Jenny Saville is a talented painter born in Cambridge, England 1970. She likes to focus on the human form and all of its flaws. Her pieces glorify the body in its strangeness and variety. Her painting titled, “Plan” is a great example of her style of subject matter. She touched on the idea of liposuction and the reasons behind it. She enjoyed seeing the marks (like surgery marks) as a map. The lines draw over the topography of the skin giving it geography in a sense. The head of the figure is also hers. She inserted herself to be involved in this idea of self-examination; she is part of the work. “Plan” is a very intimate painting taking the idea of female beauty standards and standing them on their head. The idea of abundance and a mature physique is not recognized in mainstream media. She depicts large women sensually and in power of themselves.

I enjoy the social critique of the majority of her work. There is a long and introspective thought process when you see her work. Something you have been told is sinful and gluttonous is now natural and desirable.

Gagosian.com

Wikipedia Article

Oneonta.edu

Chan Hwee Chong creates spiral illustrations of famous paintings. Using a single line and the push-pull technique to create different layers of shadows and depth. What began as a commission by Faber and Castell to show the precision of their artist pens gave Chan Hwee Chong fame. Hwee Chong is a man from Singapore who is currently living Germany as an art director at a German design studio ‘Kolle Robbe’ in Hamburg. He focuses on exploring typography and art installations in a public space that provoke our senses. Recently Hwee Chong created in collaboration with other artists the Lightstix Graffiti.

The Lightstix Graffiti is an inventive way to create a drawing in a public space that glows and catches the attention of passerby’s, like a beacon. The graffiti fixes glow-sticks onto a surface and then arranges them in such a way to create an image, or a drawing. Resulting in a glowing, beacon in an otherwise dark landscape.

I came into possession of a book which depicts and describes the works done by Van Gogh after he left Arles and went to stay at a facility in Saint-Remy to be cared for. Most of his works from that time are heavily influenced by the spaces he observed from his room or the grounds of the facility. While I chose paintings for this post, there are also a plethora of drawings in the collection as well.

Below is his painting referred to as “Country road with Cypress and Star” and his traditional heavy handed marks, which blur the line between a drawing and a painting, are effective in seemingly showing details that would be closer to the viewer in space and then they proceed to become less harsh as the painting moves further into space. The use of the road as a physical landmark that leads you from foreground to background is what makes full use of space in this work. One follows the road to the back middle and the cypress trees behind the small cottage throw you up into his night sky and beyond.

Below is another painting from entitled” Enclosed Field with Ploughman” and I think it attempts and succeeds to show us such an expanse of space. For me it is how he uses his marks to created concise movement in some areas that lead you off and away into the distance while other areas are more haphazard and created the illusion of detail that is closer and more apparent. His skies also are extremely important in creating a sense of space, using his mark making to show rolling clouds that always lead off the canvas and never are wholly contained within the painting. Finally his windmills help create the illusion of receding farther and farther back help add to the wide and open feeling in this painting. The one in the middle sets the far away point but then a smaller one to the side shows us how far back he can see from his vantage point and only goes to create miles between the viewer and the hills in the distance.

Born in 1972 in rural Ontario, this versatile artist began to grow his creativity along with his allergy to hay. As a boy he dabbled between making elaborate hay forts in his family’s barn and drawing and using the computer graphics of the time.

Today he plays with computer graphics and installation instead of hay and produces beautiful abstracted architecture. He is an up and coming artist, just recently hitting 10,000 followers on instagram.

His drawings have an illustrative expressive quality mixed with an MC Escher approach.

His current series is called:

He turns these into reference for his series of 96″ x 42″ images, printed on archival paper and mounted on dibond. They express almost a post apocalyptic feel.

http://www.mathewborrett.com

Val Britton was born in 1977 in Livingston, NJ, and now currently resides in San francisco, CA.  For her BFA, Britton attended and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, and from there she received her MFA at the California College of the Arts.  Britton has found numerous successes through her art which has resulted in gallery shows, grants, residencies, and commissions.  Britton is known for her paper and mixed media works which represent maps, astronomy, and diagrams.  Britton was inspired by her father who was a long distance truck driver.  When he passed away early in Britton’s life, she found inspiration within the maps that her father had to use to navigate his long travels.  Britton uses numerous methods within her pieces; from staining, to collage, to printing, stitching, etc., although this may be a long process, Britton finds it meditative, and claims that her pieces blur the lines between imagination and memory.  Britton’s goal in her pieces is to create movement, since her pieces are abstract she says that this is her challenge.  Currently, Britton is trying to figure out a way to push her work to represent a tension of imposed order and pandemonium.  Britton says that the retelling of our stories of our journeys, and the reconstruction of those experiences, work together to create an understanding of the now, and so the retelling itself is in fact a journey.

Collapsible City

2012
Approximately 6′ h x 7′ w
graphite, ink, tempera, and collage on paper

Mia Pearlman was born in the USA in 1974.  Ever since graduating from Cornell University in 1996 with her BFA, Pearlman has taken the art world by storm; with publishings in numerous contemporary art books, residencies, galleries, and commissions.  Some of Pearlman’s most successful works of art were a part of her recent show of installations in the Foley Gallery on the East Side of New York.  These installations were a part of her “Slash Paper Under the Knife” show, and were open to the public from, November 19, 2014 – January11, 2015.  Pearlman creates giant paper installations on the walls which play with space and natural light.  The New Yorker states that Pearlman’s pieces were,“The best pieces, notably Mia Pearlman’s crashing waves of cut and painted paper in the windows, dig into the connection between creation and destruction.”   An example of some of her work is, INRUSH, the goal of this piece (since it sat on the corner of the gallery) was to make it seem like there was no distinction of interior and exterior space by playing with natural light.  The unique quality and factor of Mia Pearlman’s work is the fact that everything is completely hand cut.  Her installations create a whole new space, and draw the viewers away from their current situation and into a whole new world.

Photo by Bryan Tarnowski, 2014 http://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/heather-3.jpg

Heather Hansen is a performance artist who creates large scale charcoal drawings through her body and movement. Hansen works as a process-orientated artist where a great portion of the art is in the performance itself and not just in the finished product. Her body moves from gesture to gesture, leaving behind the evidence of movement through the long gestural lines of charcoal.

One of Hansen’s more recent exhibitions is the Value of Line at Ochi. Here she created performance pieces, as can be seen below, in front of spectators as she draws with her gestures. Hansen’s explains her work of “download[ing] my movement directly onto paper, emptying gestures from one form to another”. Much of her work relates to this process of relaying gestures on to paper, with the finished product as layered and symmetrical expressive lines. Her work relates to drawing into space with her process of creating. The space occupied by her body during creation, the movement of the gestures across the paper from one to another, and the suggestion of time and movement in the finished product, all translate to the theme of drawing into space.

http://www.ochigallery.com/heather-hansen/#lightbox[group-330]/10/

Photo by Spencer Hansen at Ochi Gallery, 2014. http://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/heather-12.jpg

The artwork below draws attention to an implied 3D space of an interior and exterior of the spherical shape.

Heather Hansen EGLA-1 9.26.15, 2015, charcoal on rice paper 59” X 84”. http://www.ochigallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/EGLA-19.26.15_EMAIL-605×415.jpg

Heather Hansen EG SUWON1 8.19.15, 2015 charcoal on canvas, varnish 134” X 134”. http://www.ochigallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/EGSUWON1.8.19.15_EMAIL.jpg

Post by Rebecca Lempereur, 1/24/2016