Artist Showdown

Lucian Freud

2007-09-29T22:48:00.000-07:00

Lucian Michael Freud, (born 8 December 1922) is a British painter and printmaker. Freud was born in Berlin, Germany in 1922, son of Jewish parents Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of writer and politician Clement Raphael Freud and of Stephan Gabriel Freud. Freud and his family moved to the UK in 1933 due to the rise of Nazism, gaining British citizenship in 1939. During this period he attended Dartington Hall school in Totnes, Devon, and then Bryanston School.
Freud studied briefly at the Central School of Art in London then, with greater success, at Cedric Morris's East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, and also at Goldsmiths College - University of London from 1942-3. Thereafter, he served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942. Freud's first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, featured the now celebrated The Painter's Room. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Italy for several months. Since then he has lived and worked in London.
Freud's early paintings are often associated with surrealism and depict people and plants in unusual juxtapositions. These works are usually painted with quite thin paint, but from the 1950s he began to paint portraits, often nudes, to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, and began to use a thicker impasto. With this technique he would often clean his brush after each stroke. The colours in these paintings are typically muted.
Often Freud's portraits just depict the sitter, sometimes sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed, but sometimes the sitter is juxtaposed with something else, as in Girl With a White Dog and Naked Man With Rat.
Freud's subjects are often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. To quote the artist: "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really."

Brisson, Pierre Marie

2007-09-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

Born June 1955 in Orléans. Brisson is one of Europe's most talented young contemporary artists. With simplified figures and extensive texturing, Brisson's works have been compared to cave drawings. Their timeless appearances represent a kind of archeological dig for the artist: he cuts, scratches and pierces the multi-layered surfaces of his canvases to reveal his images from within the strata of these materials. Brisson's original and graphic artworks have been the subject of numerous gallery and museum exhibitions throughout Western Europe, North America, and Japan.

He makes the acquaintance of the painter Bernard Saby who encourages him.1975. First exhibition at the Charles Péguy museum in Orléans, his hometown..1978. First exhibition at the Lucette Herzog gallery in Orléans.1979. Works on his first etchings in the Pasnic atelier, Paris.1980. First exhibition in New York organized by the publisher BrunoRoulland.From 1981 to 2006. Regular exhibitions in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden and the United States of America where he is recognised as a major artist and is present in a number of collections, both public (Fine Arts Museums, Achenbach Foundation, San Francisco, Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale …) and private (Mr. Pier Luigi Loro Piana, Société Générale, …). He now lives between San Francisco, Paris and Nîmes, near the Scamandre vines that he helped establish amongst the ranks of the great Rhone valley wines.

Fernando Ferreira de Araujo

2007-09-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

Artist Statement:

"Born in Brazil and living in New York City sice 2003, I’ve been paiting for almost 18 years. Painting, to me, is basically an intuitive process, I always find myself guided by intuition and led by emotion. As opposed to wide and long heavy brush strokes, I used to have, I now tend to adopt more of a bleeding technique to achieve the same sensation and connection with my inner self. Even though my ongoing series has a strong link to my cultural background, New York has greatly influenced my perspective. Adopting acrylic and new ways of paintings in order to adapt represent the essence of evolution in my work without losing my identity and artist calligraphy. I see each one of my work as a surprise with its own personal and intuitive meaning. After brainstorming feelings and memories, they evolve freely and independently. As opposed to being in charge I'm almost as taken by the strokes, free, at the same time unaware of what’s coming next, being almost impossible to realize when to rest the brush."

www.fernandoaraujo.net

Stefan Beltzig

2007-09-27T19:03:00.000-07:00

Born in Bavaria in 1944, the son of a Berlin film maker and a dealer of Oriental Antiquities, Stefan Beltzig attempted at first to turn his back on theartistic milieu in which he was raised, dropped out of school and joined a circustroop as an acrobat. After leading the life of a vagabond, which enabled him totravel in India and the Near East, he began to study art. From 1963 to 1964 he worked at Shiraz and Isfahan in Iran where he took up ceramics and sculpture. After a formal study in arts and graduating from the Academy of Art in Munich with First Prize in painting in 1973, he began to emphasize realism and trompe l'oeil- effects in his works. Stefan Beltzig seems to be drawn to environments in transition. His work often depicts surroundings which are poised momentarily, yet hint of their transience.

www.stefanbeltzig.com

Jean-Michel Basquiat

2007-09-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), was an artist who came to personify the art scene of the 80s,with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction.

Basquiat's art career is known for his three broad, though overlapping styles. In the earliest period, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that expressed his obsession with mortality. Other frequently depicted imagery such as automobiles, buildings, police, children's sidewalk games, and graffiti came from his experience painting on the city streets. A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multipanel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery.
His works reveal a strong interest in black and Haitian identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend's dress, with his words, a "Little Shit Brown". The final period, from about 1986 to Basquiat's death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new style with different symbols and content from new sources. This period seems to have also had a profound impact on the styles of artists who admired Basquiat's work. Basquiat's lasting creative influence is immediately recognizable in the work of subsequent and self-taught generational artists such as Mark Gonzales, Kelly D. Williams, and Raymond Morris.
In 1982, Basquiat became friends with pop artist Andy Warhol and the two made a number of collaborative works. They also painted together, influencing each others' work. Some speculated that Andy Warhol was merely using Basquiat for some of his techniques and insight. Their relationship continued until Warhol's death in 1987. Warhol's death was very distressing for Basquiat, and it is speculated by Phoebe Hoban, in Basquiat, her 1998 biography on the artist, that Warhol's death was a turning point for Basquiat, and that afterwards his drug addiction and depression began to spiral.
In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, as well as the artist's own conflicted sense of identity.
He was, all at once it seemed, the ultimate party animal, a wannabe streetkid and grafittist hiding his black Brooklyn middle class roots, an advocate and interpreter of the marginal and dispossessed at the court of the mainstream, an angry black aspirant to the all-white art canon, a precocious talent, a creature of cynical marketing and a fraud, a proto-muIticulturalist, an American original.

Helio Oiticica

2007-09-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

Hélio Oiticica (1937 – 1980) was a Brazilian painter, sculptor, plastic artist and performance artist.
Oiticica's early works, in the mid 1950s, were greatly influenced by European modern art movements, principally Concrete art and De Stijl He was a member of Groupo Frente, founded Ivan Serpa, under whom he had studied painting. His early paintings used a pallete of strong, bright primary and secondary colours and geometric shapes influenced by artists such as Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and Kazimir Malevich. Oiticica's painting quickly gave way to a much warmer and more subtle pallete of oranges, yellows, reds and browns which he maintained, with some exceptions, for the rest of his life.
In 1959, he established the short-lived Grupo Neoconcreto with the artists Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Clark and Franz Weissmann. This disbanded in 1961.
Colour became a key subject of Oiticica's work and he experimented with paintings and hanging wooden sculptures with subtle (sometimes barely perceptible) differences in colour within or between the sections. The hanging sculptures gradually grew in scale and later works consisted on many hanging sections forming the overall work.
In the 1960s, he produced a series of small box shaped interactive sculptures called Bólides (fireballs) which had panels and doors which viewers could move and explore. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he made installations called penetrávels (penetrables) which viewers could step into and interact with. The most influential of these was Tropicália (1967) which gave its name to the Tropicalismo movement. He also created works called Parangolés which consisted layers of fabric, plastic and matting intended to be worn like costumes but experienced as mobile sculptures.
Having spent time in London and New York (the latter place where he became a cocaine addict) he died of a stroke, highly-likely linked to his drug consumption (he had had a couple of small strokes previously) in Brazil in 1980.
In 2007, both the Tate Modern gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston staged major exhibitions of Oiticica's

Andy Warhol

2007-09-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

Andrew Warhola (August 6, 1928 — February 22, 1987), better known as Andy Warhol, was an American artist who became a central figure in the movement known as Pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter; an avant-garde filmmaker, a record producer, an author and a public figure known for his presence in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats. A controversial figure during his lifetime (his work was often derided by critics as a hoax or "put-on"), Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books and documentary films since his death in 1987. He is generally acknowledged as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of famous American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans from the Campbell Soup Company and Coca-Cola, as well as paintings of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory", his studio, during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians and underground celebrities. He switched to silkscreen prints, which he produced serially, seeking not only to make art of mass-produced items but to mass produce the art itself. In declaring that he wanted to be "a machine", and in minimizing the role of his own hand in the production of his work, Warhol sparked a revolution in art - his work quickly became very controversial, and popular.
Warhol's work from this period revolves around American Pop (Popular) Culture. He painted dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings - many of the latter were iconic images from headline stories of the decade (e.g. photographs of mushroom clouds, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters). His subjects were instantly recognizable, and often had a mass appeal - this aspect interested him most, and it unifies his paintings from this period.

Robert Rauschenberg

2007-09-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

Robert Milton Ernest Rauschenberg (b. October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas) is an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.
Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. While the Combines are both painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg has also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance.
In 1964 Rauschenberg was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (Mark Tobey and James Whistler had previously won the Painting Prize). Since then he has enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support.
Robert Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris France, before enrolling in 1948 at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There his painting instructor was the renowned Bauhaus figure Josef Albers, whose rigid discipline and sense of method inspired Rauschenberg, as he once said, to do "exactly the reverse" of what Albers taught him.
Composer John Cage, whose music of chance occurrences and found sounds perfectly suited Rauschenberg's personality, was also a member of the Black Mountain faculty. The "white paintings" produced by Rauschenberg at Black Mountain in 1951, while they contain no images at all, are said to be so exceptionally blank and reflective that their surfaces respond and change in sympathy with the ambient conditions in which they are shown, "so you could almost tell how many people are in the room," as Rauschenberg once commented. The White Paintings are said to have directly influenced Cage in the composition of his completely "silent" piece titled 4'33" the following year.
In 1952 Rauschenberg began his series of "Black Paintings" and "Red Paintings," in which large, expressionistically brushed areas of color were combined with collage and found objects attached to the canvas. These so-called "Combine Paintings" ultimately came to include such heretofore un-painterly objects as a stuffed goat and the artist's own bed quilt, breaking down traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture, reportedly prompting one Abstract Expressionist painter to remark, "If this is Modern Art, then I quit!" Rauschenberg's Combines provided inspiration for a generation of artists seeking alternatives to traditional artistic media.
Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called "Neo-Dada," a label he shared with the painter and close friend, Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg's oft-repeated quote that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and life" suggested a questioning of the distinction between art objects and everyday objects, reminiscent of the issues raised by the notorious "Fountain" of Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp. At the same time, Johns' paintings of numerals, flags, and the like, were reprising Duchamp's message of the role of the observer in creating art's meaning.
Alternatively, in 1961, Rauschenberg took a step in what could be considered the opposite direction by championing the role of creator in creating art's meaning. Rauschenberg was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert, where artists were to create and display a portrait of the owner, Iris Clert. Rauschenberg's submission consisted of a telegram sent to the gallery declaring "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so."
By 1962, Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not only found objects but found images as well - photographs transferred to the canvas by means of the silkscreen process. Previously used only in commercial applications, silkscreen allowed Rauschenberg to address the multiple reproducibility of images, and the consequent flattening of experience that that implies. In this respect, his work is contemporaneous with that of Andy Warhol and both Rauschenberg and Johns are frequently cited as important forerunners of American Pop Art.
In 1966, Billy Klüver and Rauschenberg officially launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) a non-profit organization established to promote collaborations between artists and engineers.
In addition to painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg's long career has also included significant contributions to printmaking and Performance Art. He also won a Grammy Award for his album design of the Talking Heads album Speaking in Tongues.

Jackson Pollock

2007-09-14T19:16:00.000-07:00

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an influential American painter and a major force in the abstract expressionist movement. He was married to noted abstract painter Lee Krasner.

Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, the youngest of five sons. His father was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government. He grew up in Arizona and California, studying at Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School. During his early life, he experienced Indian culture while on surveying trips with his father. In 1929, following his brother Charles, he moved to New York City, where they both studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Benton's rural American subject matter shaped Pollock's work only fleetingly, but his rhythmic use of paint and his fierce independence were more lasting influences.

October 1945, Pollock married another important American painter, Lee Krasner, and in November they moved to what is now known as the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio in Springs on Long Island, New York. Peggy Guggenheim loaned them the down payment for the wood-frame house with a nearby barn that Pollock made into a studio. It was there that he perfected the technique of working spontaneously with liquid paint. Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936, at an experimental workshop operated in New York City by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. He later used paint pouring as one of several techniques in canvases of the early 1940s, such as "Male and Female" and "Composition with Pouring I." After his move to Springs, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, and developed what was later called his "drip" technique. This technique has also been described as a "pouring" technique. He used hardened brushes, sticks and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting.
In the process of making paintings in this way he moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush, as well as moving away from use only of the hand and wrist; as he used his whole body to paint. In 1956 Time magazine dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper" as a result of his unique painting style.

“My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”

“I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.”

“When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."

Pollock observed Indian sandpainting demonstrations in the 1940s. Other influences on his dripping technique include the Mexican muralists and also Surrealist automatism. Pollock denied "the accident"; he usually had an idea of how he wanted a particular piece to appear. It was about the movement of his body, over which he had control, mixed with the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the way paint was absorbed into the canvas. The mix of the uncontrollable and the controllable. Flinging, dripping, pouring, spattering, he would energetically move around the canvas, almost as if in a dance, and would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see. Studies by Taylor, Micolich and Jonas have explored the nature of Pollock's technique and have determined that some of these works display the properties of mathematical fractals; and that the works become more fractal-like chronologically through Pollock's career. They even go on to speculate that on some level, Pollock may have been aware of the nature of chaotic motion, and was attempting to form what he perceived as a perfect representation of mathematical chaos - more than ten years before Chaos Theory itself was discovered.

Willem de Kooning

2007-09-14T19:01:00.000-07:00

Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was an abstract expressionist painter, born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

In the post World War II era, De Kooning painted in the style that is referred to as Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and the New York School. Other painters in this category include Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell Philip Guston and Clyfford Still among others.
De Kooning's parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced when he was about five years old, and he was raised by his mother and a stepfather. His early artistic training included eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In the 1920s he worked as an assistant to the art director of a Rotterdam department store.
In 1926, De Kooning entered the United States as a stowaway on a British freighter, the SS Shelly, to Newport News, Virginia. He then went by ship to Boston, and took a train from Boston to Rhode Island, and eventually settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he supported himself as a house painter until moving to a studio in Manhattan in 1927. In 1929 he met the artist and critic John D. Graham, who would become an important stimulus and supporter. He also met the painter Arshile Gorky, who became one of De Kooning's closest friends.
In October 1935, De Kooning began to work on the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project, and he won the Logan Medal of the arts while working together with Colombian Santiago Martínez Delgado. They were employed by this work-relief program until July 1937, when they resigned because of their alien status. This period of about two years provided the artist, who had been supporting himself during the early Depression by commercial jobs, with his first opportunity to devote full time to creative work. He worked on both the easel-painting and mural divisions of the project (the several murals he designed were never executed).
In 1938, probably under the influence of Gorky, De Kooning embarked on a series of male figures, including Two Men Standing, Man, and Seated Figure (Classic Male), while simultaneously embarking on a more purist series of lyrically colored abstractions, such as Pink Landscape and Elegy. As his work progressed, the heightened colors and elegant lines of the abstractions began to creep into the more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into the 1940s. This period includes the representational but somewhat geometricized Woman and Standing Man, along with numerous untitled abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggest the presence of figures. By about 1945 the two tendencies seemed to fuse perfectly in Pink Angels.
In 1938, De Kooning met Elaine Marie Fried, later known as Elaine de Kooning, whom he married in 1943. She also became a significant artist. During the 1940s and thereafter, he became increasingly identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement and was recognized as one of its leaders in the mid-1950s. He had his first one-man show, which consisted of his black-and-white enamel compositions, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948 and taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948 and at the Yale School of Art in 1950/51.

In 1946, too poor to buy artists' pigments, he turned to black and white household enamels to paint a series of large abstractions; of these works, Light in August (c. 1946) and Black Friday (1948) are essentially black with white elements, whereas Zurich (1947) and Mailbox (1947/48) are white with black. Developing out of these works in the period after his first show were complex, agitated abstractions such as Asheville (1948/49), Attic (1949), and Excavation (1950; Art Institute of Chicago), which reintroduced color and seem to sum up with taut decisiveness the problems of free-associative composition he had struggled with for many years.
De Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s and again from 1947 to 1949. The biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions can be interpreted as female symbols. But it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of women exclusively. In the summer of that year he began Woman I (located at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City), which went through innumerable metamorphoses before it was finished in 1952.
During this period he also created other paintings of women. These works were shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 and caused a sensation, chiefly because they were figurative when most of his fellow Abstract Expressionists were painting abstractly and because of their blatant technique and imagery. The appearance of aggressive brushwork and the use of high-key colors combine to reveal a woman all too congruent with some of modern man's most widely held sexual fears. The toothy snarls, overripe, pendulous breasts, vacuous eyes, and blasted extremities imaged the darkest Freudian insights. Some of these paintings also seemed to hearken back to early Mesopotamian / Akkadian works, with the large, almost "all-seeing" eyes.
The Woman' paintings II through VI (1952-53) are all variants on this theme, as are Woman and Bicycle (1953; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and Two Women in the Country (1954). The deliberate vulgarity of these paintings contrasts with the French painter Jean Dubuffet's no less harsh Corps de Dame series of 1950, in which the female, formed with a rich topography of earth colours, relates more directly to universal symbols.
From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, De Kooning entered a new phase of nearly pure abstractions more related to landscape than to the human figure. These paintings, such as "Bolton Landing" (1957) and "Door to the River" (1960) bear broad brushstrokes and calligraphic tendencies similar to works of his contemporary Franz Kline.
In 1963, De Kooning moved permanently to East Hampton, Long Island, and returned to depicting women while also referencing the landscape in such paintings as Woman, Sag harbor and Clam Diggers.

Jane Frank

2007-09-14T18:50:00.000-07:00

Jane Frank (Jane Schenthal Frank) the American artist, was born Jane Babette Schenthal on July 25, 1918, in Baltimore, Maryland, and died in Baltimore on May 31, 1986. She is known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, and textile artist. A pupil of Hans Hofmann, she can in much of her work be categorized stylistically as an abstract expressionist, but one who draws primary inspiration from the natural world, particularly landscape — landscape "as metaphor", she once explained. Her later painting refers more explicitly to aerial landscapes, while her sculpture tends toward minimalism. Chronologically and stylistically, Jane Frank's work in totality straddles both the modern and the contemporary (even postmodern) periods. She referred to her works generally as "inscapes".
Jane Frank's paintings and mixed media works on canvas are in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art ("Amber Ambience", 1964), the Smithsonian American Art Museum ("Frazer's Hog Cay #18", 1968) , the Baltimore Museum of Art ("Winter's End", 1958), the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University ("Red Painting", 1967), the Arkansas Arts Center (AAC: image here) in Little Rock ("Web Of Rock", 1960), and the Evansville Museum ("Quarry III", 1963). Her works are in many other public, academic, corporate, and private collections.

Cy Twombly

2007-09-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia. From 1947 to 1949 he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, and at the Art Students League in New York from 1950 to 1951. There, he met Robert Rauschenberg who encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, where he met John Cage. In 1951 and 1952, he studied there under Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Ben Shahn.
The Kootz Gallery, New York, organized his first solo exhibition in 1951. At this time, his work was influenced by Kline's black-and-white gestural expressionism, as well as Paul Klee's imagery. In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France.
Upon his return in 1953, Twombly served in the army as a cryptologist, and this left a distinct mark on his style. From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, where he became a prominent figure among a group of artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In 1959, Twombly went to Italy and settled permanently in Rome. It was during this period that he began to create his first abstract sculptures, which, although varied in shape and material, were always coated with white paint. In Italy, he began to work on a larger scale and distanced himself from his former expressionist imagery.
Twombly is best known for blurring the line between drawing and painting. Many of his paintings are reminiscent of a school blackboard someone has practiced cursive "e's" on, or hundreds of years of bathroom graffiti on a wall. Twombly had at this point done away with painting a representational subject matter, citing the line or smudge, each mark with its own history, as its own subject. Later, many of his paintings and works on paper move into "romantic symbolism", as titles can be visually interpreted through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stephane Mallarme, as well as countless myths and allegories in his works. Examples of this are his famous work Apollo And The Artist, or a series of eight drawings consisting solely of the word "VIRGIL".

Nathan Oliveira

2007-09-14T18:05:00.000-07:00

Nathan Oliveira (born December 19, 1928) is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California. He is a celebrated and long-standing member of the art community in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a painter who has lived in that area all his life, and is recently retired from a long teaching career at Stanford University. As an artist, he came into national prominence in 1959 when he was included in the New York Museum of Modern Art 's New Images of Man, the exhibition that heralded a new life for figurative art after a period of almost total dominance by Abstract Expressionism.

Anselm Kiefer

2007-09-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

Anselm Kiefer is regarded as one of the most important and influential artists working today. Anselm Kiefer (born March 8, 1945, Donaueschingen) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials like straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the theological concepts of Kabbalah.
Kiefer ranks among the best-known and most successful, but also most disputed German artists after World War II. In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. Themes from Nazi rule are particularly reflected in his work; for instance, the painting "Margarethe" (oil and straw on canvas) was inspired by Paul Celan's well-known poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"). Polemical discussions in the media over the value of his artistic work have taken place for many decades.
His works are characterised by a dull/musty, nearly depressive, destructive style and are often done in large scale formats. In most of his works, the use of photography as an output surface is prevalent and earth and other raw materials of nature are often incorporated. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of humans, legendary figures or places particularly pregnant with history in nearly all of his paintings. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this often gets him linked with a style called "New Symbolism."

John McCaw

2007-09-12T22:15:00.000-07:00

John McCaw, the oldest son of American expressionist Dan McCaw and brother to painter Danny McCaw has been immersed in art from an early age. Sharing a studio with his father and brother has been a source of constant inspiration that has propelled John's art far past the academic. John's artistic background comes from the tactile nature of ceramics and clay, which can clearly be seen in the physicality of his paintings. The emphases on strong design, simple shapes, varied surfaces and sensitive color has enabled John to create well balanced visually stimulating art.Instinct and emotion played a major role in the development of John's art. By reacting spontaneously to his paintings, John translates emotion through a non-objective way, allowing the viewer to interpret freely and to participate in the painting. By drawing their own conclusions and gaining insight into their own emotions, the artist and the viewer are able to connect on a certain level.

"My paintings are a search to find and express my own voice and my own individuality. Only then can I call myself an artist.""My goal as an artist is to take the very basics of art which are color, texture and design and compose them in a way so that it is not only visually stimulating but also thought provoking. When reality or objectivity is taken out of the picture the viewer has to rely on the pure emotion. By challenging the viewers to look within themselves to find why a piece of art moves them in one direction or another, the viewer is able to participate in the painting and hopefully learn something about themselves. Sometimes the answers come easily, other times you have to search to find the answers."

"Paintings are like friends. Some you like better than others, some you accept for what they are, and others you wonder what you ever saw in them in the first place. In any case, life experiences help to create an individuals own unique reality. What I'm doing is giving the individual something that they already possess; it's up to the individual to find the answers within themselves."

Danny McCaw

2007-09-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

Danny McCaw is the youngest son of American expressionist Dan McCaw, and the brother of abstract painter John McCaw. Danny began drawing and painting at an early age. His youthful images soon developed into mature sensitive individual statements. Danny's admiration for traditional art and its disciplines have been the foundation for his own art. His appreciation for the freedom, exploration and discovery of the Expressionists has showed him the importance of individuality and creativity.Besides the constant guidance of his father, Danny has studied art at El Camino College, and the Scottsdale Art School and with one of America's leading figurative painters, Steve Huston. Awarded the Wright Foundation Scholarship in 2002, Southwest Art Magazine featured Danny as one of the newest generation's emerging artist beginning to make their mark. Danny's search for his own individuality is of the utmost importance. His art is full of honesty, and creativity is constantly enriched by his inquisitive nature, his desire to find his own voice and his effort to create lasting art.

"Every artist is on their own individual journey. Mine is that of exploration and self-discovery. Crossing the lines of fear and frustration, I challenge, not only myself, but also my art. I never want to be confined or limited by any one specific way of approaching or thinking about art. My goal is to be able to take the things that move me and express them in my own voice, to give those things my emotion, my passion, my individuality"

"An artist must always strive to be part of his work. When this happens the painting becomes art. If I touch the viewer's emotions and heart, they then can enter the painting. Like the poet that moves us with words, a painting has the same power and magic."

Dan McCaw

2007-09-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

Dan McCaw was raised in the Irish mining city of Butte, Montana. This wild, colorful city with its romantic past was a great catalyst for stirring the artistic fires of this young artist. He was drawn to art at an early age, and further encouraged by a persuasive mother who seemed to know that Dan's abilities were more than just the passing interest of youth. However, art classes were non-existent in his community, so his development was left to his own imagination and creativity.Eventually, Dan was accepted into and attended the San Francisco Academy of Art, where he studied for two years. But by then he was out of money and had a new baby on the way, so he moved his family to Los Angeles where he worked as an illustrator for a design studio. This gave his the opportunity to attend the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. After nine semesters, Dan was asked to become an instructor, and he went on to teach there part-time for 17 years.In addition to teaching, Dan continued doing illustration for five years, but he finally left the illustration field out of frustration. What he really wanted was to pursue his first love, a career in fine art. Slowly at first but then more steadily, the demand for his work grew until it outweighed his prolific ability to produce paintings. Numerous articles have been written about hint, recognizing his unusual gift for art.Today, Dan's work is found in some of the finest private and corporate collections in the world. Countless one-man shows have made Dan McCaw one of the most sought-after artists in America today.

Manuel Neri

2007-09-12T21:05:00.000-07:00

Manuel Neri was born in 1930 in Sanger, California. Neri attended San Francisco City College from 1949-50 with the idea of becoming an electrical engineer. A single class in ceramics turned him to art and a move to California College of Arts and Crafts and subsequent studies at California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Studies with such artists as Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn led him to abstract expressionism, but a radical turnabout occurred in the 1950s. “I would say that I did a U-turn in my art in 1955 when I saw my first child being born,” he says. “It was a fantastic moment. I realized then that the female body has the magic. The male may have the power, but the female has the magic.”Neri is known primarily for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble, as well as for his association with the Bay Area Figurative movement during the 1950s and 1960s. Since 1972, Neri has worked with the same model, Mary Julia, creating drawings and plaster figures that merge contemporary sculptural concerns with classical forms. The anatomical skill of these works recalls the sculptures and drawings of Rodin, Giacometti and Degas. The fragile nature of his plaster sculptures led him to cast some of the plasters in bronze, which became a vehicle for color to emphasize surfaces and form.Manuel Neri has received numerous awards including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, San Francisco Arts Commission Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sculpture, Honorary Doctorate for Outstanding Achievement in Sculpture by the San Francisco Art Institute, Awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the California College of Arts and Crafts, and an Honorary Doctorate by the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C.Manuel Neri’s work has been acquired for many important collections including: Eli Broad Family Collection, Los Angeles; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Crosby Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Denver Art Museum; Des Moines Art Center; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Gap Collection, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Honolulu Academy of the Arts; Janss Collection, Sun Valley, Idaho; Levi Strauss Associates, Inc., San Francisco; Memphis Brooks Art Museum, Tennessee; Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California; The Oakland Museum, California; Palm Springs Desert Museum, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Diego Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; Virlane Foundation, New Orleans; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.In 1990 Neri retired from the University of California, Davis, where he had taught since 1965. Neri lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and also has a studio in Carrara, Italy, where he spends several months each year creating sculptures in marble.

Joe Goodwin

2007-09-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

Artist Statement:

While working on my MFA at the University of Illinois, I became interested in the work and ideas of C.G. Jung, especially his concept of the collective unconscious and his interest in dreams. Dreams defy physics and amplify experience with their ambiguous spaces, symbolic meanings, and sensations that seem to speak from and to a sixth sense. In this way, painting and dreaming have much in common, both in process and result.
Painting allows my subconscious perceptions to register graphically, similar to the way they do in dreams. I have come to see painting as a developing solution to the unconscious

www.jgoodwinstudio.com

Michel Leah

2007-09-12T09:47:00.000-07:00

Artist Statement:

"I'm a living artist making a six figure income doing what I was born to do.. create. I'm blessed! If I have to promote myself so I can do what I love full-time, as opposed to joining the rat race.. working a job that sucks the life out of me and creating whenever I can 'find time'.. well, then, I find absolutely no shame in that. I'm not opposed to non-vanity art gallery representation. However, I find it utterly foolish for an artist to submit to 'starving artist' status for fear that their self-promotion, especially in regards to eBay, is ruining some future chance they may have of eminent gallery representation."

Artist Biography:

Michel Leah, a.k.a. The Raw Artist®, is a self-taught, outsider artist from the midwest. While Michel has been creating art in various forms throughout her life it was not until 2003, after having reversed several serious health conditions, that she started creating her art on a full-time basis.
Michel's brush name, The Raw Artist®, holds two meanings. Her trademarked nickname pertains, in most part, to her raw food lifestyle; the lifestyle that she attributes to saving her life. But her alias, The Raw Artist®, has a second meaning as well. It also refers to the very nature of Michel's art. Michel has had no formal art training. Michel is a self taught artist that marches solely to the beat of her own drum.

www.therawartist.com

Jessica Kirkpatrick

2007-09-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

Artist’s Statement:

"As an artist I intend to empathize with people and the world through the visual mode. I use art as a reflective tool to understanding my self and the environment I inhabit. I feel that style and meaning is inextricable to form and composition; in that way, I focus on an object rather than a subject—my subjective view, immersed in care for the things and people I intersect--is a given as I strive to align my mind with the universal. I focus on structure more than appearance, under the belief that visual pleasure arises out of a methodical searching. Painting is a two directional relationship, where a piece tells me as many secrets as I tell it. A canvas confronts me with my fears, false impressions, and resistance to broadening my sensibilities. I take an awkward stroke personally; it is my awkward mood. An ugly color is my ugly emotion. An image is born of my struggling ego, and if I struck any note of truth, it exists independent of me upon completion. I feel that art worthy of attention has a strong theoretical basis. However, that bases can be purely aesthetical rather than political or social. I hope to incorporate a stronger conceptual basis to my figurative work. I am fascinated by the meaning of beauty, and seek to exemplify it in my work—not by attaining it as a goal, but by using it’s principle of order and grace within my process—for me beauty is not a triumph, it is an aura exuded beyond of the artists intention. The artist’s job is to cognate and fuse dualities into a unified image. For me, this type of work externalizes my disunity, thereby extricating neurosis and elevating my awareness."

www.kirkpatrickpaintings.com

Mark Threadgold

2007-09-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

BORN: 1977 LIVES: MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS
1999 GRADUATE DIPLOMA OF EDUCATION, THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE1996-1998 BACHELOR OF ARTS (VISUAL ARTS), DEAKIN UNIVERSITY
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2003 INTRUDE GALLERY, FITZROY, VICTORIA 2002 St LAWRENCES, NORWICH, ENGLAND2001 PREVIEW GALLERY, COLLINGWOOD, VICTORIA

www.threadgoldart.com

Maya Kulenovic

2007-09-12T09:24:00.000-07:00

Maya Kulenovic is a Canadian painter, born in 1975 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has exhibited in twelve solo exhibitions and over thirty group shows in Toronto, Montreal, London (England) and Istanbul (Turkey). Her paintings can be seen in numerous collections in North America, England and Turkey.
She studied art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, England (MFA, 1998), Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto (AOCAD Honours, 1997) and Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul (1995). She was also a resident of London Goodenough College in London, England (1997/98).

www.mayakul.com

Harding Meyer

2007-09-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

Outstading figurative/portrait contemporary artist

Biography
1964 Born in Porto Alegre, Brazil
1993 Meisterschüler
1987 - 1998 Studies at the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe / Prof. Max Kaminski and Prof Helmut Dorner
1999 Helmut-Stober-Prize

www.hardingmeyer.de

Chris Wake

2007-09-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

Chris Wake was born in Adelaide in 1960, and has been painting since 1976. Her work is represented in private and corporate collections around Australia and overseas.

"As an artist, I am compelled to go beyond a purely visual connection between the artist and viewer, to a place where my work is a catalyst of discussion, challenge, or humor. My aim is to trigger interaction between the viewer and painting and extrude an interpretation unique to that individual." Chris Wake
www.artchriswake.com

Kelly Mudge

2007-09-12T07:37:00.000-07:00

The current project "Engage" explores each particular subject's personality and how those attributes are expressed on both a outward physical and psychological level. Through each individual work, the viewer can become intimately aquainted with the subject not only representationally, but on an emotional, intellectual, and moral level.Anatomical incorrectness with impossible scenery together combine to create a mythological symbolism individual to each subject. Through the use of mixed media, along with dense imagery and texture, a subtle tension is created on each surface and the viewer is invited to interpret what is clearly stated, and what remains to be said.

www.mudgefactory.com

Mirek Antoniewicz

2007-09-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

Born 1954, Wroclaw, Poland. Lives and works in Wroclaw.

Members of The Association of Polish Artist and Designers.

1980 - 1983 University Adam Mickiewicz, Poznan

1980 - 1985 University of Wroclaw

1994 - 1995 Graphic Practice on Academy of Fine Arts Wroclaw

Artist Statement:

My mind has always perceived painting as a process in which I am lucky to participate.
It is wonderful to realise that one represents a tiny moment in this animation,
which has continued on the earth for many thousands of years.
The pigment, paste and the surface remain equally important as they were thousands of years ago.
Nothing much has changed in this respect at all. I find the colours of the earth very close: ochres, siennas, umbers, and sepias.
They beautifully render the mood of flowing time.
Therefore, I have used these colours to paint picture "You & Me"

http://www.galeriam.com

Carrie Ann Baade

2007-09-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

Carrie Anne Baade imaginative portraits and narratives are informed by religion and mythology. Gods, rulers, demons, and monsters play out the complexity of the human condition in her works that incorporate forgotten paintings to quote and interpret. She has traveled around the globe in search of inspiration; her works manifest history painting into an entirely original vision, rich with the confluence of cultures and time periods.

Baade has just been nominated for a United States Artist Fellowship for 2007 which is one prestigious awards offered. Her work is featured in Metamorphosis , a book released in the spring of 2007 featuring the top, contemporary Surrealists. In 2005, she received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship granted through the Delaware Division of the Arts. She received a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters in Painting from the University of Delaware.

www.carrieannbaade.com

Mie Olise

2007-09-12T06:27:00.000-07:00

Work with abandoned places and desolate spaces, Mie Olise work is primarily painting, as well as building models of wood and cardboard and sometimes sowing. Also trained as an architect she is interested in constructions, perspectives, scales. Often spaces left by human beeings.

Artist Statement:

"I find the uncannyness of discovering a place just left by somebody else both fascinating and scary, what happened here? Did I leave it myself? who left it ? Why? I use architectural constructions, perspectives and putting together different scales to tell stories that are psychological and about the desolate and memory."

www.olise.dk

Kevin A. Rausch

2007-09-12T06:10:00.000-07:00

Painting as View of the World Only at a first glance do the works of Kevin A. Rausch (born in Carinthia, Austria) attest to a brittle, bleak apocalyptic mood; to desolatedness, grey battlegrounds, catastrophes, isolation, and the appendant weltschmerz. Once one takes a closer look, one can discover ironical associations within the collaged landscape with its strange small figures, set pieces, and animals, crossing the grey-and-white ground shades in a cheerful, colourful, and bold way. Here, weltschmerz is not spared of irony; gloomy predictions don’t go without a wink. Behind this charmingly shy coquetry, a serious, straightforward access to painting and drawing, in the sense of an artistic method, consequently developed over the years, is concealed.

Barbara Buam, Artforum Strabag Vienna

www.kevinarausch.com

Sam Dolman

2007-09-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

Sam Dolman was born in Scunthorpe North Lincolnshire, where he lived until he was 18. He then moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to study Accountancy, where he spent the next four years. After graduating it soon became apparent that figures were not the life for him. Following a year in Leeds and a period of travelling through Europe he settled in Spain where he began his artistic journey. He began to teach himself the techniques that are now synonymous with his unique style. Realising his true calling in life - he returned to England to settle in Sheffield with new found motivation.
Art was always an interest in his life from an early age, having come from a creative family. His father Eric was a professional Opera singer and mother Lynn has painted most of her life. Both have now moved to the southern mountain ranges of Spain. Needless to say this is always a welcome place for Sam to relax, capture his thoughts and gain inspiration.

http://www.samdolman.co.uk

Bill Gingles

2007-09-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

American Abstract Artist.

"Being an artist means making art, not turning out a product. Still, I've come to realize that devoting the necessary time and energy to the business side of art is a way of respecting what I do in the studio."

Bill Gingles