post…
And as I can never resist the “guess the influence” game…
I think Nielly is definitely aware of her predecessors, particularly a few ab-exers and pop artists. Above, Lichtenstein’s The Melody Haunts My Reverie, 1965. The echoes of this prototype of a woman that Lichtenstein did over and over are hard to deny.
Secondly, doesn’t the somewhat aggressive rendering of her subjects remind you of de Kooning’s women (above, Woman I)?
And finally, the garish, un-lifelike colors remind me of Warhol’s portraits. However, though similar in style, I don’t find Nielly’s use of color to be dehumanizing the way Warhol’s was. Although I will say the third one down reminds me a lot of an Avatar, which brings up interesting human/nonhuman questions…
Definitely watch from about 2:00-3:30 for a look at her process. She goes from blank canvas to something totally unidentifiable to a complete portrait with a minimum of brush strokes. When the canvas is only partially done you’re like, “What is that?”
PS- Would you have guessed her age and personal style based on her paintings??
Arts Visuels
Eadward Muybridge
Isn’t this video cool? It’s a composite of time lapse photographs by early photographer Eadweard Muybridge. I think it’s so neat that his stop-motion photographs are now able to be put back together to create very early motion-pictures..
Here are some of his works (1880s), which you may recognize, and which I love for a reason I haven’t put my finger on. Also of note, he influenced Sol LeWitt early on… a fascination with process?
Ok and lastly, going forward in time again, can you see how Muybridge influenced Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)?
