Liat Yossifor - she dances with paint

 

Yossifor is a young LA based painter working in abstraction with the difficult task of creating white paintings. She work for three days on each painting -- that is the time it takes for oil paint to begin to dry.  Her painting process seems a bit like dancing as she pushes and pulls paint into curving swirls of thick impasto.  After three days Yossifor determines if the painting is done or needs to be scraped off the canvas completely and the process begun anew.  Of course the paintings appear to be white on white, but a closer look reveals flecks of blue green, yellow and more. 

Glenn Brown's interpretation of "nature morte"

Glenn Brown's paintings are weird, but ever so engaging. Weird perhaps because he makes art historical connections, but then twists the content in a way that catches the viewers attention.  Still life (or in French "dead nature" ) painting has a long tradition in the history of art...but never like the works in Brown's 2014 exhibition where flowers at literally dying from heat exhaustion... This still life is 79 x 127 inches! And Brown's method of painting is painstaking and detailed.

Trends in Contemporary Painting

quoted from Painting Today, text Tony Godfrey:

In an age when organized religion is no longer central, painting is an important medium for thinking about our yearning for spiritual experience, our desire to some deeper meaning. After all, this is the medium where light often has sacred associations.

Marlene Dumas - Paintings about Suffering

Marlene Dumas, The Wall, 2009. Oil on linen, 70 7/8 x 118 1/8 x 1 inches

Dumas has been painting with such barebones elegance since the 1970s. In her series Against the Wall she conflates the Wailing Wall and the Security Wall between Israeli and Palestine territories and treats both as a place of suffering. 

Nalini Malani - painting off the canvas onto the walls

Malani’s installation “In Search of Vanished Blood” 2012, is so much more than a painting. She incorporates a six-channel video with the shadow dances of five rotating reverse painted Mylar cylinders. Add sound and she creates an immersive experience for the viewer.  Her themes are often universal -- drawing from classical characters, mythology, and religious narratives.

Cecily Brown - Figurative Painter melts into Abstraction

Cecily Brown, courtesy of Gagosian, 2013

 

Cecily Brown is influenced by other artists including old master painters like Goya and modern painters like deKooning and Mitchell. Her art historical references add a gravitas to her compositions -- which are usually quite large.  

Alison Watt - Cool, Clean, White

 

"Still is a monumental painting by Alison Watt, at once arresting and absorbing, which hangs in the Memorial Chapel of Old Saint Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church where it was installed for the 2004 Edinburgh Art Festival." quoted from the Edinburgh Art Festival website, 2013

 

The church has long been a patron of the arts, but in contemporary we so rarely see art as a form of worship. Watt's white fabric could be a shroud, a clerical vestment, a clean bed sheet for rest...the setting in a chapel urges us the viewers to meditate on this quiet moment --  as even her title "still" suggests ...

April Gornik - Transcendence in Nature

April Gornik

 

Storm, Rain, Light, 2013, Oil on linen, 68" x 72"  & Storm and Plains, 2012, Oil on linen, 74" x 103"

Gornik paints large landscapes with a focus on weather conditions and dramatic light.  Like the 19th century Hudson River painters, her landscapes communicate a powerful sense of the sublime.
The artist sketches on her laptop from photographs, enhancing the landscapes until she finds that split second of transcendence.

Ingrid Calame - Uncovering the Beauty of Hidden Places (in plain sight)

 

Calame reveals what is right before us, in plain sight...the marks and remnants of an activity long passed. This might be tire skid marks at a motor speedway or repaired cracks on an old asphalt road or the street art of taggers on the cement banks of the LA River. She and her team painstakingly trace these left overs resulting in a strange urban calligraphy.  Her finished paintings can be delicate drawing-like works or bold, expressive brush strokes in vibrant colors.

CHRISTIANE BAUMGARTNER - From Digital back to Analog

 

Baumgartner is a video artist who shoots images from the screen and then translates them into woodcuts, one of the oldest printmaking techniques in the graphic world.  The images are large -- very large.  She relates her prints to analog systems where information is communicated through a series of lines and she is opening a dialogue between digital images on her video art and an old, master hand made technique of carving lines to communicate an image.

David Goldes - Science meets Art

David Goldes
Charged Threads Tied at Both Ends 
Gelatin Silver Print 
2011


Interesting  things happen when an artist is also a scientist--such is the case for Goldes. He became fascinated by the drawings made by Davy and Faraday as they experimented with electricity and Goldes recreated and then photographs these same experiments. The results are strange linear compositions that appeal as much to the art historian as to the scientist.

 

Todd Hido -- The Romance of a Home Town

Here is an exhibition announcement from spring 2014 of a series titled Silver Meadows -- images from the photographers [Todd Hido's] home town in Ohio.  Like all home towns, it likely was not as idyllic as the photographs reveal it to be.  But, our sentimental memories from childhood often gloss over the stark and hard edges of truth and soften with time.  So too Hido's haunting photographs of a small town in America's heartland. 

Richard Renaldi -- Total Strangers

Renaldi pairs strangers and asks them to pose as though they were close friends. His results are often jarring, funny, or provocative -- the viewers stops, and wonders: What's the story here?

Our class blog will look at what is trending in the contemporary art world. First we will be looking at photography and printmaking.

Martha Ensign Johnson's printmaking is known for its innovative formats.  She might print on both sides of a paper or print in unusual supports like fabric.  Layering and transparency are important for Johnson; she will hang prints against a window to form a series of images that flowing one into the other. In a recent series she traced the latitude of her home town around the world finding images from the natural world -- underscoring the fragility of out planet.  Overall, what characterizes Johnson's work is beauty!  

Chris Rupp is best known for his sculptures, but he also has been working on a series of prints where he uses an old fashioned printmaking technique with a contemporary twist -- graphite rubbings. Fascinated by his toddler's acquisition of language, Rupp selects short saying; cuts the words out in mat board; glues the 4-ply letters to concrete, then makes heavy rubbings with graphite.  The rich, layered results have stumped artists and collectors --asking "how do you do that?"

The print illustrated here is inspired by something his daughter says when asked something like:  How is that banana?  BEST OF MY LIFE!  she says.

Wall Space in Santa Barbara, owned and managed by Krista Dix, consistently has excellent photography exhibitions. I especially liked her exhibition in 2014 of works by Maxine Helfman.  The photographer asked young boys to pick from a rack of girls dresses; she then photographs each boy with amazing results!

photo LA

photo LA is January 15-17, featuring an installation of Catherine Opie works. Her soft focus landscapes are very meditative. 

Also, featured at photo La is a video installation with the following works screened:

• Alexis Hudgins & Ivan Iannoli: On-going Interviews and Footage with Peter Tork, 2014
• Cody Trepte: It's Endless Undoing, 2012
• Filip Gilissen: It's All Downhill From Here On, 2011
• Sam Erenberg: Elysian Park I, 1967 / Time, 1968
• Shagha Ariannia: IM OK IF U R OK, 2012
• Simion Cernica: Uncertain Trip, 2008 (Edited 2010)

JL

Photographer William Castellana

Photographer William Castellana is perhaps best known for his still life photography.

Currently at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art Castellana is exhibiting about 30 works from his street photography series featuring neighborhoods in South Williamsburg, a borough of Brooklyn.