art & artists (4 Viewers)

hoochmonkey9

Art should be its own hammer.
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many of us here not only love the written word, but are visually stimulated as well (boys, you know what I'm talking about!).

anyway, I thought this would be a good idea for a thread, we've touched on street art in another thread, but this one is wide open.

who speaks to your likes as an artist? they can be new, old, unknown, etc.

tell us, dammit!

I'll get us started. mine's a pick because several people here like this person's movie, books, website, etc.

Miranda July's


at the Yokohama Triennial caught my eye.
 
Since it is Art and Artist... the first thing i thought of was this Ashes and Snow exhibit by Photographer Gregory Colbert. A friend of mine was the Music Supervisor/Editor for it.
It is an on going Exhibit that moves to various Cites. I believe next it will show in Mexico City. The photos are gorgeous.
I will certainly do it a disservice if i try to explain it more. It is worth a glimpse if anything.

"When I started Ashes and Snow in 1992, I set out to explore the relationship between man and animals from the inside out."

"”Gregory Colbert


Good thread Hooch.
 
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Ashes and Snow exhibit by Photographer Gregory Colbert.

I saw this show when it was in Santa Monica a couple of years ago. They built this sort of pyramid-like structure out of shipping containers to house it in the parking lot along side of the Santa Monica Pier. The photographer showed up just as we were leaving and signed the little book we bought for my son. Nice photography, and really large too.

I recently got a copy of Chris Mars' (formerly of The Replacements) new book as a gift. It's creepy and it's kooky, mysterious and spooky.
 
I like illustration--the old school guys mostly: Rackham, Mucha, Beardsly, but some of the contemporary illustrators aren't too shabby either. I've really been getting into Ben Templesmith lately. (see current avatar)
 
I'm a big fan of cubism. Obviously, mid-period Picasso, Georges Braque, etc. But there's another lesser-known cubist (well, there must be dozens of them); a Russian woman by the name of Alexandra Exter, who is right up there with the best known of them.

Since most of the links appear to have copyrights, all I'll say is do a Google Image search on her name and find what you might like.

She did do a good number of Russian ballerina pieces that are just OK to me, but it's not her best work, IMO. Check out the other images for yourself.
 
I am always impressed by the old masters, can spend hours looking at the brush strokes of Raphael, Millet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Seurat, Georges de Latour etc.
I love the art of Emily Carr, a canadian artist.

I also love comtemporay art, daring artists who experiment with new concepts.
Brian Jungen's aboriginal masks.
Here is a link:http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/jungen.html
 
... and then there Kris Kuksi who used to do very nice paintings and drawings but switched to these elaborate assemblages a couple of years ago. Neat stuff.

Max Ernst.

Nathan Henderson.

Max DeMoss.

Viktor Koen's Tasks & Games (the photogravure prints of this series are beautiful).

And, of course, the Clayton Brothers.

I love this floor lamp by Albert Paley (about $50,000 if your wondering what to get me for my birthday):

DL199701.jpg


I have a set of these candlesticks by Paley:

DC200201.jpg
 
ray caesar is my absolute favourite artist. i discovered his stuff a couple of years and have been smitten ever since. all his artwork is digitally created, and every object in a work is 'sculpted' from the inside out. his work has always had a strange effect on me - there is a bizarre sense of being out-of-time, which i can't really explain any better than that.

raycesarlaccorddamour.jpg


caesar2-thumb.jpg


ray-caesar-exodus.jpg


wallflowers.jpg
 
Norman Rockwell!

No, no, kidding. 8 years of summer employment at that museum definitely killed that.

I don't have favorite artists really... Mainly because I don't understand art. I saw Frida in Frisco last year and it was good, but... I can't really name any others.
 
good for you gerard! you're really coming along.
i visited the rockwell museum and man what a snore-fest. his work is so well done but soooo dull. i saw a huge francis bacon show at the met last week - very disturbing but amazing. like a bad acid trip on canvas.
 
i like rockwell! sure, it's idealised americana, but it's beautifully rendered and there's so much character in his figures.
 
p129317-Otterlo_Netherlands-Van_Gogh_Painting.jpg

I was in a hurry earlier when I posted the other image, but I like the way he does his brush strokes like he's showing a flow within the composition. I say that like I know something but we all know better. It is more interesting knowing that V. Van Gogh was mentally disturbed and looked at things from a different perspective. While at the Norton Simon Museum I was quite entertained looking at his paintings up close and noticing every brush stroke. He was probably not a raging lunatic.
 
I like Francis Bacon, also. there's a good doc at ubuweb on Bacon.

link.

i've seen that a few times it's really great - any lucien freud fans will dig this - the only (as far as i'm aware) video interview with him. another great freak.

i liked rockwell less after i saw his originals at the museum. his prelims have much more life than the finished paintings which i found pretty dry.

anyone been to the van gogh museum in amsterdam? amazing to see the progression of his style as he got more and more unbalanced. his letters are worth reading as well -
 
anyone been to the van gogh museum in amsterdam? amazing to see the progression of his style as he got more and more unbalanced. his letters are worth reading as well -

Yes, I was there in 2002. One of the first early paintings you see is the one with the potato eaters (a quite realistic painting), and one of the last paintings is the one with the crows, which is a bit weird. I rented one of the museum's audio devices so I could listen to the commentator speaking about some of the paintings while I was looking at them.
I have a book of his letters to his brother Theo, but I have'nt read it yet.
 
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i like a lot of comic book art - jim woodring, kim deitch, dan clowes, kevin huizenga, seth, chris ware, etc...

as far as "fine" art or what gets shown in galleries, the artists i like usually fall under the label "pop surrealism" - joe vaux, alex gross, ray caesar, mark ryden, blaine fontana, alex pardee, greg simkins, nathan spoor, roland tamayo, and so on...

and then there's always luigi serafini, the king among kings. if you're interested in serafini, i know of a great chapbook with tons of info...
 
I was at the Van Gogh museum back in December 2005. It's hard to take it all in. I can't spend more than about 2 hours in a place like that; my brain gets overwhelmed. But I did see a good number of pieces that I had never seen before and these really struck me with the breadth of his work.

Here's one that I was able to score a t-shirt of outside the museum

Rather prophetic, no?:

early-paintings-by-vincent-van-gogh-16.jpg


Here's another from 1886:

9.jpg
 
Oh the smoking skeleton is a Van Gogh? I've been looking at it on the cover of David Sedaris's latest book for more than a year and loving it... Great piece.
 
Indeed, and I would think for sure that Sedaris would credit him.

It's actually a fairly small piece; maybe 16" x 20" and it's on the second floor (if I remember correctly) in a glass case along with many other pieces. I think that there may be at least two versions of this, because the image I posted is slightly different (more torso) from the one I think I saw. But my memory isn't so good.
 
anyone been to the van gogh museum in amsterdam? amazing to see the progression of his style as he got more and more unbalanced. his letters are worth reading as well -

Last year I visited the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum and spend one night in a youth hostel nearby called he Van Gogh Hostel. It was a wonderful stay, spent several hours in the Museum.
This April, I also visited the Kräller Müller Museum in Ottario, near Arnhem, maybe 2 hours away from Amsterdam. It is one of the most beautiful museum of Modern Art in the World. They also have a large collection of Van Gogh paintings. It is set in the middle of a beautiful park, well worth the visit.

100_0186.JPG 100_0187.JPG
 
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I am always impressed by the old masters,
Me too ! Last year, I spent a lot of evenings in the Louvre, rediscovering a museum that I had deserted since my teen years. The hugest paintings from masters like Veronese, David, Delacroix, Géricault, etc. have my preference, an amazing work that always makes me feel dizzy. Each time I imagine the time, the perseverance, the patience that have been necessary for such masterpieces, vertigo catches me.

My favourite painters are the Pre-Raphaelites (especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones) and the german Romantic Caspar David Friedrich.

ghirlandata.jpg

La Ghirlandata, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

I first saw it on the cover of a Jane Austen book and was deeply moved, that was how I got acquainted with the Pre-Raphaelites.


The best exhibition I saw last year was Land 250, entirely devoted to the great Patti Smith and consisting in photos, paintings, drawings, personal objects, videos, etc. of her. We could see through it how much her life and work were influenced by some french writers.

pattiSmith2008.jpg


She gave a reading of Virginia Woolf's texts and a gig but I didn't manage to have places...I was so upset that I cried, like a kid who doesn't get the toy he strongly desired.

A presentation of the exhibition Land 250 :

An extract from the reading of Virginia Woolf :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UzS0dwuuHg&feature=related

These last six months, I didn't have many time to visit a lot of exhibitions. I would have liked very much to see the one focusing on the english poet and painter William Blake but...today is the last day, it will close in five hours. I had done so many things this week that I have no energy left to go. Too bad !
 
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i think the 3 skulls under the smoker is by cezanne, another fave. amsterdam was amazing, the rijksmuseum for vermeer and rembrandt and the coffee shops for...i found one of the only ones that served booze there - reggae, beer and the best menu i've ever seen. it's funny how many people i've talked to who went and said they had all these plans but got too high and just stayed in their rooms all day - or went straight to the heineken brewery and got bombed and passed out in the park.
 
....snip...

as far as "fine" art or what gets shown in galleries, the artists i like usually fall under the label "pop surrealism" - joe vaux, alex gross, ray caesar, mark ryden, blaine fontana, alex pardee, greg simkins, nathan spoor, roland tamayo, and so on...

and then there's always luigi serafini, the king among kings. if you're interested in serafini, i know of a great chapbook with tons of info...

I put that "pop Surrealism" into Google and got this:
The_Birth_Of_Ginger.jpg


and this:
Lonely-Heart_new.jpg

very nice.
 
Wow justine!! Thanks for the images. I was blown away by ray caesar, and you're naxt post was equally mind blowing. I can totally relate to the butterfly guy. Did "the hallway" remind anyone else of a Radiohead song?
 

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