Tag: art history

Walter Oltmann

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The Artwork of Walter Oltmann

Born in 1960 Walter Oltmann went to school and completed his Fine Arts Degree in Kwa-Zulu Natal. His father worked as a civil servant and the family moved between one remote area of Kwa-Zulu Natal to the next. This migratory life style exposed Walter Oltmann to the rich craft tradition of rural South Africa.

Oltmann recalls the rigorous training in drawing that university art students underwent at the time. Drawing skills were seen as a foundation to build the rest of one’s art making practice on.  His teachers “made it clear to us that drawing should be a regimen in one’s creative practice and also a way of thinking as an investigative activity”. The mastery of drawing skills has translated well into Oltmann’s interpretation of the mastery of traditional craft skills that are to be found in South Africa.

Walter Oltmann’s work can be divided into two main areas of practice: drawing (pencil, ink and bleach) and sculpture (wire work). He is a master at manipulating both two-dimensional and three-dimensional line. A thread runs through the prints that he made at The Artists’ Press: “While I have dabbled with lithography, this is my first real adventuring into it. The thread of the pencil line moves into wire which moves into polymer plate and then is transferred onto paper”.

The embossed quality of the letterpress printing gives an added tactile dimension to the work. The spirit of the wire work has translated well into print. The hand-made quality of the woven and knotted wire sculptures objectifies the aspect of time passing – the viewer grasps time as a tangible quality embodied in the material.  This aspect also carries over into the drawings and prints that Walter Oltmann makes.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Blue Poles″, Enamel and Aluminium Paint with Glass on Canvas, 1952, National Gallery of Australia

“Blue Poles” was first exhibited at Pollock’s solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1952 where it was titled “Number 11, 1952″. Pollock’s decision to forego conventional descriptive titles and simply number his paintings, including the year of their execution, began with his 1949 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Some paintings originally given number titles when they were first exhibited were later given more descriptive titles. For example, “Number 10, 1952″ became “Convergence”.

This is also the case with “Number 11, 1952″. The painting was first given the title “Blue Poles”, and dated separately as 1952, in the exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1954. Sidney Janis recalled clearly that the new title came from Pollock himself. Thereafter the painting is usually referred to as “Blue Poles”, although occasionally the earlier and late titles are combined as “Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952″.

Note: An Interesting discussion of Pollock’s actual painting of “Blue Poles’:  http://nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=36334&MnuID=2&GalID=1

Fabienne Verdier

Paintings by Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier is an abstract painter who explores the dynamism of forces in nature, movement and immobility by drawing on her intimate knowledge of techniques and traditions of both Western and Eastern art.

As a young art school graduate, Verdier left France for China in 1985 to study the art of spontaneous painting and other Eastern traditions with some of the last great Chinese painters who survived the Cultural Revolution. Her adventure and immersion as an apprentice painter would last nearly ten years, recounted in her 2003 book, ‘Passagère du Silence’.

Verdier paints vertically in ink, standing directly on her stretchers, using giant brushes and tools of her own invention suspended from the studio ceiling. Her work combines Eastern aspects of unity, spontaneity and asceticism with the line, action and expression of Western painting.

Notes: Fabienne Verdier’s website, which includes several videos that present her exhibitions and follow her work process, is located at: http://fabienneverdier.com

Insert Image: Fabienne Verdier, “Color Flows 3”, 2012, Mixed Media on Canvas, 40 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Kendall Buster

Sculptures by Kendall Buster

Kendall Buster is a full-time faculty member in the sculpture and extended media department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her large-scale “biological architecture” projects have been exhibited in numerous national and international venues. She has been interviewed on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition as part of a series on art and science and was the recipient of a 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in the Arts.

“Sculpture can expand beyond the idea of the making of a distinct, autonomous object and into site-responsive installation,” Buster said. “The way I work tends to engage architectural spaces, often using a variety of materials that may not be permanent, and so there is this wonderful opportunity to do all kinds of things with scale, play and volume.”

A native of rural Alabama, Buster began her education in the sciences, particularly biology and microbiology, which inform her work today.

“A lot of these pieces have accessible interiors and operate like models that transform a given architectural space,” she said. “And there are certain kinds of references to what we think of as the language of biology in that many of the materials I use really do resemble a membrane.”

Rebecca Bathory

Photography by Rebecca Bathory

Rebecca Lilith Bathory is a British photographer, living in London. As Rebecca Litchfield, she is known for her series “Soviet Ghosts”. She graduated from University for the Creative Arts with a first class degree in Graphic Design in June 2006. Between 2008 and 2010 she studied for a master’s degree in Fashion Photography at The London College of Fashion, for which she was awarded a distinction. In 2014 she was awarded a Techne scholarship for a research PhD degree at the University of Roehampton to research the photography of dark tourism. She graduated with a PHD in Visual Anthropology.

Finding beauty in darkness, poetry and meaning in the forgotten and surreal, imaginary worlds amongst decay. Rebecca Bathory’s artworks breathe life into forgotten historical locations, they reawaken old narratives, find beauty and meaning in their ruin and revive the memories of lost moments in places tainted by the indigenous.

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Ernest Haeckel

Lithographs by Ernst Haeckel

“Kunstformen der Natur”, or “Art Forms in Nature”, encapsulates biologist Ernst Haeckel’s response to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Haeckel  published these exquisitely rendered depictions of flora and fauna in ten installments of ten illustrations from 1899 to 1904, aiming to widen the general public’s understanding of naturalism.

Haeckel also clearly saw his illustrations as more than just scientific documentation. In introducing one of his plates, he wrote that its patterns would not be out of place in embroideries or on urns and bottles. Haeckel’s elaborate forms have been called a precursor to art nouveau, and his influence even stretched to architecture.

N C Wyeth

N C Wyeth, “Herring”, Oil on Canvas, 1935, Collection of Phyllis and Jamie Wyeth

Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945) is best known as one of America’s foremost book and magazine illustrators of his era. Born and raised in Needham, Massachusetts, N.C. Wyeth learned drafting at the Mechanics School and then studied at the Massachusetts Normal School (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design). He was advised by one of his teachers to become an illustrator, and he soon followed two of his student friends to study illustration in 1902 under the renowned American illustrator Howard Pyle in Wilmington, Delaware.

In February 1903, Wyeth got his first commission, from Saturday Evening Post.  This was the beginning of a long and successful career in which he illustrated more than a hundred books, among them many popular novels for Scribner’s, including Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robin Hood, The Last of the Mohicans, Robinson Crusoe, and Rip Van Winkle.

Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg, “Companions”, Multi-Colored Fiberglass, 2008

British-born, German-based sculptor Tony Cragg rose to prominence in the 1980s as a leading voice in the cohort known as New British Sculpture. Seeking a new, European sensibility, homegrown out of the continent’s neo-avant-garde positions, this group, which also included Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, took inspiration from a broad range of practices.

But the awe-inspiring technique of their work—Kapoor’s mirrored surfaces, Gormley’s cubistic distillation of space into three-dimensional grids, or Cragg’s fractal-like complexity—have tended to overshadow their art historical roots. In the case of Cragg, this genealogy forms the basis for the artist’s iconic style, often in surprising ways.

Turner Prize-winning sculptor Tony Cragg emerged in the late 1970s with a bold practice that questioned and tested the limits of a wide variety of traditional sculptural materials, including bronze, steel, glass, wood, and stone. “I’m an absolute materialist, and for me material is exciting and ultimately sublime,” he has said. Eschewing factory fabrication of his works, Cragg has been known to merge contemporary industrial materials with the suggestion of the functional forms of mundane objects and ancient vessels—like jars, bottles, and test tubes—resulting in sublime, sinuous, and twisting forms.

Ivan Milev Lalev

Ivan Milev Lalev, “Krali Marko”, 1926

Ivan Milev Lalev was a Bulgarian painter and scenographer regarded as the founder of the Bulgarian Secession and a representative of Bulgarian modernism, combining symbolism, Art Nouveau and expressionism in his work. In 1920 at the age of twenty three, he was admitted to the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, where he studied under Prof. Stefan Badzhov, and had three one-man exhibitions. He also contributed to the communist comic magazine Red Laughter as an illustrator and cartoonist.

Milev died of influenza in Sofia on 25 January 1927, shortly before his thirtieth birthday. Regarded as one of the great masters of distemper and watercolour painting in Bulgarian art, Milev’s characteristic decorative style was much influenced by the European Secession, but it was also related to Bulgarian folk art and icon painting. Milev’s paintings are exhibited in the National Art Gallery and the Sofia Gallery.

Kevin Weir

Kevin Weir, “Jacob”, Computer Graphics, Vintage Photograph Gifs

 

Art director and designer Kevin Weir uses historical black and white photographs forgotten to time as the basis for his quirky—and slightly disturbing—animated GIFs. Having mastered Photoshop in high school, he found himself five years later “making black and white GIFs as a way to occupy myself during the downtime of an internship I had during grad school.” He shared the images on his Tumblr “Flux Machine” where they quickly went viral.

Weir makes use of photographs found in the Library of Congress online archive, and is deeply drawn to what he calls “unknowable places and persons,” images with little connection to present day, that he can use as blank canvas for his weird ideas. The tinted nature of the medium’s limited frames of animation and the creepiness factor add to the strangeness of the gifs.

Weir is now an art director at Droga5 in NYC, he also also animates music videos and sassy birds.

Michael de la Paz

Michael de la Paz, “Hearst Castle- The Roman Pool”, 2012

The Roman Pool at Hearst castle is a tiled indoor pool decorated with eight statues of Roman gods, goddesses and heroes. The pool appears to be styled after an ancient Roman bath such as the Baths of Caracalla in Rome c. 211-17 CE.

The mosaic tiled patterns were inspired by mosaics found in the 5th Century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy. They are also representative of traditional marine monster themes that can be found in ancient Roman baths. The statues are rough copies of ancient Greek and Roman statues. One such copy represents the “Apoxyomenos.” Statuary was used on a considerable scale in the Baths of Caracalla.

Reblogged with thanks to https://www.flickr.com/photos/mykdelapaz/

Albert Renger-Patzsch

Photography by Albert Renger-Patzsch

In the 1920’s a number of German photographers that were linked to the social, political and artistic movement were referred as ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ meaning new objective or new realism, which the new objectivity had tried to change the view point perspective on the development of photography than just the dark room experiments.

In its sharply focused and matter-of-fact style Albert Renger-Patzsch’s work exemplifies the esthetic of The New Objectivity that flourished in the arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Like Edward Weston in the United States, Renger-Patzsch believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object.

He wrote: “The secret of a good photograph—which, like a work of art, can have esthetic qualities—is its realism … Let us therefore leave art to artists and endeavor to create, with the means peculiar to photography and without borrowing from art, photographs which will last because of their photographic qualities.”

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, “Gas”, Oil on Canvas, 1940, Museum of Modern Art, New York

This work resulted from a composite representation of several gasoline stations seen by Edward Hopper. The light in this painting—both natural and artificial—gives the scene of a gas station and its lone attendant at dusk an underlying sense of drama. But rather than simply depicting a straightforward narrative, Hopper’s aim was “the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature”—in this case, the loneliness of an American country road.

Fellow artist Charles Burchfield believed these paintings would remain memorable beyond their time, because in his “honest presentation of the American scene … Hopper does not insist upon what the beholder shall feel.”

Edward Willis Redfield

Edward Willis Redfield, “The Burning of Center Bridge”, 1923, Oil on Canvas, 127.6 x 142.9 cm, James A. Michener Art Museum, Doyelstown, Pennsylvania

Primarily a landscape painter, Edward Willis Redfield was acclaimed as the most “American” artist of the New Hope school because of his vigor and individualism. Redfield favored the technique of painting en plein air, that is, outdoors amid nature. Tying his canvas to a tree, He worked in even the most brutal weather. Painting rapidly, in thick, broad brushstrokes, and without attempting preliminary sketches, Redfield typically completed his paintings in one sitting.

In 1923 Redfield created the nocturnal scene that would be recognized as one of his most important works. “The Burning of Center Bridge” depicts the 1923 fire that destroyed the bridge connecting Center Bridge, Pennsylvania, with Stockton, New Jersey. Although Redfield took notes on an envelope as he observed the scene, he departed from his practice of capturing a landscape en plein air and painted the scene when he returned to his studio.

Within two days, Redfield created this canvas, which captures the heroic efforts of firemen trying to extinguish the fire as spectators stand by helplessly watching the burning wooden structure glow against a black sky filled with plumes of smoke. The destruction of the region’s oldest Delaware River covered bridge was a monumental event for local residents. News of the incident appeared in the Washington Post and in the headlines of the local Bucks County Intelligencer, which recounted the drama of 25 firemen falling into the river as they fought the fire while “the banks of the river were lined with a crowd aggregating thousands of spectators.”