Monday, January 31, 2011

MY MOST POPULAR POST EVER! ANDY GOLDSWORTHY, LAND ARTIST

Andy Goldsworthy,OBE (born 26 July 1956) is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist living in Scotland producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. I was so inspired by his philosophy and work when I saw the 2001 documentary feature film about him called Rivers and Tides, directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer. I wish I could work out in nature like he does!
Andy Goldsworthy
Rowan Leaves and Hole
Title Unknown


Ice Ball

Ice Spiral: Tree Soul
                                              
  The materials used in Andy Goldsworthy's art often include brightly-coloured flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pinecones, snow, stone, twigs, and thorns. He has been quoted as saying, "I think it's incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can't edit the materials I work with. For his ephemeral works, Goldsworthy often uses only his bare hands, teeth, and found tools to prepare and arrange the materials. Photography plays a crucial role in his art due to its often ephemeral and transient state. According to Goldsworthy, "Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit."


Thursday, January 27, 2011

EVA HESSE, ONE OF THE GREAT ARTISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY & ONE OF MY PERSONAL FAVORITES!



Eva Hesse
oil on masonite, no title, 1960                                   
oil on canvas, no title, 1960
Contingent, polymer, 1968
Repetition ..., 1968
Eva Hesse was one of the great artists of the 1960s, and her major sculptural works stand out as singular achievements of that era. At once drawing on Minimalist strategies of repetition and seriality, and pushing nontraditional materials toward new modes of expression, Hesse created an art that evoked emotion, absence, and contingency. The large-scale sculptures she created in latex and fiberglass for her only solo sculpture exhibition, Chain Polymers at the Fischbach Gallery in November 1968, secured her reputation. Born in Hamburg in 1936, she and her older sister were sent to Holland on a children's train at the end of 1938. Their parents fled Nazi Germany two months later, and the family came to New York, where Hesse was raised in the German Jewish community of Washington Heights. She wanted to be an artist from an early age and studied at Pratt Institute of Design, the Cooper Union, and the Yale School of Art and Architecture. After completing her studies in 1959, Hesse returned to New York and pursued her art for just over a decade. From The Jewish Museum
"The artist who did the most to humanize Minimalism without sentimentalizing it was Eva Hesse. Dying of brain cancer at thirty-four, an age at which most artist's careers are barely under way, she left a truncated body of work but one of remarkable power: an instrument of feeling that spoke of an inner life, sometimes fraught with anxiety...
dot_clear.gif"Spurred by the examples of Jean Dubuffet Joseph Beuys, Claes Oldenburg.... She never wanted to see her work smugly categorized as 'women's art.' Quite the contrary; Hesse wanted it to join the general discourse of modern images, uncramped by niches of gender or race. 'The best way to beat discrimination in art is by art,' she brusquely replied to a list of questions a journalist sent her. 'Excellence has no sex.' From" American Visions" by Robert Hughes
In 1967, Hesse discovered latex (a material she knew would eventually deteriorate), fiberglass and polyester resin. Hesse loved the irregular shapes, surfaces and translucency that these materials produced. Hesse often created elaborate, handmade pieces involving obsessive repetition. However, she was not interested in certain technical aspects of sculpture. For many of her later pieces made of metal and fiberglass, she left the fabrication to outside companies. In 1961, she met and married sculptor Tom Doyle.The couple—whose marriage was coming apart—lived and worked in an abandoned textile mill in the Ruhr region of Germany for about a year during 1964-1965. Hesse was not happy to be back in Germany, but began sculpting with materials that had been left behind in the abandoned factory: During the late 1960s, it was popular to remove the appearance of the artist's hand from the work. For Hesse, she did so more for practical reasons than intellectual ones. During this period, when she was creating some of her most well known pieces, she developed brain tumors and continued to work until she became too ill. She then directed assistants to create and install her work. Hesse died in 1970 at the age of thirty four.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

URBAN ART




Urban art sometimes known as graffiti is a style of art that relates to cities and city life often done by artists who live in or have a passion for city life. The term urban means "from the city". Sometimes Urban art is called "street art". The style of this art is mostly cartoon based, and sometimes realistic. The art is sometimes viewed as vandalism and destruction of property. In general urban art is expressed at the neighborhood level, sometimes called "hoods" or the "ghetto" where a lot of people of different cultures live together.


Another use is for ad campaigns promot an unlimited number of products or services. One of the most successful viral ad campaigns using urban art was in 1989 by Shepard Fairey. He created an image of Andre the Giant to be used by skaters and others. The promotion was called obey the giant and has even gained so much popularity to have a website created in the name of just the design. http://obeygiant.com. The urban art style has an unlimited number of uses and its basic crowd focus is male teenagers.
From Wikipedia

Friday, January 7, 2011

AFRICAN ART-MARLENE DUMAS, SOLY CISSE

There are many types of "AFRICAN ART", as many as there are countries in Africa!  For purposes of this post I will mention two Artists  who came from SOUTH AFRICA & WEST AFRICA. I am concentrating on just two but will post others at a later posting.  I have loved AFRICAN ART since I first saw it, probably when I studied ART & saw the influence that it had on the MASTERS such as Picasso, Matisse, Braque & many others.  African ART is a strong link in the history of ART, and African artists have taken their deserved place in CONTEMPORARY ART.

Marlene Dumas
Marlene Dumas


Marlene Mumas







Marlene Dumas (born August 3, 1953) is a South African born artist and painter who lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Stressing both the physical reality of the human body and its psychological value, Dumas tends to paint her subjects at the extreme fringes of life’s cycle, from birth to death, with a continual emphasis on classical modes of representation in Western art, such as the nude or the funerary portrait. By working within and also transgressing these traditional historical antecedents, Dumas uses the human figure as a means to critique contemporary ideas of racial, sexual, and social identity.(from Wikipedia)








Soly Cissé was born in 1969 in Dakar, Senegal. He lives and works in Dakar.
In 1995 Soly Cissé did an workshop in photography which was followed by an exhibition at the Centre Culturel Français in Dakar, organized by Kodak. Cissé graduated in 1996 from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dakar.
The theme of Cissé 's paintings is repeatedly the duality between tradition and modernity.



I first saw Soly Cisse At the African Museum Dapper in Paris some years ago. I was struck by his energy and talent. We then saw an exhibiton of his at a gallery in Paris last year.
Rivian
Soly Cissé at his studio in Dakar
Soly Cisse

Soly Cisse
Soly cisse

Monday, January 3, 2011

SOON...AFRICAN ART

Some of the most exiciting ART being produced today is in AFRICA.  I will show you some in the next couple of days.  "DON'T GO AWAY, I WILL BE BACK"!