Month: December 2015

Jim Dine

Jim Dine, Eight Pieces from the “Robe” Series

Jim Dine had a great love for hs everyday objects, the things in which he lived and worked. Throughout his career Jim Dine incorporated common objects into his work that were meaningful in his own life–such as tools, bathrobes, and hearts. Through repetition over time, these objects take on meaning for the viewer as well as the artist. By creating a work that is based on his own favorite bathrobe, he is creating a very intimate self portrait of himself. In essence, who he is as a person and as an artist.

On guggenheim.org, Dine’s work is interpreted thusly, “Dine also began to address his identity and physicality through images of thickly painted palettes (or actual palettes affixed to canvases) and oversize color charts, which suggest the basic artifacts of his profession and the presence of the artist. Such references to the self became more direct in 1964 in a series of assemblages featuring images of men’s suits and in another series based on an illustration of a bathrobe that Dine saw in a newspaper advertisement.”

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Six Paintings by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, of Coast Salish descent, graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in British Columbia. In combining his own experiences with a political perspective, he paints landscapes with vivid, acidic colours, merging Native iconography with a surrealist influence to address West Coast Native issues.

Yuxweluptun is Salish for “man of many masks,” a name given to the artist during his initiation into the Sxwaixwe Society at the age of fourteen. It is Cowishan Salish belief that the Sxwaixwe is a supernatural being who came down from the sky to live at the bottom of a lake. There is a dance associated with this creature in which the mask plays an important role. Yuxweluptun explains, “You carry the mask that belongs to your family and you identify with the animal on the mask.” (Robin Laurence, “Man of Masks,” Canadian Art, Spring 1995).

Yuxweluptun has chosen art as a way to voice his political concerns, exposing environmental destruction and the struggle of Native people. He believes that his artwork stimulates dialogue between Native and non-Native people.

Irving Kriesberg

Paintings by Irving Kriesberg

Irving Kriesberg (1919–2009) was an American painter whose work combined elements of Abstract Expressionism with figurative elements of human and animal forms.

In 1945 Irving Kriesberg moved to New York City and had numerous solo and group exhibitions. His entry into the international art scene came when Dorothy Miller, curator of the Museum of Modern Art included Kriesberg in the landmark 1952 exhibition “15 AMERICANS” at MoMA. The ‘15 AMERICANS’  exhibition included Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and others.

Where hard-line Abstract Expressionists shunned figural elements in their work, Irving Kriesberg used them lavishly. As a result, he was often called a Figurative Expressionist; the term applied to midcentury Expressionists whose work was not strictly abstract.

But as often as not, Mr. Kriesberg’s work transcended category. Though it teemed with figures — frogs, birds, people, angels and much else — it was anything but representational. Normally small creatures tower and loom, dancers weave through space at unorthodox angles, and customarily static objects appear fluid and sinuous. All these things gave his work a sense of wit and mystery.