Another artist whom I encountered is Jesse Mockrin, a Los Angeles based figurative artist. Her art is portraiture/figurative work that seems air brushed to have somewhat rubbery features reminiscent of a Botero painting. Mockrin's palette is generally cool or neutral. But I connected to her work in that she also uses strategic cropping to make the figure appear disjointed!! It makes her work look like a traditional portrait that was cut over and over and rearranged separately. My favorite is an image of ghostly pale hands entwined with rope, creating ambiguity not to what is pictured, but why. Mockrin, like me, also has always been drawn to figurative work (pun intended), explaining that, "In high school, when my painting class took a field trip to do plein air landscape painting, I painted a picture of my legs instead. I feel like I have always been able to see the figure better than anything else and gravitated towards painting it." I deeply admire her cropping and hope to use that effectively in my work as well.
One of the artists whom I found recently I found through Coach Hall's suggestion: Graham Smith, a San Diego-based illustrator and artist. His art is really fascinating: it looks like amplified and highly detailed comic book illustration. He doesn't generate artwork on his computer, but instead uses pen, pencil, and markers. This is impressive, because making many illustrations takes a long amount of time that would be more easily done using software on a computer. I also find his use of line quality and color very compelling. Personally, the use of different color or blocks of color to correspond with different lines to create value is something I would like to emulate. Some of his work is actually really similar to how I draw naturally (when I am not trying to be photorealistic). However, his seems intentional, and mine is just poor proportioning and weird, personal standards of beauty.
Another artist whom I encountered is Jesse Mockrin, a Los Angeles based figurative artist. Her art is portraiture/figurative work that seems air brushed to have somewhat rubbery features reminiscent of a Botero painting. Mockrin's palette is generally cool or neutral. But I connected to her work in that she also uses strategic cropping to make the figure appear disjointed!! It makes her work look like a traditional portrait that was cut over and over and rearranged separately. My favorite is an image of ghostly pale hands entwined with rope, creating ambiguity not to what is pictured, but why. Mockrin, like me, also has always been drawn to figurative work (pun intended), explaining that, "In high school, when my painting class took a field trip to do plein air landscape painting, I painted a picture of my legs instead. I feel like I have always been able to see the figure better than anything else and gravitated towards painting it." I deeply admire her cropping and hope to use that effectively in my work as well.
0 Comments
Over winter break, my family took our annual visit to New York City. Normally we try to avoid "touristy stuff," after the first trips to 30 Rock and the Empire State Building in 2008. This trip, however, my mom insisted that we walk The High Line, so on a frigid, late-December morning, we trekked the historic freight rail-line. Looking down from the elevated path, I glimpsed a sign: "Rothko - Dark Palette." At that point, I grabbed my family and forced four, tightly bundled and hungry people to go to the Pace Gallery to look at the Rothko exhibit. Rothko is a very important figure to my artistic development. He made me stop saying things like, "Oh, anyone could do that." Because not everyone can do that. It is very difficult, and he created pieces of various sizes and media. I have also always been interested in who he was, personally, as someone who connects to being an angsty, fiercely egocentric American painter of Russian-Jewish descent. Generally I prefer his warmer paintings, especially the red and orange ones which he insisted weren't happy because they were the colors of an inferno. But this exhibit was remarkable: firstly, I was not actually permitted to take pictures of many of them, because they were so deeply black that any photography could damage the work. There were only about a dozen paintings, but they entirely filled the four rooms of the gallery; most of them were large in scale, and a few were as big as the walls upon which they were displayed. The color scheme for all the pieces was, naturally, dark, but the darkness ranged from mauve to plum to deep navy to very, very deep black. From a distance, they looked like rectangles painted within other rectangles: up close, the paint was cracked, there were clear splotches of too much turpentine, and there were lines around the edges that resembled stretch marks. One takeaway I have, in regards to my own art, is to pay attention to imperfections in details: too much blending removes some of the most compelling aspects of a work. I also felt personally successful for making my brother go to his first art gallery ever, and for getting my father to admit that some modern art was interesting. One of the artists that I am discussing this marking period for the Awareness section is Kehinde Wiley, an acclaimed contemporary New York artist; although Wiley is by no means obscure, his art is relatively new to me, as I only discovered him recently through the VMFA exhibit this summer. I was utterly amazed: the juxtaposition of photorealistic figurative artwork and portraiture combined with the highly textured and vivid backgrounds of his images show immense skill and display his message on drawing attention to the beauty and uniqueness of the individual, especially people of color who are often underrepresented in classical art; in a way, he is recreating the traditions and practices of the Old Masters. I am in awe of his artwork and desire to emulate not only his technical skill, but his evident passion and drive for creativity and content. Another artist that I am featuring is Eric Daigh, an artist of whom I was unaware until recent investigations. Eric Daigh, an artist known for his portraits, uses the techniques of photorealist artists: he zooms in on the pixels of each image which he recreates, and from these pixels he creates portraits out of - wait for it - PUSH PINS. From a distance, these works look like blurry, low-definition photographs, and one can only recognize the medium up close. This type of portraiture astonishes me; while I deeply admire photorealistic artists, the level of detail (and the amount of gridding) they utilize in the creation of their artwork would make me highly impatient. This marking period, we visited the VCU Business Center to see a new work of art by their new resident artist, Noah Scalin. Noah Scalin is probably best known for his "Skull A Day" artwork. In the VCU Business Center, he constructed a temporary work that depicts the face of Maggie Walker, a preeminent African American, female banker from the Richmond area. This work, which uses perspective extremely inventively, is constructed out of clothes, which will be donated upon the deconstruction of the artwork. While I find the techniques used for the perspective of the piece fascinating, and think the statement made (that the work can only be seen correctly through a camera lens in a certain location), I actually did not like the piece itself. I thought that it was a bit of a cheap ploy for a work that, although it shows technical skill, does not have much to say and is based on an image, two complaints I also have with my own work. This marking period, my Art V class was assigned two readings, one on the 1996 (?) Brooklyn Museum Sensation censorship controversy, the other on criticism and censorship of artwork in the Soviet Union as well as contemporary Russia. In the former, the controversy surrounded British artist Chris Ofili’s work, titled The Holy Virgin Mary, which depicted an African Madonna with elephant dung and surrounded by genitalia. While the work is, in my opinion, by no means visually or appealing, it is not nearly as horrific as it sounds when described. Personally, I am not a fan from a compositional standpoint, but overall I side with then senatorial candidate Hillary Clinton: while the work is not, well, good, “it is not appropriate to penalize and punish an institution such as the Brooklyn museum that has served this community.” The latter reading detailed the oppression of artists and protest art as well as corruption in the Russian art world / government. In my mind, it is indubitable that Mayor Giuliani censored, or attempted to censor, the British Museum / the Sensation exhibit. The mindset of Mayor Giuliani and his counsel, apparently, was that since the artwork offended his individual religious views, no one should be allowed to view it. His justification that the artwork needed to be accessible and appropriate for young children, while not inaccurate, was flimsy and barely disguised his personal vendetta against the work, which he harbored before even seeing it. My perspective is that if you find artwork unattractive or offensive, do not look at it. The Brooklyn Museum’s policy of suggesting age guidelines for the artwork seemed like a reasonable compromise for both the “moralistic” and free speech perspectives of artwork. Additionally, it was shown that Mayor Giuliani’s diatribe against the work/museum backfired, as all the press only served to bring in more viewers to the museum. What surprised me about the second reading, about censorship in the modern Russian art world, was actually that for a period in the 80s and 90s art was treated with a much greater degree of lenience. It is stereotypical of me, but I had always assumed that the Russian authoritarian government would carefully dictate the image presented of their nation and by their nation’s artist. Again, while the censorship is unsurprising, as an advocate for both artwork and free speech, it pains me to hear of the imprisonment of artists for their critical artwork. Even the performance art piece that consisted of group sex, which I do not understand nor would I be interested in seeing, should be permitted in the appropriate setting. What is somewhat shocking is that, although in the United States artists can battle against censorship, the same principles occur in the US and Russia. My artwork has been figurative since I first transitioned from finger-painting to drawing. I have always depicted women. For years, I thought that was because women, in magazines, in movies, in the media, epitomized beauty. I subscribed to the societal constructs that define what is aesthetically appealing: facial symmetry, hourglass figures, skin devoid of blemishes. This view of body image hurt me. Scrolling through Instagram, flipping through Vogue, I saw the airbrushing and Photoshop, the perfectly packaged images that fit on one page, little pixels in a box.
Studies show that over half the women using social media edit their photos before posting them. There are thousands of “beauty” apps to download, apps that add makeup, enlarge eyes, thin loses, lighten skin, smooth stretch marks, slim waistlines. There has recently been a trend, in advertisements especially, specifically movie posters and album art, in which women’s bodies are shown but their faces are not pictured. It is literal objectification. The woman is not real, not recognizable, expressionless. Women’s bodies are idealized and fetishized. My artwork both parodies and perpetuates this trend. I crop images of women, focusing on glorified body parts, stomachs, clavicles, lips, eyes, breasts, jutting hips. I use media that can be smoothed and polished, oil paint, vine charcoal, chalk pastels, water colors, so that flesh and imperfections can be blended away. I frame the limbs in squares and rectangles. I still subscribe to this idea of body image, even though I know it does not exist, that it is false. I am trying to question through my artwork what is beautiful, what is human, what is feasible. |
CategoriesArchives
June 2017
|