artist week two

Sam Beam, from Iron and Wine, attended VCU for painting and along with being a musician paints his own album covers thus making him one of those all round fancy types.Sam Beam lives in Miami, FL and makes music under the name Iron & Wine. He is a father of two (both daughters) and teaches cinematography at a local college.

Andrea Zittel was born in Escondido, California, in 1965. She received a BFA in painting and sculpture in 1988 from San Diego State University, and an MFA in sculpture in 1990 from the Rhode Island School of Design. Zittel’s sculptures and installations transform everything necessary for life—such as eating, sleeping, bathing, and socializing—into artful experiments in living. Blurring the lines between life and art, Zittel’s projects extend to her own home and wardrobe. Wearing a single outfit every day for an entire season, and constantly remodeling her home to suit changing demands and interests, Zittel continually reinvents her relationship to her domestic and social environment. Influenced by modernist design and architecture from the early part of the twentieth century, the artist’s one-woman mock organization, “A–Z Administrative Services,” develops furniture, homes, and vehicles for contemporary consumers with a similar simplicity and attention to order. Seeking to attain a sense of freedom through structure, Zittel is more interested in revealing the human need for order than in prescribing a single unifying design principle or style. “People say my work is all about control, but it’s not really,” she remarks. “I am always looking for the gray area between freedom—which can sometimes feel too open-ended and vast—and security—which may easily turn into confinement.” Her “A-Z Pocket Property,” a 44-ton floating fantasy island off the coast of Denmark commissioned by the Danish government, contrasts the extremes of a creative escape with the isolation that occurs when a person is removed from society. Altering and examining aspects of life that are for the most part taken for granted, Zittel’s hand-crafted solutions respond to the day-to-day rhythms of the body and the creative need of people to match their surroundings to the changing appearance of life. Zittel lives in California and New York. source art21

Alphonse Maria Mucha was born in the town of Ivancice, Moravia(today's region ofCzech Republic). His singing abilities allowed him to continue his education through high school in the Moravian capital of Brunn(today Brno), even though drawing had been his first love since childhood. He worked at decorative painting jobs in Moravia, mostly painting theatrical scenery, then in 1879 moved to Vienna to work for a leading Viennese theatrical design company, while informally furthering his artistic education. When a fire destroyed hi

s employer's business in 1881 he returned to Moravia, doing freelance decorative and portrait painting. Count Karl Khuen of Mikulov hired Mucha to decorateHrušovany Emmahof Castle with murals, and was impressed enough that he agreed to sponsor Mucha's formal training at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.Then he moved to paris and his work spread.

basically the reasons i am drawn to his work is the intoxicating dreamlike motion and beauty, as if the women in his pictures are goddesses trapped here on earth. The movement of his illustrations are almost smoke like giving them a sense of mystery and magic.

Levi van Veluw is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in the Netherlands. He creates his art art and documents it on his own. In this series, Landscapes, he has combined the traditional self portrait and landscape, making them into something interesting and new. The contours and shadows of the face create the plains on the earth.This explores not only the idea of a self portrait being more about color, texture, and form, but also has translated the landscape from a 2D image to a three dimensional one. The normally very personal and impersonal are meshed into one. He also works with moving trains on his face and working light in relation to the landscape with day and night v seasons like in this work.

Dina Goldstein is a photographer based in Vancouver. This photograph titled Rapunzel is part of a series that takes the fairytale princesses of our childhood and juxtaposes them into a realistic modern scenario of women around the artist. She was inspired by her young daughter and her interest in princesses and dressing like them. These works compare the perfect women in the daughters world to the true women in the artists.