Month: May 2017

Forrest Williams

Forrest Williams, “Interval”, 2001, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Forrest Williams studied English and Art History at Edinburgh University, Scotland. He graduated from the New York Academy of Art, New York, with a MFA in Painting. Williams  currently works and lives in New York.

“My paintings are about men: about being a man as I see it and about relationships between men. They depict individual men, but they’re not portraits. The men inhabit a particular place, but it isn’t real. It’s an ambiguous, interior territory, where things are and are not what they seem.”

The paintings are staged scenarios, theatrical moments, and the men who inhabit them are the actors. The reality lies in the emotional core of this world — intensely felt but highly contained. My model Lorenzo called it “emotional purgatory.”

Although they’re a group of anonymous men, they’re at the same time self-portraits I suppose. Perhaps these are worlds of their own making — worlds with outsides and edges and unknown terrains beyond. This is the region where desire and doubt, longing and reticence, intimacy and uncertainty coexist. It speaks of absence as much as presence.” – Forrest Williams

Reblogged with many thanks to https://k250966.tumblr.com

Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy

Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy, “The Wake”, Graphic Novel

“The Wake” is a 10 issue series penned by Scott Snyder of “American Vampire” fame.  Marine biologist Lee Archer is recruited by Agent Astor Cruz of the Department of Homeland Security, to travel to a secret underwater base. There he joins an eclectic group of individuals gathered together to make sense of a horrific find; a captured merman. The creature has clawed, webbed arms, and a mouth full of sharp, predatory teeth.

In the second issue it appears that, in addition to these terrifying physical capabilities, it has other powers as well. “The Wake” floods the reader with wave after wave of terror, and will fully sate any horror genre lover.  The artwork and atmosphere of the story are impressive; the undersea station has a claustrophobic feel , and the creature looks deadly.

Roger Caillois: “An Obscure Nostalgia to Create”

Photographers Unknown, An Obscure Nostalgia to Create

“I wonder, only in passing, whether the indelible ornamentation that man inscribes upon his own epidermis does not respond to a nostalgia for the universal internally generated coloring of corrollas, furs, shells, carapaces and wings. For man it has been necessary to create both works and tools outside of himself. But it may be that he retains an obscure nostalgia to create them on his own body, to make them a part of it rather than projecting them outwards onto an independent surface, where he is free to retouch them as he sees fit, which is precisely what painting and art are.”

― Roger Caillois, The Dedalus Book of Surrealism: The Identity of Things

 

Kenton Nelson

Kenton Nelson, “Looking”

Kenton Nelson was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA.  He attended Long Beach State University and Otis Parsons Art Institute, and for the last 35 years has had his art studio in Pasadena, CA.  He has been on the faculty of the Otis Parsons Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

Nelson traces his interest in painting back to his great uncle, Roberto Montenegro, renowned Mexican muralist and Modernist. The style of Nelson’s paintings have their origins in American Scene painting, Regionalism, and the work of the WPA artists of the 1930′s.

Nelson paints figures, landscape, and architecture bathed in light.  The objective in his paintings is to idealize the ordinary with the intention of engagement, using the iconic symbols and styles of his lifetime in a theatrical style to make leading suggestions.

The Owl and the Man

Photographer Unknown, (The Owl and the Man)

“Oh, what a lovely owl!“ Cried the Wart. But when he went up to it and held out his hand, the owl grew half as tall again, stood up as stiff as a poker, closed its eyes so that there was only the smallest slit to peep through – as you are in the habit of doing when told to shut your eyes at hide-and-seek – and said in a doubtful voice, “There is no owl.”  Then it shut its eyes entirely and looked the other way.

-T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Claire Fontaine

Paris-based Collective Claire Fontaine, “Carelessness Causes Fire”, Audain Gallery, Vancouver, 2012

A Paris-based collective founded in 2004, Claire Fontaine is named after a brand of French notebooks and stationery. In an attempt to identify the transformed position of “the artist”, Claire Fontaine has conceived of the “readymade artist,” which considers the contemporary artist as equivalent to Marcel Duchamps’s urinal or Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. The collective has developed a practice in which existing forms and materials—such as ephemeral-object sculpture, installation, video, painting, infographics, and neon—are crafted into works that critique political and aesthetic norms of the art world.

Reblogged with thanks to http://contemporary-art-blog.com