Mashup of popular culture is probably the most accurate description of Joram Roukes’s artwork that takes elements from graffiti, cartoons, sports, movies and just about everything else put in front of us to distract us from the underlying decay of our society. There is also a bit of Francis Bacon peaking out from the seams if you look closely and that’s just enough to add an edge that can push things a just dark enough to make it very interesting.
Chris Harmon was remembering all the way back to what seemed like forever ago last year when a massive oil spill drenched the sea with an absolutely unforgivable amount of sludge. How quickly we forget. After uncovering a bit of data fueled by that memory (pun intended) Harmon decided to create this animation to help detail just how addicted to oil we really are.
Painter Kwon Kyung Yup first starts with a photograph and then works from a draft before finally finishing her oil paintings. The strength of her realistic portraits comes from the addition of symbolic elements communicating an experienced trauma and vulnerability in her subjects.
Painter Carly Waito hit the trend nail on the head with her recent oil on masonite series depicting different kinds of crystals. They have been popular in hip art subculture, most likely because their ties to psychedelic art and her timing in achieving this series could not have been better. They are also beautifully rendered with a trompe l’oeil blur effect that helps add a layer of tangible reality to the works. Although I admit to loving the paintings of crystals, the above painting of Bornite stood out to me for it’s complicated use of color. There is an amazing attention to detail in that painting that I appreciate. She explains some of the process behind her renderings at her blog which you can read here.
Painter Luke Rudolf has discovered a magic formula utilizing the interplay between simple geometry, organic paint strokes and use of color to devise images that you just can’t take your eyes off of. It’s almost as if you expect something to materialize from beneath his work.
Kevin E. Taylor received a B.F.A. from The Savannah College of Art and Design in 1995. He currently resides in San Francisco.
Animals attack. Or mate?
Jim Gaylord is an oil painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His paintings use light, motion and color in the most unusual way by recalling something familiar but putting that familiarity into a spinning, blurring and reflecting tornado.
I stumbled upon the collaborative paintings of painters Daryoush Asgar and Elisabeth Gabriel today and was really kind of just blown away by the radical use of color, composition and staging of subjects. Each painting is like a violent but beautiful play.
Here is a little background on two incredibly talented artists:
“Asgar / Gabriel’s works depict what they call “the historization of the moment” with references to baroque and 19th century paintings. They see their protagonists as portraits of a generation following the imperative “you can be anything you want”, a generation of ideological homelessness unabashedly pursuing a new myth moving between ecstasy and nightmare.
Painting itself is the last step in their long creative process. Asgar / Gabriel begin with a photographic sketch. Each sketch consists of hundreds of compiled photographs borrowed from mass media, their private photo album and then recomposed and modified on the computer. Like a contemporary Frankenstein, each of the subjects and compositions are reconstituted time capsules and commentaries on modernity’s obsession with notions of the “ideal” calling awareness to the global patronage of this obsessively unattainable modality set forth and so pervasive in popular culture.
Daryoush Asgar was born in Tehran 1975. In 1985, during the Iran-Iraq war, his family immigrated to Austria. 1996-2000 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He exhibited in Austria, Germany, Italy and Canada and won the Austrian Strabag Art Award in 2002.
Elisabeth Gabriel was born in Vienna 1975. 1988-90 she studied piano at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts. 1994-2000 she studied philosophy and literature at the University of Vienna. She did her thesis on the Aesthetic Theory of Theodora W. Adorno. After graduation she worked at the theatre in Vienna, Berlin and Bern (Switzerland).
Asgar / Gabriel work and live in a studio in the heart of Vienna. They began their relationship musically in the 1990s playing in a garage rock-band. In 2002, they moved to Berlin where they started their painting collaborations and stayed for 3 years. Their first collaborative painting Entering Barbarians was exhibited in Vienna, 2005.”
That’s it damn it. This is getting personal. We’ve gotta do something about dependency on foreign oil. This country was born to rock. No more of this.
