Janet Fish

          Janet Fish has a style similar to Audrey Flack of painting in a photorealistic manner. She was born in Boston to a family full of artists and art historians. Throughout school she focused on Abstract Expressionism but strayed away from it and its lack of creative freedom. She began to paint everyday physical objects and her style developed into painting jars, vases, fruit, and anything with a reflective surface. Fish loves painting glassware because the reflections create beautiful shapes and change the lighting or distort the shape on the other objects.

I love her work because she is gifted with recreating reflective and transparent surfaces. The reflections in one object have an influence on other objects, creating unity throughout each piece. Reflections are incredibly challenging so I definitely commend her for being able to get it right. Each painting, like Audrey Flack, is highly saturated and aesthetically pleasing. However, instead of being a vanitas like Flack’s the combination of objects almost tell a story in itself.

Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack is an American artist from New York known for her sculptures and photorealistic vanitas paintings. Along with creating artwork, she is currently a professor who has taught at several schools throughout the United States. Her photorealistic paintings were among the first to be featured in New York City’s MoMA, beginning the photorealist movement. The highly saturated colors in the paintings and glamorized beauty point to her influence from Baroque Art. These paintings are modern day vanitas, still life that has objects of beauty and constant reminders that death is inevitable (skull, mirrors, makeup, old photos, hourglass).

I chose her work because I love how she takes a genre of still life and recreates it in a more relevant manner. In older vanitas from the 17^th century, most of them were low key whereas Flack does the opposite in hers. The colors are incredibly beautiful along with the use of trompe l’oeil to create the illusion of a photograph. Each object has an important meaning to the piece as a whole, which is an important element to artwork. I think her use of composition is unique as well. She tries to fit the frame around the objects as opposed to painting objects sitting on a table that the viewer can see.

Mary Ellen Johnson

Mary Ellen Johnson was born in 1967 in New Jersey. She attended the Ringling School of Art and Design in Florida. Currently, she resides in South Carolina. She is known for her oil paintings of food. The concept behind it is that "food is a universal experience." She wanted to incorporate elements of sensuality, temptation, hunger, and comfort within each painting in order to connect food with humanity. She makes the paintings on a large scale to trigger feelings of hunger and emphasize the extravagance of the food. I chose Mary Ellen Johnson's work because they glamorize food (almost in a sensual manner) to look beautiful but in reality it is unhealthy for you. I love her style of creating almost photo-realistic images. The series kind of reminds me of candid shots people do for family portraits where everyone looks nice and happy, the lighting creates a lens flare, and the backdrop is a plain gradation. Here, it's like they are being advertised as this glorious meal. I find her work truly inspiring to my project.

Beth Galton

Beth Galton is a New York based photographer. She graduated from Hiram College with a studio art degree. Many of her works are of food or still life. She has had big name clients such as Campbell's, Nabisco, and Kraft Foods. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and even in cook books. The series "Cut Food" was inspired by a previous assignment where a client asked them to cut a burrito in half. She decided to explore this a bit more with various foods like ice cream, cereal, soups, and coffee. Galton wants to show food in an angle that we usually do not see. The results are simple but create visual interest because we see food in a more dissected way. Unlike Gina Beavers' protest against revolting food photography techniques, Galton embraces them. She uses gelatin to solidify the liquids of the soups and coffee. I wanted to research her photographs because I thought it was an interesting take on how we see food and how it is usually photographed in advertising.

Gina Beavers

Gina Beavers was born in Greece in 1974. She attended the University of Virginia and got her bachelors in Studio Art and Anthropology. Afterwards, she obtained her Masters at the Art Institute of Chicago. She also received an Education degree in Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in New York, Baltimore, Miami, Canada and other places. 

Her series "Palate" consists of paintings commenting on the fetishization of food. What is unique about the series is that she takes the paint and gives it a sculptural quality. The paintings are layers of acrylic paint and paint medium, creating incredible texture and the look of a low relief. The paintings represent the over fetishization of food to the point that the results of the works are repulsive. In the advertising industry, photographers will paint food to give a more vibrant color, spray them with chemicals to create a glistening effect, among other revolting techniques to get that perfect shot. Beavers' wanted to capture that aspect within the series. 

I chose her to research because I love her use of medium. She takes something meant for two-dimensional works and turns it into a sculpture-like piece. The texture allows for shadows and highlights to be created wherever the piece is installed. Her work evokes a feeling that I hope my series will be capable of doing.

Pamela Michelle Johnson

     

       

The idea for my work came about from personal experience, however Pamela Michelle Johnson's series, "American Still Life" provided a stronger concept and inspiration towards what I want to achieve. She was born in California and went to school for engineering with a minor in art. Afterwards, she decided to fully pursue an art career and moved to Chicago. She became involved with the art community and has had her work displayed in galleries throughout the US."American Still Life" is her series commenting on the diet of the average American.

Through my work, I strive to invoke reflection on a culture focused on mass-consumption and mass-production, where the negative aspects of overindulgence are often forgotten or ignored. 

The work flaunts our culture back at us. It questions embracing a culture of complete and instant gratification while ignoring the consequences of our indulgences. The work questions many of our cultural ideals and social norms. These are the pictures of our insatiable appetites; they are the pictures of the consequences.

Overbearing scale and gluttonous quantities, juxtaposed against foods that are both tempting and comforting, examine the conflict between enjoying the highly processed, artificially flavored bounty of American life and the progression to overindulgence and gluttonous excess. The work is both gross and enticing.

I chose her work because she is a huge inspiration to this project. There are so many elements she took into account to reflect her concept (the bright colors, awkward compositions, and even the scale of the canvas). However, instead of making pieces that are desolate like hers, I may include some sort of setting to create a possible narrative in my works.

Wayne Thiebaud

 

Wayne Thiebaud is best known for his works of pastries and sweets. Born in 1920, his inspiration came from comic strips. He followed his passion and worked as a cartoonist and even worked for Disney. After moving to New York during the Abstract Expressionist movement, he began to paint scenes reflecting consumerism and products in daily American life. His paintings are often high key, use playful colors, and thick textures. He still paints still life and landscapes in the San Francisco bay area. Thiebaud is commonly mistaken as part of the Pop Art movement. However, he does not associate himself with the genre because he views it as a critique or mockery on consumerism. He wants his paintings to be seen as nostalgic of traditional values. I chose to research him because of his experimentation with light and how that has an effect on the colors he paints with. I think the high key color choice reflects the subject matter since they are light, pastel, and sweet. I also love the use of repetition in many of his pieces. His works bring about a feeling of nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s in my opinion, taking me to places like little milkshake shops in a small town. I think it's important to be able to take a viewer to another state of mind in order for a piece to be successful.