Month: January 2016

Hermann Hesse: “Every Man’s Story is Important”

Photographers Unknown, (Collection: Every Man’s Story is Important)

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man’s story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”

–Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

DELeast

Street Art by DELeast

ALeast was born in 1984 in Wuhan, China and is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. He studied Sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts and began making art in public spaces in 2004. His murals can be found in cities around the world including the U.S., Switzerland, Namibia, France, Israel, Australia and China.

The dark imagery found in DALeast’s art is undeniably captivating, woven with intricate detail while focusing on the simple subjects in his pieces. Each of his pieces of art is created using paint to look like thousands of metal shards are coming together to form beautiful shapes, often animals or humans. Within every piece of DALeast’s art, a pop of color observed in the background brings his subject to life. This allows him to focus on the intricacy of his technique while delivering his final product. The use of fractured imagery and contrasting backgrounds serve to give his art a breath of energy and soul that can sometimes be lost in art with a more somber subject matter.

A majority of DALeast’s art utilizes animals as the subject matter. In many of his works, less pronounced line work in the background serves as a shadowing effect for the images illustrated in the forefront. The overall artistic effect of utilizing a dark base while simultaneously highlighting in fragmented, brighter lines is to make the images appear to leap off the wall or canvas; It is the artist’s skillful layering of lines that leads the viewer to be able to visually interpret the image in many different ways.

John Andro Avendano

Two Paintings by John Andro Avendano

Top Image: “Blue Maze”, Ink, Acrylic, Chalk and Newspaper on Paper, 2007; Bottom Image: “Sex 1″, Oil on Canvas, 2012

John Andro Avendano was born into an artistic family in Arleta, California in 1959. His mother painted and his brothers drew; so from an early age, he has been a focused artist. He did not settle on just one artistic medium but developed many forms of expressing art.

In the late 1970’s, John Avendano gave up ownership in his construction company to become a full-time artist. These were lean times and he would often give away art for food. For several years he worked under Hal Reed who learned his techniques by studying under Nicolai Fechen and by working at Walt Disney Studios in Las Angeles. Avendano was Hal Reed’s assistant for five years at the Art League of Las Angeles while perfecting his skill of color theory, composition, and anatomy. Avendano later taught art at the Art League and at several elementary schools in the Los Angeles area.

Ed Paschke

Ed Paschke, “Mano d’Orange”, Oil on Linen, 2003

Edward Francis Paschke was a Polish American painter. His childhood interest in animation and cartoons, as well as his father’s creativity in wood carving and construction, led him toward a career in art. As a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago he was influenced by many artists featured in the Museum’s special exhibitions, in particular the work of Gauguin, Picasso and Seurat.

Unlike most of his Pop predecessors with their unthreatening embrace of popular culture, Paschke gravitated towards the images that exemplified the underside of American values — fame, violence, sex, and money — a preference that he shared with Andy Warhol, who was one of his foremost inspirations. In the fall of 1984, he was featured on the cover of Art in America magazine, with a great review of his work offered as a powerful alternative to the then popular Neo-Expressionism that was sweeping the New York art scene. Later considered to be an artist of his own time and place, his explorations of the archetypes and clichés of media identity prefigured the appropriative gestures of the “Pictures Generation” and for a new generation of global artists his totemic, eye-popping paintings have come to embody the essence of cosmopolitan art.

Hermann Hesse: “The Magic of Symbols”

Photographer Unknown, (The Rainmaker)

“He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him.

And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find – this is our firm belief – the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces.”

-Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game