Nobuhiro was born in 1976 and from Fukuoka. There’s not much about him personally that I can find, but he went to Tokyo Zokei University and then graduated at Kyoto City University of Art. He has collections of his artwork at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan, and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan. He’s also done collaborations with Video program works, coproduce with COMME des GARÇONS , Kyoto, Hong Kong in 2007, Sculpture works, coproduce with COMME des GARÇONS, Tokyo in 2010, Installation works, coproduce with Phillip Lim, SAKS, NY. There’s actually a website he has for his artwork, his Exhibitions, and his commission works. As for what kind of art he does, he seems to mostly do Layer drawings and Strip drawings. If you want to look at more of his artwork, just click on the link. (http://nobuhironakanishi.com/biography/)

Bridget Riley is a drawer/painter best known for her contributions to the op art movement. She was born in London and still lives and works there. Her work is greatly inspired by Neo-impressionists like Seurat. The way that they broke down scenes into colors is the same vision that is at the root of Rileys art and debatably all op art.

Aside from drawing, she’s also done some murals that I find relate to the theme “Drawing into Space” really well. In 2017, she created a striped mural titled Bolt of Colour that covered a U-shaped former army barracks in Marfa, Texas. I feel like this relates to the class because of the fact that the drawing is circumnavigating a physical space. I’m not quite sure what our next “line” assignment is, but I feel like this could also serve as possible inspiration for us moving into that project.

For my first project, I took inspiration from a photo I had taken last semester at a concert. I really liked that the photo was foggy, and that the artists on stage were kind of disappearing into the background. There was already a sense of foreground, middle ground, and background in the image which made the process a little bit easier.

I decided to use charcoal for my project. At first I wanted to also use color pastels, since I really like the red in the original image. But I had no idea how to combine that with the charcoal so I decided to just stick to black and white. I am happy with how it turned out since it was my first time drawing using charcoal, but it could be improved. I think the middle ground could be even darker/foggier, and the lights and beams of light could have stood out more. I could also add more detail to the people in the audience, like adding highlights to the hair and make the phone more detailed too, and also the whole situation on the ceiling could be better. Overall, I tried my best and that’s what matters.

After creating my collage for this class, I was asking my professor, Matt Rebolz for some feedback. He ended up referring me to Wangechi Mutu due to her beautiful collages.

Wangechi Mutu, a beautiful Kenyan artist is born in Nairobi. She went to Great Britain and America for school. Later on in life she moved to New York to get a BFA at Cooper Union College in 1996. In 2000 she got her Master of fine arts at Yale University. She lives in New York and still works too.

She creates collages that revolve around femininity and sexuality, etc etc. Mutu uses mediums of “Mylar polyester film, acrylic paint, packing tape, glitter, and imagery from magazines.”

The reason she does these pieces is to show her experience and influence that differ from her African culture to American culture. There’s a different result of this through her collages and painting.

When looking at her work, she takes these pieces and remakes pieces that look like humans. They are a but spooky but the more you look at them the more beautiful it gets. There’s so much to look at.

https://www.artnet.com/artists/wangechi-mutu/biography

For this week I created a collage that has a bit of meaning to it. At first I wasn’t sure about what however I was receiving a bunch of images of women from school and from magazines.

This piece is suppose to show how women are said to have rights and can vote. In the long run, these rights end up getting stripped from our feet. The mistake I make was thinking more conceptually instead of fundamentally while trying to make such a strong piece. There’s more technical ways of doing art like this versus a more creative idea. I do think in order to make it stronger is so add some coloring in the negative space in the middle or even breaking these bars.

Although I did like this piece and enjoyed making it, there is a lot more I need to add to it til I am 100% happy with this piece.

Brooks Shane Salzwedel is a great example of a an artist that works with translucent layers in his work. Brooks is a graduate of Art Center College of Design and during his time in school is when he began experimenting with working with translucent layers. To create his work he draws on sheets of Mylar, acetate, and Duralar. On these sheets he uses graphite, charcoal, and sometimes watercolor/spraypaint. After drawing on each layer the sheets are placed together one on top of the other, which allows certain elements of the drawings to become more or less clear. The final step in his process is to seal the layers with resin.

In his work Brooks often uses a combination of nature and man made elements, layering the two together. In a good number of his works he began using the subject matter of bridges. He was interested in exploring how the architecture of the bridge itself allowed him to experiment with the composition of the works. In and interview with Design Boom he spoke about how he has an interest in looking at images from the industrial revolution as inspiration. Which is an interesting point to know because often his works do feel sort of dystopian or reminiscent of something we’ve seen before but it’s not an exact match.

Citations

This week, since we’re looking at working with transparent paper, I thought I’d shine some light on a contemporary artist that I really love. Joey Vermouth is best known for his “bug art” on TikTok, you might know him by his username sweetjoeyvermouth. Vermouth’s “bug art” is both the piece itself and the performance that goes into creating it. It’s become quite controversial online whether or not “bug art” is “real” art– but I argue that it totally is. You see, the internet often falls for the misconception that it requires a lot of skill and training to be a “real” artist, but Vermouth’s works prove that art can be made with tracing paper and dollar tree coloring books.

As previously stated, Vermouth’s process is half of the art. He works with materials that can be found at stores like Dollar Tree or Walmart, so it’s a very accessible process. He then traces the image of the celebrity, colors it, squirts it with water and adds stickers. He records his entire process and uploads time-lapses of all of his pieces to TikTok, for the audio he sings a little song about how “you don’t have to like my bug art, it’s ok.”

Overall, Joey Vermouth is an impressive artist and definitely someone to look at moving into this next project.

Sources:

https://freshbugart.tumblr.com

I started my collage by harvesting some cardboard from an amazon box, then I rubbed some watercolor paint on there with a paper towel. With some crayon markers, I started drawing on the cardboard– just simple stars and spirals. I then taped some brown paper over the cardboard and spray painted it. After I finished painting the paper, I burned a hole in the center so the cardboard would show through.

After that, I started glueing/pinning found objects to the cardboard. I cut up a linocut I made and used the pieces to print some extra texture on the cardboard. I finished it up with some additional drawings and then I stuffed the edges of the brown paper with paper towels to create depth.

Overall, I’m happy with how it turned out, but I could honestly keep adding stuff to it forever. I really liked this process because I didn’t really know what the final outcome would look like at first, but it slowly became clear to me as I was creating.

Maya land is a traditional surreal collage artist and has been creating art since she was 5 years old. She was also born and still lives in London; however, I couldn’t find any website that tells us about her age. She creates her artworks by hand using vintage imagery. With a vintage nostalgia, her works explore the social and political issues we face in contemporary. It also creates another world and another meaning. She studied Fine art at Art Academy and specialized in oil painting there. However, after she graduated, she realized that her ” true love ” is collage art and continues creating collages to this day. Maya actually sells her artwork on her website, so if you or anyone feels like buying one of her art pieces, you can now. However, her artwork is really expensive, so maybe save up a lot of money first before buying. Most of her collages seem to be food, furniture, people, and places. Here is the link to her shop (Link: https://www.saatchiart.com/mayamladenovic) (Info: https://artisticsideoflife.com/about#:~:text=Maya%20Land%20is%20a%20London,we%20face%20in%20contemporary%20society.)

I first couldn’t decide what to pick for a theme for my collage project, so I picked a few magazines and went through pages to find something I liked. I watch a lot of Gordon Ramsay shows, so the pictures of food count my eye. I then cut out as many food pictures I could find in a few magazines I picked and tried to mess around with them on my white piece of paper.

After messing around for a while, I stuck to a few pictures that I thought were perfect enough and threw out the rest. I got some of my alcohol markers and started drawing random food, words, and even coffee all over the collage. It’s kind of basic to me, but I think it’s a cute little collage for me to put up on my wall at some point.