Portfolio Review Artists

29.  Holly Andres - Sparrow Lane

She is a photographer who was born in Montana in 1977.  Her art is mostly centered on the topic of childhood, which had previously been one of my ideas for my senior seminar.  So during my portfolio review I was directed to her collection called "Sparrow Lane."  It is about girls on the verge of adulthood.  It is very symbolic and meant to have a Nancy Drew type feel to it.

"The Sparrow Lane protagonists are propelled by curiosity, empowered by their discoveries, and are also intimidated by a sense of impending threat. While the girls flirt with danger, however, the work is apparently innocent and devoid of explicit violence. Rather, the series represents the potential loss of innocence."

I love these photos.  The last one reminds me of Alice and Wonderland but what I enjoy about all of the photos is that I feel like they are illustrations to the mystery books they made me read in elementary school.

30. Julie Blackman

She is a landscape painter in Portland, Oregon.  She went to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to earn her BFA in painting and later went to the University of Portland to get her Masters in Education.

She talks about her work as another way to see nature.  How that cameras can show you one image but she tries to portray landscapes in a different way.   "There are many truths about a place or a thing and one image cannot portray all those realities. What we “see” is created by the brain using data sent there by the eye. This allows for many influences to affect our perceptions of reality such as our individual nature, our emotional state and intrusions from the outside."

Her landscapes remind me of stuff by Cezanne, maybe he is an influence on her artwork.

 I could really learn from her work.  She rarely uses white and I tend to do my highlights in mixtures + white.  Her stuff is really bright and beautiful with lots of contrast.

31. Paula Rego

She was born in Portugal and bases a lot of her paintings off of their culture of storytelling.  As a child she loved the illustrations in her father's book, Dante's Inferno, so this is where a lot of her style comes from.  Her stuff is very dark and dramatic.  A lot of her images are influenced by old folk tales, like below the first piece is from her collection of Snow white and the bottom one is from Pinocchio. 

I like how she depicts her woman as these husky masculine creatures.  It makes them look real like they are not idealized women you would see in a magazine.  Their poses are always interesting too.  No model poses here!  It is like she wants to show every flexed muscle and fabric fold in her paintings.

Amurika

My mom introduced me into this artist.  He was big in the 70s.  I had never heard of him, so I decided to do some ARTIST RESEARCH!!!

28. Peter Max

He was born in Germany and raised in many different countries as a kid.  He was influenced by many different aspects of his environment as he traveled throughout his childhood.  He would watch the Monks paint every morning and China.  His mother, a fashion designer gave him inspiration while he gained more inspiration from comic books and American Jazz.

He is labeled as an illustrator and graphic designer and has been associated with the pop art and psychedelic art movements.  He does a lot of posters and paints a lot of American themed things (flags, statue of liberty,..).  I like that he works in a lot of different mediums such as: painting, printmaking, drawing, and graphic design. 

OMG shoes

Now I have my old painting textbook open in front of me and I'm pulling artists out based on what inspires me.  Now that I've decided to go the route of painting and possibly pastelling, this might be a good source for me.

25. Lisa Milroy

She was born in Canada and then went to London  to study at the St. Martins School of Art.  She earned a BFA at the University of London and is now the head of Graduate Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art.

 Her shoe painting was the one printed in my textbook and I liked it because of it's simplicity.  It looks like it's only done using 3 different colors and I like how they are shown repeated in different views.  Her art to me always looks like it's not finished.  Like her painting in the middle, I really just want to give her a ruler for those lines.  Her shapes never look just right, but I kind of like that about her art.  It doesn't need to be perfect!

26. Wayne Thiebaud

I saw one of his pieces on my DC trip.  He's know for his paintings of pastries and cakes.  He is known as a pop artist because of his use of exaggerated color and interest in everyday objects.  He was born in Arizona but raised in California.  The now 91 went to California State University in 1951 and earned his masters in 1952.  He taught there up until the 1970s.

He earned a National Medal of Arts from president Clinton in 1994.

Here is the one I took from our trip.  What I really like about his art, other than the fact that looking at cakes makes me hungry, is his shading.  I like the use of contrasting colors to create a shadow like the yellow and purple on the first cake picture.  He uses a lot of exaggerated color and his repeated subject matter make his paintings really fun.

27. Janet Fish

This realist painter was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Bermuda.  Shes comes from a large family of artists, including her parents, aunts, and uncles.  She went to Smith College back in Massachusetts and studied printmaking.  She moved her attention to panting when she attended at Yale from 1960-1963.  She studied alongside Chuck Close and became one of the first women to earn a Masters of Fine Arts at Yale (You go girl!).

She works with light really well.  I love her paintings of plastics, because it is really hard to communicate that in a painting.  I think she gets the reflections really well and the shapes just right. 

Decepticons

So, after rereading the syllabus I've broken some rules on my blog.  No regional/local artists.  Whoops!  So here's to researching 52 artists to make up for my boo-boos!

So here we go again, I'm going to start simple.  I feel really cliche choosing these artists below but these guys will always serve as my biggest inspiration.

23. Tim Burton

He has a book and a show going on at the MoMA!  He's better known as a director, producer, and a writer but I enjoy him much more as an artist.  He grew up in California and lived a pretty average life in the suburbs.  He went to the California Institute of the Arts and studied character design.  Then his short film "Stalk of the Celery Monster" he created after college gained the attention of Walt Disney and he became and apprentice animator.  He's known for his popular films like Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas (my personal fav).

I am a fan of his art because, well, it's weird!  His art is really quirky and colorful.  Some of it is so soft and somber while others are bright an bold.  It never really makes sense and it always involves monsters or his own little silly created characters.  Look at his snazzy art!

 

24. Hayao Miyazaki

This Japanese artist was born in Tokyo and started pursuing a career in art in 1963.  He is categorized as a manga artist because he is well known for his anime films.  He had a really hard early life being born in 1941 during World War II.  His mother was very sick and unable to be at home and he was switched from school to school because of the war.  His father made parts for fighter planes, so he spent a lot of his childhood fascinated by aviation and drew planes.

Reading about his animation process was really interesting.  He tries to do a lot of it himself, but now in his old age it is getting a lot harder for him.  I pulled this quote he said:  "it's very important for me to retain the right ratio between working by hand and computer. I have learnt that balance now, how to use both and still be able to call my films 2D."

I love that each of his films have the same themes such as childhood transition and there is always some form of flight (those fighter planes really influenced him as a child!).  I grew up watching his stuff on the Disney Channel.  Here are some of my personal favorites:

Kiki's Delivery Service

Ponyo

Howl's Moving Castle

Autobots

21. Jeremiah Palecek

He started out by doing video game paintings, and then moved on to painting whatever "hit him right away."  Most of his paintings are about internet memes, like the gopher one below.

This quote of his just shows how bizarre his work is: "I carry a small pocket recorder everywhere I go and I record my ideas. I still have hundreds of paintings that are on a list to be made. They are simple one line sentences that pop into my head that include. Jesus Christ riding a BMX bike, Paintings of Homosexuality found in Nature, or A Plesiosaur in Lake Champlain."

 I really like his craziness and the rough textured brushstrokes.  His work is so random!

22. Leland Bobbe

Leland is a portrait photographer living in NYC.  I recently saw this series he has been doing called "Half Drag."  I love it because I love the transformations in makeup and costume.  These men are gorgeous!  I wish I could find out more about him, but this is all I've got.

Project 2

 

Lego E. Lee.  Stonewall Lego?  General Legoston.  8 x 10" Pastel on Pastel Paper.

(Ignore terrible photo quality, I'm working on lighting for my little studio)

Exploring a new idea for senior sem...

I want to take classic art and redo it with pop culture and nerd icons to show the change in social culture.  Did I phrase that right?  Hmm...,well it's like this:

If you show a child or any average adult a picture of these two men, they can't regurgitate any info on them.  Maybe a name if they learned it in school as a child. 

But then you look at my pastel drawing, and just about every average American can tell you that's a LEGO.  It's sad that toys are more familiar icons than people like Napoleon.

I'm working on another painting, that will take me the remainder of the summer.  I am taking this painting:

And turning it into something like this:

I always find it funny how popular Star Wars is.  I've recently been watching a feed on my Facebook about a recent Star Wars convention where everyone gets together and dresses up as Stormtroopers and Darth Vader and run around and enjoy Star Wars culture.  It's roughly sketched out on the canvas.

I'm on a roll with this idea.  It really motivates me more than the make-up idea, and Senior Sem should be fun right?  I'm really in love with this concept as of now.

OBX

19. Stephanie Kiker

I fell in love with her art when I was vacationing in the Outer Banks with my family.  We ran into this little local art shop during a rain storm and I was attracted to her bold use of color and design.

She graduated from NC State University with a B.A. in Graphic Design.  Then in 1996 she moved to Hatteras to begin pursuing her career as a working artist.  Amazing right?  I would love to live by the beach and produce some beach inspired work.  The beach gives her inspiration, whether it's under water or on land she loves the natural beauty of the wildlife.

We bought a lot of things in the gift shop.  Lots of things to go with my octopus art room!  I bought a cutting board in the wave print and a light switch plate in the heron print.  Looks great :).

20.  Marcia Cline

She moved to the Outer Banks in 1979 and received a B.F.A. from UNC with an emphasis on batik and printmaking.  She is an "en plen air" artist that loves using a vibrant palette to capture her fondness of the Outer Banks.

My favorite works of hers are of beach houses.  I've been to the Outer Banks every year with my family and I love the landscape along the beach. 

I love her homepage picture of her painting on the beach here.  Can I do this everyday?

16, 17, 18.

16. Hilary White


Hilary is an acrylic painter and illustrator.  She takes famous paintings and reinterprets them with a pop culture twist.  I really enjoy her style.  I was thinking about doing something similar if I decided to paint for senior sem.

 Her other works can be seen here.

17.  John Kuhn

In his Flickr, he describes himself: " I am an artist, retired drag queen, whiteface clown, former nudist, born again Christian, average 46 year old guy...well maybe not exactly average!"  He took up a 365 day challenge as well, but this time with face paint!  The Michigan based artists takes objects, foods, and other things on his face!

18. Camargo Valentino

The Texan artist had an epiphany when he was in the US Army that he no longer wanted to pursue a career in the military.  He enrolled in the Art Institute of Huston to pursue his dream in the arts.  His style integrates pop culture iconography with classical technique.  His paintings show what things the artist enjoys such as comic book characters.  A lot of his paintings show the boxers he likes.  His other work can be seen here.