work in progress stuff

I love the green gummy bear n_n

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 2,300^th 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. 

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 and Louie Collaboratively Painting

            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. 

Karin Kneffel

Karin Kneffel is a German born artist and similar to Elizabeth Patterson, she creates photo realistic rainscape oil paintings among other things. Her work is shown internationally in Europe and the United States. Currently, she is a painting professor at the Munich Academy of Arts.

Her artwork challenges her to recreate shadows of tree branches, reflections of rain, and other relationships between subjects and light. She started out painting simple spaces and moved on to more complex artworks. Many of her paintings now show both interior and exterior spaces as if the viewer was looking inside of a space (or vice versa). Her talent to show off light and shadow create interesting patterns throughout each piece. Kneffel’s work explores the duality of interior versus exterior, transparent versus opaque, and solidity versus pattern. The paintings are created at such a large scale that when you see it up close, the work almost turns into an abstract piece with all the patterns. I admire the amount of control and precision her paintings (specifically the raindrops) must have taken. I love how they give a sense of two layers (one being an interior space and the other being and exterior space).

Luciana Rondolini's My Silver Path

            Luciana Rondolini was born in 1976 in Buenos Aires. She received a Graphic Design degree from the Buenos Aires Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism. She also has a Bachelors in Visual Arts.

            Her series I found the most interesting, My Silver Path, consists of a giant box full of rotting fruit encrusted with silver jewelry. The jewels are plastic but look like diamonds. From afar, the viewer sees silver and shiny jewels but up close, the rotting fruit and mold on the inside of the jewels is deliberately shown. The series touches on issues such as artificial beauty and the glamour of people in the media.

            I found the series interesting because it is always changing every day as the fruit continues to grow mold and deteriorate. It draws parallels to the social media and perhaps to people and their inner and outer beauty.

“This work feels like a visual metaphor for the irony contemporary human condition. The irony being that if we spend enough time to really look at the people we feel are the most beautiful attention seekers of the bunch we shall discover that there are likely to be the most ruined.”