Thursday, October 17, 2013
Sunday, August 25, 2013
B-AGT
One of my favorite portraiture
artists, German artist known as B-AGT, creates fan art of familiar figures in
pop culture from video games to movies. Most of his portraits are pencil or
paint. Many of the portraits feature characters from the Final Fantasy
franchise. He is not a professional artist and only paints as a hobby.
He grew up creating art as a hobby and
draw subjects from shows he liked. His work can be seen on DeviantArt and
gained popularity right away. For him, fan art is to interpret something you
like. When you like something so much, you want to show our appreciation for it
by recreating it but adding personal style. Most of his works are pencil but he
also fancies watercolor. It takes him about 12 to 15 hours to finish a piece,
which is almost no time at all!
I find his artwork inspiring because
his subjects are very similar to my personal work. I love creating fan art of
characters I love from my favorite TV shows and video games. His artwork
motivates me to strive to be better and develop my skills.
Lawrence Yang
Lawrence Yang is an artist that I
have been following for years. He is one of the biggest influences on my own
personal art when I started out making attempts to teach myself how to paint.
His artwork is influenced by his love for graffiti and
traditional Chinese painting. His artwork includes many different mediums from
watercolor, ink, and marker. Yang tries to find order in chaos within his
artwork and communicates that through color. Yang’s artworks are considered Pop
Surrealist type paintings of characters and landscapes. He starts out by
creating washes on canvas to act as backgrounds. He stores them until he is
able to paint an idea on them, which can sometimes take months. His art started
to become popular when he revamped the Pepsi logo to look like an obese man.
Currently, he works during the day for Apple and spends the
rest of his time creating artwork. Yang is self taught since he went to school
for Biology. Making a living off of art never occurred to him, it was always
something he did for fun. He lives in San Francisco with his imaginary pets,
Cholo and Binky.
Edward B Gordon
Edward B. Gordon is a painter who
creates small, daily paintings of intimate moments. He was born in 1966 and
currently resides in Berlin. His paintings include beautiful cohesive colors and
thick, visible brushstrokes which gives him a personal style. Many of his
paintings include an exaggerated value of the shadows. Most of the paintings
are very small at about 6” by 6”. The subject matter ranges from landscapes to
portraits and even strangers on the street. His urban scenes and portraits can
be called “en passant” – meaning to detect. Gordon’s paintings show scenes of
Berlin in brief, passing moments. He is able to direct our attention to
something that we would have never noticed or thought of as beautiful. Gordon
has been painting everyday for the past seven years and has just reached past
his 2,300th painting mark! He is able to find his next painting by
walking the streets of Berlin.
George Jennings
George Jennings grew up in an art
environment. Being from Washington DC, around his grandfather who was an
established artist, and attending a high school for arts influenced his liking
towards the arts. He did not attend college but kept developing his artistic
skill. Jennings has had a multitude of jobs outside of art including becoming a
truck driver, the air force, and several government jobs. Afterwards, he moved
to Seattle to pursue a full time career in art.
His paintings usually come from a
simple thought or an idea he has. Jennings hopes to convey a sense of peace in
each of his paintings, the same peace that he feels when he creates. He wishes
for the viewer to connect to the piece, even if it’s just a small part of it.
Most of his works are contemporary portraits using multiple media such as
acrylic paint, oil paint, and graphite. He is influenced by Art Nouveau, which
is something can be clearly seen in many of his works. Other influences include
music, his grandfather, Japanese Anime, and Maxfield Parrish.
I love his style of art and his
influences of Art Nouveau and Anime can definitely be seen. He creates a sense
of realism in some aspects of the painting but creates a more abstract aspect
as well.
Ivan Alifan
Ivan Alifan is an artist that I have
been following for quite some time because of his incredible paintings and
because I find it amazing that someone around my age can create such beautiful
artwork. For the most part, he creates portraits. His latest series of
portraits revolve around a figure drenched in a paste-like liquid. This liquid
covers the figure’s face creating porcelain like layer on them. These portraits
are a representation of how human beings encase themselves in this hardened
layer but by doing so are inhibited to move or truly exist as themselves. For
Alifan, the series explores the modern gaze and the transformation of an
individual. Many of the portraits use pale colors creating a ghostly look to
them.
Alifan was born in 1989 in Russia.
He is currently attending OCAD University in Canada for Drawing and Painting.
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Linda Huber
Linda Huber is probably one of my
favorite portrait artists that I have been following for a few years. I find
her work inspiring because her subject choice is similar to my own personal
artwork. I love how beautifully she is able to capture texture and small
detail. Her favorite medium is pencil because she loves to recreate life with
an object that is so simple. Many of her drawings are from reference photos and
can take between 40 – 100 hours to complete. Huber is completely self taught.
Her artwork has been displayed all over the country in advertisements, books,
CD covers, and television shows. Huber drawings begin with a photo reference.
She prints them out three times. The first print shows a grid to establish
where on the paper everything is. The second print puts emphasis on the dark
areas and the third puts emphasis on the light areas to show details that may
have been missed. Many times she draws with the canvas upside down in order to
gain a fresh perspective and make it easier for the brain to interpret the shapes.
Iris Scott
Iris Scott has turned finger
painting from childhood into a fine art. At a mere age of 29, Scott started the
technique by chance. She was finishing up a painting of a landscape and needed
to make a correction to a minor detail. Her brush was stained with a different
color than the subject so she made the touch up with her finger. Now she left
the brushes and uses her hands (while wearing gloves) to create a piece. Scott
was born in Seattle.
Her artwork is
considered Impressionistic. She paints subjects such as animals, landscapes,
and city life. She moved to Thailand for the beautiful scenery that would
create her artwork. She also gave up teaching once she was able to make a full
time living off of her artwork. Scott finds the process faster and easier than
using a paint brush because there is no clean up afterwards.
I love how the thick, visible strokes remind me of Van Gogh’s
style of painting. This certainly does show since Van Gogh, along with Monet
and Munch, are her inspiration. She does a great job with the vibrant colors
and capturing texture.
Ester Roi
Ester
Roi creates incredible realistic drawings of colorful rocks using colored
pencil. She uses pencil as opposed to paint due to their simplicity. These
pieces show the interaction between water and rocks. The study shows how the
water can change the texture and lighting of the rock’s surface. She believes
that water is an element of fantasy and illusion. Underneath the water, lines
become blurred, hard objects look soft and cool. Above the water is the opposite
so Roi wants to create a balance between the two. Roi hopes to capture the ever
changing shape that water creates on an object.
“Water transforms everything it touches: hard lines become
soft, warm colors cool, solid shapes break down into parts. Realism evolves
into abstraction and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The interplay between
these realms is an endless source of inspiration for me.”
Ester was
born in Italy but now resides in California. During her childhood, she has
always been fascinated with color and incorporated it into her learning. In
order to learn the piano, she color coordinated the notes and keys. Her garden
is color coordinated as well. Her artwork is absolutely breathtaking and seems
very tedious considering the medium.
Andy Denzler
Andy
Denzler was born in 1965 in Zurich, where he currently lives. He attended
several different schools there, in London, and in California. Denzler’s
artwork has been displayed in both the United States and in Europe.
His oil
paintings play on the realm between fiction and reality. Most of his paintings
are moments of a figure in a blurred, distorted movement. They are like freeze
frames in a video when you pause a movie tape. He wanted to show figures in
mid-action with the use of lighting and blurred lines. Denzler uses a strong
contrast between the figures and their background. The figures create a
narrative by struggling to escape and move from this frozen moment. Denzler’s
artwork is considered both Photorealistic yet Abstract Expressionism. His work
is inspired by his background in painting and in photography.
The
paintings are quite eerie but I find them interesting because they remind me of
my childhood before DVDs came out and I had to watch movies on VHS tapes. I
love how he is able to distort the subject but the viewer is still able to
understand what we are looking at.
Karin Jurick
Karin
Jurick is a painter known for her works of patrons viewing artwork in
galleries. She paints many other different subjects as well such as people
reading, still life, and animals. Jurick originally wanted to become an
illustrator. However, after both of her parents’ deaths she had the weight of
owning their shop. She stopped doing art for about 15 years until recently in
2004 when she began painting and selling her work on eBay. This has helped her
to own her own gallery.
Her
paintings are based off of photographs of people in moments of time. She is
self taught and did not attend school because of her parents’ shop. Jurick is
part of the Daily Painting Movement where she posts daily, small, and affordable
paintings on a blog.
I love her
work because she is able to capture beauty in something so simple in daily life,
like a person drinking wine at a restaurant or a couple admiring a work of art.
It is a reminder that the people in her paintings are everyday folk that you
could see just about anywhere. She is able to take an ordinary moment and give
it more life.
Susan Abbott
Susan
Abbott is a painter born in Takoma Park, Maryland. She grew up in an art
environment, seeing the art scene in Washington DC and with her father being a
graphic designer. Abbott would spend her free time as a child drawing,
painting, and reading art books. She attended the Maryland Institute’s College
of Art to study painting. Afterwards, she studied printmaking in Iowa. Since
then, she has been a full time artist. Her work has been exhibited all over the
country. She has even been commissioned by Oprah Winfrey. Currently, she lives in
Vermont.
Many of her
drawings consist of landscapes from places that she has visited all around the
world. They are mainly just studies of light and how color interacts with the
environment. Abbott’s work can be seen as somewhat more abstract that
observational since some of the lines can be ambiguous. Her work has been
described as Modernism. Abbott’s most recent work consists of landscapes around
her home in Vermont.
Her work
somewhat reminds me of Thiebaud’s landscape paintings in that they use
saturated colors and the way she uses smooth brushstrokes. They also capture certain
nostalgia for American Life that Thiebaud is always able to capture so well.
Jim Holland
Jim Holland
was born in 1955 in Schenectady, New York. He was first inspired by art from
looking through his parents’ art history books as a child. Holland attended
Dutchess Community College with a degree in Graphic Design. After school he
worked as a graphic designer and then a few years later decided to paint full
time. His inspiration comes from artists like Edward Hopper. Currently he
resides in Massachusetts.
His artwork
consists mainly of tranquil landscapes and interiors. He would paint scenes
from trips he went on (such as a trip to Cape Cod). The spaces that he recreates
are stripped down to a bare minimum in order to give a sense of solitude, such
as that of Hopper’s work. Holland plays with use of lighting and color to alter
the mood in each piece. His artwork has been displayed all over the United
States and Europe.
I love his
work because of the isolation in each piece. I love how he plays with natural
lighting and is able to create a narrative even though each painting is devoid
of any living thing. I think it is amazing how much lighting can change the
mood in a piece.
Monica Cook
Monica Cook
was born in 1974 in Dalton, Georgia. She attended the Savannah College of Art
and Design for painting and also went to several other schools. Currently she
resides in New York City making a living off of her artwork and creating murals.
Cook’s work has been shown in galleries all over the world.
Her most recent
work shows oil paintings of women (Cook acts as her own model) covered and
tangled in food, such as fish and fruit, creating a sense of repulsion and
eroticism. She chooses food that is slimey and food that reminds her of human
flesh. The paintings show off a primal sense of compulsion in humanity. The
glazed skin from food and sweat and saliva are physical expressions of emotion.
The expressions on the women’s faces range from emptiness to an elated smile.
These impulses and emotions are what Cook wants to bring out in her artwork
because it’s something that people try so hard to cover up. I find her work
inspiring because it lingers in between aspects of beauty and something
grotesque.
Lauren Kaelin
Lauren
Kaelin creates oil paintings of internet memes from Grumpy Cat to the Dramatic
Gopher. Kaelin is from Brooklyn and graduated from Smith College. Her artwork
is inspired by the Walter Benjamin theory that art loses its value with reproduction.
She does the exact opposite of this theory and paints images that we have seen
dozens of times. The first meme she painted was the Ikea Monkey. She posted it
onto Facebook and got such an overwhelming response to it, possibly because it
is easily recognizable or because she took a meme and gave it some elevation.
From there, she painted more she was already familiar with and then some that
were gaining popularity that would make the series more complete. I find her
paintings to be fun and a more modern form of Pop Art.
Cara Thayer and Louie Van Patten
Cara Thayer
and Louie Van Patten are two painters that actually collaborate together to
create a single piece of artwork. Their goal is to create works that look
unified as if done by only one artist. Painting alone is difficult enough but
two artists painting on a canvas seems much more complex. They create subjects
mainly of the human skin. The figures are shown in a traditional way but under
modern (florescent) lighting giving it an updated appearance.
Thayer was
born in 1981 and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. Van Patten was born in 1985 and received an Associates
degree from the Des Moines Area Community College.
Watching
the video of them collaborate on the piece is pretty awesome because of the
fact that they actually paint on the canvas at the same time, which was
unexpected. The link is above and I’d definitely recommend checking it out.
I find the
fact that they are so young to be an inspiring factor. Seeing all these artists
who have been creating for forty years or more can seem intimidating. However,
these two artists have shown that it is possible at any age to have solo
exhibitions and make a living off of art.
Ben Schonzeit
Ben
Schonzeit is a painter born in 1942 in Brooklyn, New York. He currently resides
in New York City and has received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cooper Union. Ben
has been a huge part of the SoHo movement in the 1960s as well as the
Hyperrealist movement during the 1970s. His artwork has been displayed in
hundreds of exhibitions and shows.
When he was
younger, he first found his inspiration from the National Geographic magazines
that he would find at his aunt and uncle’s home. Many of his drawings that he
started out with are from the magazines he collected.
His work
ranges from Hyperrealism to Surrealism. His subjects vary from food, still
life, animals, and flowers. Schonzeit’s acrylic paintings can be completed in a
mere day or can span across months. His paintings are made at very large
scales.
I think his
work is interesting because of the amount of detail captured. Adding such
detail helps to remind the viewer why we are attracted to those objects in the
first place. I also love his variety in subject choice. His work looks like
photographs, which can especially be seen in his series of flower paintings
that appear to be blurry, like a camera out of focus.
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