Thursday, September 10, 2009

week three




Tim McFarlane :BA Studio Art, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 1994. He still lives in Philadelphia and mainly paints, but what drew me to the artist was one of his installations for the store Anthropologie.



Dean Veca was born in Louisiana and attended Otis college of art and design in LA. He is known for creating paintings, drawings and installations that portray surreal cartoons, psychedelic landscapes, and pop culture iconography while also being inspired by long-established decorative motifs. He is widely recognized for his all-encompassing installations that surround the viewer and incite a sense of awe. Revealing fantastical, humorous, aggressive, or sexual imagery with both frenzy and pattern-like precision.





AJ Fosik's eclectic handmade and intricately designed wood animal sculptures and paintings, combined with cryptic symbols, intrigue and provoke. Fosik creates an experience that at first glance evokes a questioning of familiar concepts and then pushes the viewer to look and think deeper. Inspired by subversive cultural influences which shift complacency, he creates pieces that suspend comfort while at the same time offer recognizable symbols and images. In this dynamic tension the art and the viewer hopefully come together in an expanded definition of culture and assumption
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Sandy Skoglund was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1946. Skoglund studied studio art and art history at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts from 1964-68. She went on to graduate school at the University of Iowa in 1969 where she studied filmmaking, intaglio printmaking, and multimedia art, receiving her M.A. in 1971 and her M.F.A. in painting in 1972.

Skoglund moved to New York City in 1972, where she started working as a conceptual artist, dealing with repetitive, process-oriented art production through the techniques of mark-making and photocopying. In the late seventies Skoglund’s desire to document conceptual ideas led her to teach herself photography. This developing interest in photographic technique became fused with her interest in popular culture and commercial picture making strategies, resulting in the directorial tableau work she is known for today. Skoglund currently lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.



Shary Boyle is a Toronto-based artist whose practice includes drawing, painting, sculpture and live “projected light” performance. In 2005 she presented a celebrated art/ music collaboration with Feist at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, researched the origins of European porcelain in eastern Germany, performed “live drawing” for the Sonar Festival in Barcelona and maintained a painting studio in Tampere, Finland. Foreign residence and travel is central to her creative methodology, her images map an intensely personal location within international transience




Thursday, September 3, 2009

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.


Friday, August 21, 2009

Henry Darger
Henry Darger was a self taught artist and writer that spend most of his life as a janitor and never made any true connections to another individual. His novel may be one of the longest ever written. His art and writings are filled with well known images of children, blood, colors, wings, and evil adults trying to enslave the children.



Nagi Noda's

Nagi Noda is know for her hair creations and her eerie poodle work-out video. She is a japanese pop artist and director born in Tokyo.

























I feel that the best way to describe Hsiung and his art is through his Q&A


Q. Who wins the war-Unicorns or Pandas?
A. Well, the pandas are still here.


Q. What is a unitaur and why were they hunted?
A. The unitaurs were peaceful creatures who enjoyed nature and friendship. They grew horns like unicorns. The warish centaurs didn't like that they were different. They were all destroyed


Q. Why do you draw so many pictures of Hitler?
A. Because he looks like Charlie Chaplin


Q. Why does your art look like a retarded 8 year old did them?
A. In fact, you are correct. I have a retarded 8 year old boy living with me. I give him an oreo cookie everytime he draws me a picture.

Q. How did that guy lose his arms?
A. I'm not sure but look at all the things he can do.

Q. Why do all the animals in your drawings die?
A. Material weakness on my part.

Q. Why is it that I can find a mistake in every picture?
A. I have no depth perceptions; the same reason I can't drive well.

Q. What if I like your drawings?
A. Then you are probably one of the following:

a) A neo Nazi

b) mentally retarded

c) legally blind



Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian, China. He was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy from 1981 to 1985. Cai's work is scholarly and often politically charged. Cai initially began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity and confront the suppressive, controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of his signature "explosion events," artistically choreographed shows incorporating fireworks and other pyrotechnics. In 1995, he moved to New York with a grant from the New York -based Asian Cultural Council ,an international organization to promote artistic exchanges between Asian countries and the United States.




Alex McLeod started out studying drawing at OCADbut after graduation started to make full digital rendering. Though he mainly creates art in his home town of Toronto, his art has been made international due to blogs(including Kanye's blog). McLeod is able to create these jelly-like dreamscapes that appear to be installations though digital processes, which allow him to create exactly what he sees in his mind. McLeod has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the Toronto area.