Category: painting

Zack Zdrale

Zack Zdrale, “Conversation”, Oil on Canvas, 2011

Zack Zdrale is from Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned a BA of Science-Art degree in 1999. Upon graduation, he continued to study life drawing with Robert L. Schultz. His training culminated in a Master’s degree in figurative painting from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He graduated with honors and now teaches in the graduate Fine Art department.

Zdrale focuses primarily on the human figure, conveying a wide variety of attitudes and emotions through the pose of the body and facial expression. His palette is subdued and moody, and his figures are painted in accurate tones against dark, dramatic backgrounds. Zdrale is a master of light and shadow, and he utilizes its interplay on the figure to great effect.

Greg Dunn

Greg Dunn, “Hippocampus II”, Japanese Sumi-e Ink Wash on Panel

Greg Dunn, who received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, explores that connection, painting images of the hippocampus, cortex, and neurons. He uses a traditional Japanese Sumi-e ink wash painting style with  modern interpretation.

He has always cultivated an interest in disciplines like meditation and Sumi-e brush painting.

“I think the natural state of the human mind is calmness. So when you are able to create a smooth line that is as close to a natural process as a human can get. You’re trying to capture the natural molecular unfolding of nature.” -Greg Dunn

Julia Rohwedder

Julia Rohwedder, Unknown Title, (The Change)

Julia Rohwedder is a graphic and animation artist.

“The change comes rapidly, quicker than thought. The wolf in man surges from the mind and into the body. The thought to action becomes action; the action becomes the force and cunning of a wild one going into a hunt. The senses heighten and explode.” – Thomas of Maidstone

 

White Tara

Artist Unknown, “White Tara”

“When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen, in that gap, in between, isn’t there a consciousness of the present moment; fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair’s breadth of a concept, a luminous, naked awareness? Well, that is what Rigpa is! Yet it doesn’t stay in that state forever, because another thought suddenly arises, doesn’t it? This is the self-radiance of that Rigpa.

However, if you do not recognize this thought for what it really is, the very instant it arises, then it will turn into just another ordinary thought, as before. This is called the “chain of delusion,” and is the root of samsara. If you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow-up, then whatever thoughts arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated.”

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Erik Gonzales

Erik Gonzales, “Olympus Mons I”, 2016, Pigmented Plaster, Powdered Marble, Acrylic Emulsion, Acrylic and Charcoal on Canvas

Phoenix artist Erik Gonzales’s mixed media works refernces both nature and history. He incorporated various material in his art, including clay, acrylics, marble dust, and plaster.

Erik Gonzales was born in 1973 in New Mexico and was raised in Arizona, Colorado and Connecticut. In 1990 he moved back to Arizona and attended Arizona State University where he graduated with honors. Gonzales studied in Madrid in 1995 obtaining a second degree in Spanish Studies and Literature.

It is Gonzales’s Spanish heritage that continues to have a profound influence on his work creating a dichotomy of new and old. The analytical side of his work can be traced to his father whose pioneering career as a nuclear pharmacist introduced the artist to the world of science at an early age. The deep textures and bold use of color represents his mother’s Andalusian background and continues to influence his use of mystical imagery within his work.

Reblogged with many thanks to thunderstruck9:

Oswaldo Guayasamin

Two Paintings by Oswaldo Guayasamin

Oswaldo Guayasamin was an Ecuadorian eminent painter and sculptor whose heritage traces back to Quechua and Mestizo indigenous populations. Guayasamin dedicated his entire life to art and he was also a passionate supporter of the communist Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro.

Guayasamin was given a prize for an entire life of work for peace by the United Nations because his humanist work reflects the pain and misery of mankind and speaks against the omnipresent  twentieth century violence, marked by world wars, civil wars , genocides, dictatorships and torture.

Gottfied Rheinwein

Gottfried Heinwein, “Mouse 1″, 1995, Mixed Media (Oil and Acrylic on Canvas), 210 x 310 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

In ‘The Darker Side of Playland’ show at the SFMOMA, the endearing cuteness of beloved toys and cartoon characters turns menacing and monstrous. Much of the work has the quality of childhood nightmares. In those dreams, long before any adult understanding of the specific pains and evils that live holds, the familiar and comforting objects and images of a child’s world are rent with something untoward.

For children, not understanding what really to be afraid of, these dreams portend some pain and disturbance lurking into the landscape. Perhaps nothing in the exhibition exemplifies this better than Gottfried Helnwein’s ‘Mickey’. His portrait of Disney’s favorite mouse occupies an entire wall of the gallery; rendered from an oblique angle, his jaunty, ingenuous visage looks somehow sneaky and suspicious. His broad smile, encasing a row of gleaming teeth, seems more a snarl or leer.

This is Mickey as Mr. Hyde, his hidden other self now disturbingly revealed. Helnwein’s Mickey is painted in shades of gray, as if pictured on an old black-and-white TV set. We are meant to be transported to the flickering edges of our own childhood memories in a time imaginably more blameless, crime-less and guiltless.

Alyssa Monks

Paintings by Alyssa Monks

Alyssa Monks’s paintings are of a representational narrative genre. She portrays a specific place and time with simultaneous empathy and detachment.

Monks is part of the Continuing Education Faculty at the New York Academy of Art, where she teaches Flesh Painting. She currently is also an instructor at the Montclair State University.

She earned her BA from Boston College and an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art. At the New York Academy of Art, Alyssa studied with Vincent Desiderio, Jenny Saville, Wade Schuman, Brenda Zlamany, John Jacobsmeyer, Harvey Citron, Deane Keller, Edward Schmidt, Steven Assael, and Lisa Bartolozzi. She additionally studied at Montclair State College, the New School, and Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence. She completed an artist in residency at Fullerton College.

Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli, Untitled, Collage and Mixed Media on Canvas, 1960, 138 x 172 cm

Marca-Relli is considered one of the main exponents of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, and he was involved in the movement from its conception as he organized the first Abstract Expressionist show at the Ninth Street Show in 1951, with the artist Franz Kline and the gallerist Leo Castelli.

This important exhibition marked the beginning of the new uniquely American artistic movement, which is based on revolutionary painting methods, notably, Action Painting.  Artists that participated in this exhibition included: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Barnet Newman, Hans Hoffman, Franz Klien and Conrad Marca-Relli.

Jeffrey T Larson

Paintings by Jeffrey T. Larson

Jeffrey T. Larson is a classically trained artist renowned for his ability to adeptly capture the simple, yet oft-neglected and beautiful, pleasures of contemporary life onto canvas. At the young age of 17, Jeffery T. Larson had the resolve and dedication to receive admission into the renowned Atelier Lack, Richard Lack’s traditional and Boston School-influenced atelier in Minneapolis, MN.

After completing his four-year education at Atelier Lack, Larson continued his academic training through museum study in the U.S. and Europe. His strong repertoire allowed for a wonderful duality to evolve in his work: authoritatively rendered, composed and current still-life paintings created in the studio and, conversely, luminous, painterly and almost Impressionist landscape and figure paintings created en plein air.

The common threads between the two styles are Larson’s exacting usage of natural light, dedication to working solely from direct observation, ability to capture the quiet beauty in even the most mundane subject matter and, of course, the necessary restraint to leave his pieces open and fresh.

Stephen Greene

Stephen Greene, “The Mourners”, Oil on Canvas, 1946, 50.8 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection

Stephen Greene was a painter from Valley Cottage, New York, known for his abstract paintings and in the 1940′s for his social realist figure paintings. Greene taught at Princeton University for many years where he was teacher to many well-known figures in the art world including Frank Stella and art critic and historian Michael Fried.

Greene had more than 2 dozen solo exhibitions of his work in leading art galleries in New York City. He also taught at the Art Students League of New York for several decades. After the mid-1950s and until his death Greene’s mature work was related to abstract expressionism, color field painting and surrealism.

“I have always wanted to achieve a profoundly moving image, to make of paint and canvas a visual fact worth dealing with on many levels. Art does set up a particular world and the one that suits my vision of what I see, know, deals with the dark side of experience as well as its enchantment and pleasures. In art, our hopes and desires shape our visions of fulfillment for more than the actual experiences that we may have.

My use of color and light that is mysterious is of an interior perception. My formal stance is very much involved with an underlying structure that is insistent to the life of the work. I remain subject ridden and how a vertical divides the space from top to bottom, from my earliest works to the present, is as much subject matter as overt reference to the known world. I prefer to make paintings that are sufficiently individual to be granted their own place.”                            — Stephen Greene, Valley Cottage, New York, 1999.