Category: art history

Maggi Hambling

Maggi Hambling, “ A Conversation with the Sea”, Steel, Aldeburgh, England

The sculture is made from stainless steel and is a celebration of the composer Benjamin Britten who lived in the area. The words stencilled onto the tip of one of the scallop shells read “I hear those voices that will not be drowned” and are taken from Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes”. The twelve foot high sculpture is made of 10mm-thick stainless steel, with five tons of shingle between it and its foundation, which is also of steel. It will withstand gales of 100 miles an hour.

The scallop-shaped sculpture was built thanks to the enthusiastic support and fund-raising efforts of Simon Loftus, an influential figure in the Aldeburgh music festival and the chairman of Adnams, the famous brewery in Southwold, up the coast from Aldeburgh.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “Dying Bull”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 33.7 x 55.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Picasso’s father took him to see his first bullfight in 1889, when he was only nine years old. The spectacle so impressed him that he made it the subject of his very first painting that same year. In 1934 Picasso again took up the subject in an extensive series of drawings, prints, and paintings in which the choreography of the corrida became a metaphor for life and death. Here, Picasso focuses solely on the agony of the dying bull, eliminating the spectators, horses, and matador.

Felix Jenewein

Felix Jenewein, “The Plague”, Colour Lithograph, 1901, One of Six Plates in a Portfolio with Title Pages and Introduction by Karel B. Mádl.

Subject described by Karel B. Mádl as follows: “The first victims of the plague fall suddenly in the open air, under a ruddy sky, in which hangs ghastly the pale disc of the moon, and moves the threatening tail of the comet. The mighty body of the traveler is struck down as by lightening, and is cut down in deadly convulsions. The strong limbs quiver and are being contorted. Death came down among the people with terrible violence and the witnesses of this visitation are terror stricken. Two figures only suffice to show us the sad, voiceless land, and the painter places us into the midst of the dismay, caused by the plague.”

San Base

Five Surreal Paintings by San Base

San Base is a Canadian artist, born in Russia. Since early childhood, he showed an aptitude toward arts, and at the age of 12 he was accepted into a Fine Arts school. Soon after, he discovered another passion – the mathematics. As an admirer of both art and science, he faced a tough decision as an adolescent – to accept an offer to Surikov Academy of Fine Arts (one of the most prominent art schools in Russia) or to go to a technical university. In the end, he selected a program in applied science and graduated as a cybernetics engineer, but he never gave up painting.

He moved to the Ukraine and excelled in his as a programmer. Meanwhile, San Base dedicated all of his free time to painting and perfected his artist skills. In the early ‘90s, Base invented the concept of Dynamic Painting by combining his two strengths – programmer’s skills and love of art. He immigrated to Canada in the mid ’90s and over the last decade he perfected the technology behind Dynamic Paintings. And now, brilliant results of his genius work can finally be discovered in galleries throughout the world.

Jean Droit

Jean Droit, 1924 Paris Poster for the Olympic Games

From his early youth, Jean Droit manifested his talents as an artist, primarily in watercolors. His first exhibition of watercolors was at the Galerie du Roy in Brussels in 1912. His posters and illustrations, published by numerous magazines and in luxury books, were universally known and appreciated. Shortly before 1914, Jean Droit designed the outfits for the boards of the Belgian Army.

Upon his return to France after the end of the war, he became  a draftsman at the Manufacture de Sèvres and  resumed his artistic and educational activities. Several of his works are at the Royal Army Museum in Brussels.

Thanks to http://djinn-gallery.tumblr.com

Martin Glick

Martin Glick, “Twisting Male Torso (Male Dancer)”, Alabaster, 2008

Sculptor Martin Glick resides in Pomona, New York, just outside of New York City. He was taught by Conger Metcalf in Boston and today teaches sculpture from his studio.

The sculpture of a Twisting Male Torso is carved in alabaster and signed on right lower side. The overall dimensions of the piece are 27″ high (including base) by 11″ wide by 13″ deep.

Glick says of his works “I have been told that my sculptures have something that is unique. There is a twist to the norm, a twist of the form, an emotional element that is mine. It is my heart and my particular view of the world.”

Andy Kehoe

Forest Monster Paintings by Andy Kehoe

Andy Kehoe, a graduate of Parsons School of Design, paints works that depict themes that are dark in nature, yet are elevated above being frightening by the use of playful humor or a dreamy, fairytale like quality.
The otherwordly landscapes and nature-spirit denizens that populate Kehoe’s work open up an even deeper portal to Kehoe’s world, one that contains a similar magic and enigmatic mystery as that of Hayao Miyazaki.

Stoyan Nenov

Stoyan Nenov, “Bulgarian Men Diving for the Cross at Epiphany”, Reuters

On January 6, known also as St Jordan’s, Orthodox Chrisitans celebrate the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist in the river Jordan, seen as his appearance to the world (epiphany) as the Son of God.

The characteristic Bulgarian St Jordan’s ritual is performed by a priest who throws a cross into a river or a lake for young men to catch it. It is believed that the first person that gets to the cross will enjoy good health throughout the whole year.

Ernst Fuchs

Ernst Fuchs, “Transfiguration of the Resurrected”, Egg Tempera, 1961-82

Ernst Fuchs was born in 1930 in Vienna. He has produced many hundreds of paintings, recorded music, designed architecture and is a co-founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. He brilliantly displays the visionary vistas of the human imagination with surreal themes and spiritual symbolism.

Ernest Fuchs teaches and paints using a painting technique known as Mischtechnik. Mischtechnik utilizes small amounts of paint applied with glazes using egg tempera. This application of paint can be seen in the works of the Flemish masters of old. The thin layers of pigment are separated by the transparent glazes creating depth and vivid colors which are ideal for the visionary realms of fantastic art.

Fuchs utilizes this traditional technique for painting and through it feels a connection with the master painters of old. As though by studying proven techniques of the past he is carrying on the lineage of that painting tradition and carrying with him the lexicon of master painters.

Zdzislaw Beksinski

Illustrations by Zdzislaw Beksinski

Zdzislaw Beksiński  was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor, specializing in the field of dystopian surrealism. Beksiński did his paintings and drawings in what he called either a ‘Baroque’ or a ‘Gothic’ manner. His creations were made mainly in two periods. The first period of work is generally considered to contain expressionistic color, with a strong style of “utopian realism” and surreal architecture, like a doomsday scenario. The second period contained more abstract style, with the main features of formalism.

Beksiński threw himself into painting with a passion, and worked constantly (always to the strains of classical music). He soon became the leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his “fantastic period”, which lasted up to the mid-1980s. This is his best-known period, during which he created very disturbing images, showing a surrealistic, post-apocalyptic environment with very detailed scenes of death, decay, landscapes filled with skeletons, deformed figures and deserts.

On 21 February 2005, Beksiński was found dead in his flat in Warsaw with 17 stab wounds on his body; two of the wounds were determined to have been fatal. Robert Kupiec (the teenage son of his longtime caretaker), who later pleaded guilty, and his accomplice, Lukas Kupiec, were arrested shortly after the crime. Before his death, Beksiński refused to loan Robert Kupiec a few hundred złotych (approximately $100).

Norbet Bisky

Paintings by Norbet Bisky

Norbert Bisky is a German painter based in Berlin, best known for his frescos depicting adolescents. He was born at Leipzig in the former German Democratic Republic. The son of a Communist official, he grew up in a home in which Communism assumed the power of a religion. He studied from the mid-1990s at the Hochschule der Künste where he was a master student of Georg Baselitz in Berlin and at the Salzburg Summer Academy in the class of Jim Dine.

His work is greatly influenced by the socialist realism which was the official art of the GDR. In recent years he has shifted to darker themes of disaster, disease and decapitation while retaining the consummate painterliness which is the hallmark of his work. His figures, in many cases are floating, falling, tumbling, without any gravitational axis. The tumult surrounding the figures is punctuated by the cross pollination of cues from Christian ideology, art history, gay culture, pornography and apocalyptic visions. Bisky transmits an impression of instability on the canvas that distinctly resonates with our contemporary state of affairs.

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.