Month: March 2016

Dean Cornwell

Two Murals by Dean Cornwell, The Raleigh Room of the Warwick Hotel, 68 West 54th Street, New York City, 1937

Dean Cornwell was an American illustrator and muralist. His oil paintings were frequently featured in popular magazines and books as literary illustrations, advertisements, and posters promoting the war effort. Throughout the first half of the 20th century he was a dominant presence in American illustration. At the peak of his popularity he was nicknamed the “Dean of Illustrators”.

In 1937 William Randolph Hearst commissioned Cornwell to create murals for The Raleigh Room, the restaurant inside his new residential hotel. Cornwell complied with a series of scenes of the life of Raleigh, depicting the explorer-courtier throwing down his cloak over a mud puddle for Queen Elizabeth, receiving a charter from her, and landing on Roanoke Island. After Cornwell had completed the murals, however, he and Hearst disagreed about compensation, and in revenge, the artist added obscene elements to the paintings, including an Indian with bare buttocks and men urinating on both Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth. Fortunately, he painted out these elements once the dispute was resolved. Over time the murals darkened, but they were brilliantly restored in a renovation in 2004.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Margarette”, Oil and Straw on Canvas, 1981, 280 x 380 cm, Tate Museum, London, England

Anselm Kiefer was born 1945 in Donauschingen, Germany, at the close of World War II. He studied art formally under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy in the early 1970s where history and myth became central themes in his work.

In 1971 Kiefer produced his first large-scale landscape paintings and from 1973 he began to experiment with wooden interiors on a monumental scale. His preoccupation with recent German history is seen throughout his work and his use of recurring motifs, such as an artist’s palette symbolises his emotional journey relating to this period. Kiefer has made increasing use of materials such as sand, straw, wood, dirt and photographs, as well as sewn materials and lead model soldiers. By adding found materials to the painted surface Kiefer invented a compelling third space between painting and sculpture. Recent work has broadened his range yet further: in 2006 he showed a series of paintings based around the little-known work of the modernist Russian poet Velimir Chlebnikov.

Brett Williams and Hayden Phipps

Brett Williams and Hayden Phipps, “The Death and Life of Desmond Wolfe”, 2013 Entry for the Filminute Challenge

Every year, Filminute challenges filmmakers all over the world to tell a story in 60 seconds.

The concept of flipping through brief moments in a person’s life to create a short film is tried and true, which is what makes this outstanding work from Brett Williams and Hayden Phipps that much more impressive. For one, it’s got a beautifully-shot stunt at its core. For two, it subverts that common flash-by-flash exploration of a person’s existence by introducing us to a man who is not at all what he seems.

This film from South Africa received a Jury Commendation in 2013.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

John Boyd

John Boyd, “Fish Head”, Oil on Board, 1957, 11×14 inches, Private’s Collection, Ireland

John Boyd was born in Carlisle, England in 1957 and studied painting in the Slade School of Art. He has resided in Ireland for the past 20 years and has exhibited internationally since the late 70s, most often in London, America and Ireland.

Boyd has developed a style uniquely his own, one that seems to hint at complex and unresolved narratives replete with a quiet but profound anguish. Although he has received relatively little critical attention, his distinctively mannered paintings have acquired a loyal following.

Thanks to http://visualstatic101.tumblr.com

Oluf Gravesen

Sculptures by Oluf Gravesen

Oluf Gravesen was a Danish visual artist, both in printmaking and in sculpture. In 1961 the 18-year-old Gravesen became the youngest person to be admitted to the Danish Royal Academy’s Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg, exhibiting three small scrap metal reliefs.

A successful solo exhibition at Den Permanente in the mid-60s brought his work to the attention of Copenhagen’s stylists and led to its inclusion in room settings for their promotions. Later he worked on his artworks, all made entirely of nails, in Paris, London and New York.

Gravesen’s exile meant he was not widely known in Denmark, so when he returned home from New York in the mid-1980s with a deadly disease, his tragically premature death was marked only by his family and closest friends and came, in the words of Pittsburgh’s Concept Art Gallery, “before he could see the influence his work would have on the late 20th and early 21st century New York art scene”.