Posts Tagged ‘ Paintings ’
The paintings of Slovakian artist Katarina Janeckova are soused in sex. Three lovers romp around in bed; a brunette poses for naked photos in a swimming pool; a woman spanks her partner with a hairbrush. But there is one thing lacking from her provocative tableaus—men. Instead, the women couple up with brown or black bears, rendered in woozy watercolor or acrylic brushstrokes. “For me, the bear is a perfect substitute for a man,” Janeckova explains. “I paint those bears as simple, strange dark figures, because it allows you to fantasize.” It also allows the women to become the central figures in her works, and for Janeckova to present them as strong and sexually empowered. “It’s a stereotype that pretty women are usually submissive, so I like to play around that,” Katarina says. “Sometimes it’s less visible and more in my head, sometimes it’s obvious or exaggerated.” It’s most apparent in some of her recent works, which portray the massive muscles of female bodybuilders. Katarina honors their forms by depicting them on the side of a Grecian urn, or even turning a container of Muscle Milk into a flower vase. “My ideal of female beauty changed,” Katarina discusses in the following interview, along with sex, symbols and her current exhibition, How to Make a Bear Fall in Love, which is currently on view at Studio d’Arte Raffaelli in Trento, Italy.
Russia may be on America’s radar for some ugly reasons, but it’s on ours for some beautiful ones. Photographer Tali Rutman has an incredible collection of photos, featuring a model painted with replicas of amazing abstract paintings.
I’ve loved the “On To The Next One” video from Jay-Z since the day it came out, but the video being in black and white left a little bit lacking. For some reason the work of Chad Wys encompasses the regal elegance of that video with color, and so much more. The visual creator Chad Wys out of Peoria, IL, is one of the most ocularly stunning creators of our time. Collection after collection he continues to prove his prowess, and his ability for taking classic painting and adding incredible tweaks that make those works his own. Check the method.
Seoul, Korea is the home to many a talented artist, but Kim Byungkwan rolls in a lane of his own. His collection of black and white, stylized, and almost eerie works are titled “Memories 1940’s”. The faceless, fluid, and frightening acrylic paintings are all reminiscent of the time period, and are just a small portion of Byungkwan’s full collection of works. To see more of Kim’s work, just click here.
The amount of talent one can come across these days is endless. Especially in the case of artist Keng Lye, whose main painting medium is…resin & acrylic. As a result, the paintings look stunningly realistic, you’d have to blink twice to make sure.
Rory Kurtz has been illustrating since he was old enough to hold a crayon. Self-taught and focusing in pencil, ink, and digital paint, Rory has carved out his niche as a unique voice in the illustration community. Working with digital media allows his paintings a greater amount of versatility, and faster production time, which makes all the difference when meeting deadlines. His influences are spread out across the respective wolds of literature, fashion, art, film, & music. His work isn’t necessarily easy to define, as he tends to shift from one style to the next and back again as fits the assignment, but the individual pieces seem unified by a shared sense of fantasy in a modern reality.
Paintings, sculptures, readymades, works on paper, and digital works by Chad Wys.
The Fondation Cartier Pour L’Art Contemporain in Paris is currently showing an exhibition devoted to the work of Moebius, as well as his other pseudonym Gir and real identity Jean Giraud. Devoted to his comics work, the display is… well. Rather impressive. It includes his notepads, paintings, unpublished pieces and an animated film. The theme of the exhibition is metamorphosis.
Variations of glittered deformations form the basis for a grotesquely beautiful motif in the works of Japanese artist 非(xhxix). Digitally sketching, drawing, and painting everything using Photoshop alone, 非 visualizes loneliness in his subjects and decorates them with scars, layers of geometric abstractions and floral imagery. As most of his subjects are young men, the artist explains that “boys are more suitable to express loneliness as women are emotional and powerful.” Concocting images of isolated pain and an ethereal sadness into haunting depictions of young western men, 非 reveals a mystified insight into the depths of the Japanese psyche.
Originally hailing from Perth, Ollie Lucas is a visual artist now residing in Melbourne, Australia. Previously his work revolved around the cerebral phenomenon ‘pareidolia’. Pareidolia put simply is seeing objects in clouds or recognisable objects in patterns or surfaces. His surfaces are created through swirling colours blended together to create a dynamic moving base. It’s upon this base that the intricate pattern work is applied through drawing. Using an almost meditational concentration the drawn pattern work combines with the colour to create a complex and detailed abstract surface for the eye to explore. However since moving to Melbourne Ollie has been bombarded with streets filled with a combination of graffiti, street art and urban decay.
My work has always had graphical and clean elements to it. A past life as a graphic designer is to blame there. Exposure to the graffiti scene in Melbourne has made me question harmony in my work, I have a love for filthy, dirty and weathered paint splattered surfaces, but at the same time I crave clean, modern, hardline geometrics. This is what drives my practice, combining two visual elements that are polar opposites in search for a harmony that i may never obtain.
Tzviatko Kinchev was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and he is an extraordinary, talented young man. He is studing in The National Academy of Arts and also working for Haemimont Games as an 2D artist. Check out his works and how he uses a great colorful palette of warm colors.
Water color is not the easiest medium to master but the artist Minh Dam was able to make multiple master pieces in this collection . Check the method.
Russian artist Vladimir Kush was born in Moscow and is a surrealist painter and sculptor. He defines his art as metaphorical realism instead surrealism. His paintings are fascinated by fantasy stories. His paintings looks like influenced by Salvador Dali.
Taking a photo this clear would be a feat for many – but these stunning images are actually hand-painted or drawn. Last week the detailed pencil drawings by Scottish artist Paul Cadden caught the eye, but the exhibition at the Plus One gallery also showcases other artists creating hyper-real pictures. Explaining the aim of one of his pieces, artist Tom Martin says: “Essentially I’m trying to look for ways to create a situation whereby things are believably real, yet impossible. “The scenario here is impossible and cannot ever exist in this world at least, but we are forced to accept it.” Including three BP Portrait Award winners, the display features both portraits and still life works – though chocolate lovers may be disappointed by Cynthia Poole’s confectionery as those grabbable-looking bars are sadly unreal…
The artist Andy Gilmore has a passion for geometric shapes. (He must have been the kid to copy off of in Geometry class). His artworks take all different shapes… no pun intended, but they all seem to be equally amazing. Check the method below.
As research has proved, guests will steal plenty of things from hotels given the chance — but most would draw the line at a piece of art valued in the thousands. One hotel, however, is inviting guests to steal art, in a clever promotion drawn up by Art Series Hotels, an Australian chain, for the summer. Guests who book a room at the chain’s properties between December 15 and January 15 are being challenged to ‘steal’ a Banksy print worth AU$15,000, with the promise that they can keep it if they successfully pull off the heist.
The print, “No Ball Games,” has been authenticated and signed by Banksy and will be circulating through Art Series’ three Melbourne hotels — The Olsen, The Cullen and The Blackman — during the month. Any guest that manages to make off with the piece will be allowed to keep it, the hotel says, but those caught in the act will have to return it to be hung on the wall. The promotion is a clever twist on Banksy’s own statements on art — the Britain-based artist has been known to sneak into galleries and hang his work alongside the curated works — and also pokes fun at several thieves who have attempted to remove the graffitied art from streets to sell.
Nick Gentry is a British graduate of Central St Martins and has exhibited in the UK, USA and Europe. As part of a generation that grew up surrounded by floppy disks, VHS tapes, polaroids and cassettes, he is inspired by the sociological impact of a new internet culture. His portraits use a combination of obsolete media formats, making a comment on waste culture, life cycles and identity. Using old disks as a canvas, these artefacts are combined to create photo-fits and identities that may draw connections to the personal information that is then forever locked down underneath the paint.
Alexa Meade thinks completely backwards. Most artists use acrylic paints to create portraits of people on canvas. But not Meade – she applies acrylic paints on her subjects and makes them appear to be a part of the painting. Meade is an installation artist based in the Washington, DC area. Her innovative use of paint on the three dimensional surfaces of found objects, live models, and architectural spaces has been incorporated into a series of installations that create a perceptual shift in how we experience and interpret spatial relationships. “I paint representational portraits directly on top of the people I am representing. The models are transformed into embodiments of the artist’s interpretation of their essence. When captured on film, the living, breathing people underneath the paint disappear, overshadowed by the masks of themselves.” – Alexa Meade
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