HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL! SOME FUN CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART FOR YOU TO ENJOY FROM SHARE ART!

''Untitled (Marilyn/Mao)'' by Yu Youhan

Yue Minjun's" Laughing Men"

Huang Yan, "Chinese Landscape"

“Worker Peasant Businessman Student Soldier,” by Zhang Xiaogang

Contemporary Chinese ART-Fang Lijun-(More posts coming)

Fang Lijun 方力钧 Fang Lijun, born in 1963 in Handan, Hebei province is one of the leading and most influential contemporary artists in china. Fang Lijun is known to be one of the main forerunners of the early 1990’s movement known asCynical Realism. This artistic trend evolved as a result of the aftermath of the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen and the closing of the “China Avant-Garde” exhibition at the China national Gallery in Beijing. These events which symbolize the climax of the artistic aspirations that built up during the 1980’s collapsed at once and created a void that Fang Lijun and others filled with a new message full of irony and indifference to the big forces that the individual is subject to. Fang Lijun was one of the first artists to translate this new social temperament onto the canvas. The idealism of the 1980’s gave room to a more somber and realistic understanding of the role of avant-garde art under a one party regime. Fang Lijun redefined the new artistic tendencies of contemporary Chinese art in the 1990’s. The tragic events which gave birth to Cynical Realism represent a drawback in the Arts community self confidence drive to tackle serious issues in a critical eye. Much like a capable person, physically weak being bullied by a stronger, not necessarily smarter opponent. The weak can’t fight they are left with nothing but a cynical smile which comes to terms with their inability to prevail.

Watch for new post, Contemporary Chinese Artists

The Contemporary Chinese Artists are among the hottest on the Art scene. You will see some of them on http://rivian-shareart.blogspot.com/
Soon!

MY STUDENT GAYLE TAUBER HAS FOUND HER TEACHER & HER MASTER: THREAD FOUR FOR MAKING ART!

Gayle Tauber 

Gayle Tauber

Decide to find a Teacher & a Master that speak to you & can help you live your dream as my wonderful student Gayle Tauber has done. She has been painting with me for a few years, (who's counting?). Her Master is Lucien Freud.  Just look at the exiting work that she has been doing with her acrylic paints!

Phil by Gayle

Paddy by Gayle

Layla by Gayle

                                                              

Gayle Tauber has been involved in entrepreneurial businesses for more than 40 years, mostly as a cofounder of startups that focused on health/wellness, social responsibility and the preservation of capital.  Her most recent business, Kashi Company – a producer and marketer of cereals and grain-based products  was started in 1983 and sold to the Kellogg Company in 2000. Gayle started drawing as a young girl, but it was not until she sold her business that she had time to pursue her art interest with her first teacher, Rivian Butikofer, who has skillfully guided and nurtured her artistic exploration.

                        

Gayle & Rivian

WATCH FOR THREAD FOUR FOR MAKING ART...CAN YOU GUESS WHAT IT MIGHT BE?

Contemplative Man-by Rivian
paint & mixed media

Man One-by Rivian
plaster, paint & mixed media

THANK YOU TO ALL OF THE COUNTRIES THAT VISIT MY SITE

RIVIAN AT THE EASEL

ALBANIA,ALGERIA, ARGENTINA,AUSTRIA, AUSTRALIA,BANGLADESH, BELGIUM, BELIZE,BOSNIA AND HERZERZEGOVIANA, BRAZIL, CANADA, CHILI, CHINA, COLUMBIA, CROATIA, CYPRUS, CZECH REPUBLIC, DENMARK,DOMINICAN REPUBLIC,
EGYPT,ESTONIA,FIJI,
FINLAND,FRANCE, GERMANY,GHANA, GREAT BRITAIN, GREECE,HONG KONG, HUNGRY, ICELAND,

INDIA, IRAN, IRELAND,
ISRAEL,ITALY, JAPAN, KUWAIT, LATVIA, MACEDONIA, MALAYSIA, MARTINIQUE, MEXICO, NETHERLANDS, NORWAY,PAKISTAN,PERU, POLAND,PORTUGAL, QATAR,ROMANIA, RUSSIA, SENEGAL, SERBIA, SINGAPORE, SOUTH AFRICA, SOUTH KOREA, SLOVENIA, SPAIN, SUDAN, SURINAME, SWEDEN, SWITZERLAND, THAILAND, THE PHILLIPPINES,TURKEY, UKRAINE,  UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, UNITED STATES, VENEZUELA


I WELCOME YOUR COMMENTS...IN WHATEVER LANGUAGE!
RIVIAN

"GAY BASHING @ THE SMITHSONIAN"

David Wojnarowic,"A Fire In My Belly"

Keith Haring,"The Life of Christ"

Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian

By FRANK RICH

Published: December 11, 2010

EACH Aug. 4, my wife Alex and I visit a church to light candles for two people we loved who both died tragically on that day two years apart — my mother, killed at 64 in a car crash, and Alex’s closest friend from graduate school, killed by AIDS at half that age. My mother was Jewish but loved the meditative serenity of vast cathedrals. Alex’s friend, John, was a Roman Catholic conflicted by a religion that demonized his sexuality. Our favorite pilgrimage is to an Episcopal church, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, not as some sectarian compromise but because of its AIDS chapel, a haunting reminder of the plague that ravaged that city’s population, especially its gay men, some time ago.

What helps give us some solace is the chapel’s mesmerizing altarpiece. It was the New York artist Keith Haring’s last completed work in the weeks before his death by AIDS at age 31 in 1990. Titled “The Life of Christ” and radiant in gold leaf, it crowns its anguished panorama of suffering with a pair of angels ascending to heaven — all rendered in Haring’s whimsical, graffiti-inspired iconography. Even as he was succumbing to a ruthless disease that had provoked indifference and cruelty rather than compassion from too many of his fellow citizens, Haring, somehow, could still see angels. You needn’t be a believer to be inspired by the beauty of his vision.

Not every artist struck down by AIDS could hit so generous a note. Such was the case with David Wojnarowicz, a painter, author and filmmaker, who, like Haring, was a fixture of the East Village arts scene in the 1980s. When his mentor and former lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, fell ill with AIDS in 1987, Wojnarowicz created a video titled “A Fire in My Belly” to express both his grief and his fury. As in Haring’s altarpiece, Christ figures in Wojnarowicz’s response to the plague — albeit in a cryptic, 11-second cameo. A crucifix is besieged by ants that evoke frantic souls scurrying in panic as a seemingly impassive God looked on.

Hujar died in 1987, and Wojnarowicz would die at age 37, also of AIDS, in 1992. This is now ancient, half-forgotten history. When a four-minute excerpt from “A Fire in My Belly” was included in an exhibit that opened six weeks ago at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, it received no attention. That’s hardly a surprise, given the entirety of this very large show — a survey of same-sex themes in American portraiture titled “Hide/Seek.” The works of Wojnarowicz, Hujar and other lesser known figures are surrounded by such lofty (and often unlikely) bedfellows (many gay, some not) as Robert Mapplethorpe, John Singer Sargent, Grant Wood, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth and Haring. It’s an exhibit that would have been unimaginable in a mainstream institution in Wojnarowicz’s lifetime.

The story might end there — like Haring’s altarpiece, a bittersweet yet uplifting postscript to a time of plague. But it doesn’t because “Fire in My Belly” was removed from the exhibit by the National Portrait Gallery some 10 days ago with the full approval, if not instigation, of its parent institution, the Smithsonian. (The censored version of “Hide/Seek” is still scheduled to run through Feb. 13.) The incident is chilling because it suggests that even in a time of huge progress in gay civil rights, homophobia remains among the last permissible bigotries in America. “Think anti-gay bullying is just for kids? Ask the Smithsonian,” wrote The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, Christopher Knight, last week. One might add: Think anti-gay bullying is just for small-town America? Look at the nation’s capital.

The Smithsonian’s behavior and the ensuing silence in official Washington are jarring echoes of those days when American political leaders stood by idly as the epidemic raged on. The incident is also a throwback to the culture wars we thought we were getting past now — most eerily the mother of them all, the cancellation of a Mapplethorpe exhibit (after he died of AIDS) at another Washington museum, the Corcoran, in 1989.

Like many of its antecedents, the war over Wojnarowicz is a completely manufactured piece of theater. What triggered the abrupt uproar was an incendiary Nov. 29 post on a conservative Web site. The post was immediately and opportunistically seized upon by William Donohue, of the so-called Catholic League, a right-wing publicity mill with no official or financial connection to the Catholic Church.

Donohue is best known for defending Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism by declaring that “Hollywood is controlled by Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.” A perennial critic of all news media except Fox, he has also accused The Times of anti-Catholicism because it investigated the church pedophilia scandal. Donohue maintains the church doesn’t have a “pedophilia crisis” but a “homosexual crisis.” Such is the bully that the Smithsonian surrendered to without a fight.

Donohue’s tactic was to label the 11-second ants-and-crucifix sequence as “anti-Christian” hate speech. “The irony,” wrote the Washington Post art critic, Blake Gopnik, is that the video is merely a tepid variation on the centuries-old tradition of artists using images of Christ, many of them “hideously grisly,” to speak of mankind’s suffering. Those images are staples of all museums — even in Washington, where gory 17th-century sculptures of Christ were featured in a recent show of Spanish sacred art at the National Gallery.

But of course Donohue was just using his “religious” objections as a perfunctory cover for the homophobia actually driving his complaint. The truth popped out of the closet as Donohue expanded his indictment to “pornographic images of gay men.” His Republican Congressional allies got into the act. Eric Cantor called for the entire exhibit to be shut down and threatened to maim the Smithsonian’s taxpayer funding come January. (The exhibit was entirely funded by private donors, but such facts don’t matter in culture wars.) Jack Kingston, of the House Appropriations Committee, rattled off his own list of exaggerated gay outrages in “Hide/Seek,” from “Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts” to “naked brothers kissing.”

It took only hours after Donohue’s initial battle cry for the video to be yanked. “The decision wasn’t caving in,” the museum’s director, Martin E. Sullivan, told reporters. Of course it was. The Smithsonian, in its own official statement, rationalized its censorship by saying that Wojnarowicz’s video “generated a strong response from the public.” That’s nonsense. There wasn’t a strong response from the public — there was no response. As the museum’s own publicist told the press, the National Portrait Gallery hadn’t received a single complaint about “A Fire in the Belly” from the exhibit’s opening day, Oct. 30, until a full month later, when a “public” that hadn’t seen the exhibit was mobilized by Donohue to blast the museum by phone and e-mail.

The Post’s Gopnik has been heroically relentless in calling out the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery for their capitulation. But few in Washington’s power circles have joined him, including the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents — a gilded assembly of bipartisan cowardice that ranges from Senator Thad Cochran, Republican of Mississippi, to Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. This timidity has been particularly striking given that the city’s potentates gathered to bestow the Kennedy Center Honors last weekend on the choreographer Bill T. Jones, whose legendary artistic and personal partnership with Arnie Zane came to a tragic end when Zane was killed by AIDS at age 39 in 1988.

It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian’s surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are rarely called out for what they are — “bigotry disguised as prudence,” in the apt phrase of Slate’s military affairs columnist, Fred Kaplan. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has been granted serious and sometimes unchallenged credence as a moral arbiter not just by Rupert Murdoch’s outlets but by CNN, MSNBC and The Post’s “On Faith” Web site even as he cites junk science to declare that “homosexuality poses a risk to children” and that being gay leads to being a child molester.

It’s partly to counteract the hate speech of persistent bullies like Donohue and Perkins that the Seattle-based author and activist Dan Savage created his “It Gets Better” campaign in which gay adults (and some non-gay leaders, including President Obama) make videos urging at-risk teens to realize that they are not alone. But even this humanitarian effort is controversial and suspect in some Beltway quarters: G.O.P. politicians and conservative pundits have yet to participate even though most of the recent and well-publicized suicides by gay teens have occurred in Republican Congressional districts, including those of party leaders like Michele Bachmann, Mike Pence and Kevin McCarthy.

Has it gotten better since AIDS decimated a generation of gay men? In San Francisco, certainly. But when America’s signature cultural institution can be so easily bullied by bigots, it’s another indicator that the angels Keith Haring saw on his death bed have not landed in Washington just yet.

"JEWS ARE WELCOME HERE"

A motorcyclist on a village outskirts takes in a sign
proclaiming “Jews are not welcomed here,” circa 1935.

Jews Are Welcome Here

(Detail) Bottom Pane of Window

Top pane: The Artist, (Rivian), eyes representing 6.000,000 Jews who died in the Holocaust

Second pane: faces & hands representing the 6,000,000. 

Third pane, My Maternal Grandparents, Samuel & Rebecca Fishman who escaped the pogroms in Russia with my Mother, Fanny as an infant. Note: My Father, Dr.Benj. Swatez was also born in Russia & escaped the pogroms. (In most of Europe the Jews had to wear the gold Star of David.) 

Bottom pane: Sixty images representing the Jews who died in the Holocaust & the Jews who lived & prospered. IE: Albert Einstein, Sarah Bernhardt, Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, the Marx Bros. Israeli Citizens, members of my Family etc. contradicting Hitler's plan to have a museum dedicated to an "extinct people"!  "This was extermination on an industrial scale and it involved huge numbers of people. Neighbours and employers reported Jews to the Gestapo. Bureaucrats processed notices of deportation. Postmen served them. Railway staff marshalled their departure. Others drove the trains and manned the signals. It was all logically and legally planned in an inversion of all the values on which human civilisation had been built.

So perverse was it that Hitler ordered the collection of 200,000 Jewish artefacts, which were photographed and catalogued to be displayed at the end of the war as a trophy case of archaeological remains. It was to be called The Museum of an Extinct Race."  

My ART WINDOW is a testament that Hitler's plan failed...thank G-d!

 Rivian 

SOME MORE OF MY GREAT STUDENTS!

Ralph Lazar

Sharlene Sherwin

Carolyn Marsden

Ann West

Phyllis Mcinnis

Betty Serepca

Dr. Sabina Heuser

SOME OF MY WONDERFUL STUDENTS!

Gayle Tauber

Faith fleury

Zahra Freeman

Kathleen Wilson

Angelika Erne

Melanie Lurie

Jeri Feldman

Jan Ouren

Cree Scudder

Leslie Klurfeld

THREAD THREE FOR MAKING ART

Gorky & His Mother, Arshille Gorky

Infantin (Sibylle) Alexei Jawlensky

"I seek a form of language which will express my ideas for our time." ---Arshile Gorky

"The artist expresses only what he  has within himself, not what he sees with his eyes."

 Alexej  von Jawlensky 


These two quotes  express my THIRD THREAD FOR MAKING ART. Nothing else needs to be said!


I'd LOVE IT IF YOU WOULD LEAVE A COMMENT-IN ANY LANGUAGE!
Thank you,
Rivian

JERI FELDMAN: ARTIST, WRITER, MY STUDENT

Natasha Two, by Jeri Feldman

I propped up a small easel and started oil painting in my bedroom in Queens, NY at the age of fourteen.  After years of being picked last in P.E., realizing that I had no musical talent, could not type and almost failed home economics, I was finally inspired in art class. It was the one place where a shy kid could really shine.

Fast forward, and after a few decades of career building and child rearing I have picked up the paintbrush. I don't intend to take another break from the canvas, the colors that you still envision when you close your eyes at night, the smell of oil paint.

I don't know how to describe my style as I am always experimenting and finding new inspiration.  From portraits to landscapes, if it has a riot of colors and a distinct mood I just might go for it.

Mick Jagger, by Jeri Feldman

MARYL LE BERRE, PASSIONATE FRENCH ARTIST

Maryl Le Berre

Maryl Le Berre

I met Maryl Le Berre last year  at my favorite Gallery in Paris, Galerie Marie Vitoux in the Marais, my "arrondissement" of preference. Her Art is so emotional, I was drawn in by it immediately. Marie Vitoux compares her figures to contemporary dancers "who vibrate their bodies passionately".  She has been exhibiting her paintings since 1990 and her photographs since 1980. I hope that you enjoy seeing some of her work on SHARE ART!

HANS WITHOUT WHISKERS

This is the latest painting I did of my Husband Hans, a bit different from the earlier Sept. posting of "HANS WITH WHISKERS" I hope that you enjoy seeing both of them!  You can see more of my work on my website:rivianbutikofer.com 

THANKS FOR LOOKING AT SHARE ART! 

I WOULD LOVE HAVING YOUR COMMENTS!

Hans Without Whiskers by Rivian

WOMEN IN THE ARTS ...JOAN MITCHELL, ONE OF THE GIANTS!

Mitchell

Mitchell

Mitchell

This is the first posting on the subject of WOMEN IN THE ARTS.  I will be blogging intermittently about this subject which is, of course, dear to my heart! 
I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM MY READERS, (2,000 in less than two months! yay!) FROM ABOUT TWENTY DIFFERENT COUNTRIES ON THIS SUBJECT. PLEASE COMMENT!

In 1989, a group of women plastered posters across New York. "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?", the slogan asked. The Guerrilla Girls, as the activists were known, were outraged that while only 5% of the artists in the Museum of Modern Art were women, 85% of the nudes were female. Twenty years later, these posters are not just being exhibited inside a national museum - they are part of the largest all-female showcase in contemporary art to date, one that might finally show the art world what it has been missing.It is the first time the Pompidou Centre in Paris has displayed its new permanent collection of female painters, photographers, designers, architects, sculptors, performance artists and film-makers. After decades of excluding women from its major shows, elles@pompidou was an enormous visual manifesto for the institution, proving its commitment to putting female artists at the core of modern and contemporary art. (I hope more galleries & museums follow suite)!


I am focusing on JOAN MITCHELL, AMERICAN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST, one of the most powerful painters I can think of...of any gender!  Joan Mitchell (1925‐1992) is one of the main female American painters of the 20th century. She was born in Chicago and spent most of her career at Vetheuil, a few miles only from Giverny, two key villages in Claude Monet's art. She passed on way too young at age 67!

The abstract painting she perfected as early as the fifties, oversized, luminous, dynamic, deeply refers to nature (Great Valley, Sunflowers, Linden, Fields). Actually, nature surrounded her studio at Vetheuil with its large views on the Seine river. 

WATCH FOR NEW & INTERESTING POST SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14TH!

photo by Rivian

photo by Rivian