My practice explores the correlation between the concept of masculinity and the properties of the medium; generally based in paint, at times my practice also incorporates video, text, sculpture, performance, and paper-based work. The objective of this pursuit is to challenge a perspective of identity through heightened, purposefully self-aware representation, in which these representations refer to their own physicality and question their legitimacy and even the very nature of my practice. The approach taken toward my practice is largely the result of a cathartic incident in 2008, in which a hate-crime assault led to a fascination with the notion that substance might overcome the limitations of its physicality – and that my perspective might transcend solipsism and approach the political. The propulsion for my work is the notion that identity may be (de/re)constructed as a politically charged confrontation of Self.
I am interested in how my paintings might operate independently from their literal figurative foundation and engage with an exploration of color, reduction of forms, and triumph of substance as imbued with meaning and metaphor, overt, and suggestive. My practice is a process encumbered by the reduction of literalness in preference of a sensual and topographical painted surface. Through this process of discovery, I hope to create work that engages with a continuously forming language of painting and representation. By drawing attention to the tangibility of the work, I introduce extra-diegetic readings, pulling the viewer from the sutures of the represented subject and inviting readings beyond the confines of the painted picture.
With each successive work, I hope to draw attention to the painterly versus the formal, predominating the medium as integral to the understanding and formation of my work, and referencing painting as both ‘act’ and ‘medium’. Through my treatment of form and content, I ask the viewer to consider the technical aspects of my paintings, but also the metaphorical role that media assumes in my work, and finally the relationship of my paintings to a greater narrative and mythology, in which each subject is related to ideas of psyche and convalescence. As a result, my work often uses personal history to approach universal themes, and a politics that I view as deeply personal, yet resoundingly human.
by Ben Blatt
My recent watercolor paintings focus on enclosures set in abandoned architectural spaces. Bell jars, fountains, terrariums, monuments, and medallions serve as incubators for evocative botanical worlds. In these spaces I create safe houses for propagation. My controlled environments are ideal for growing and preserving a climate. Through these settings, notions of paradox are explored: upside down architecture over-waters plants; leaves open to receive foreign crystalline-mechanical structures; water is both frozen and flowing; carved stone crawls with veins, vast mountain ranges are somehow contained. Life overtakes life, perpetuating cycles of life and death. I choose to work primarily with the patient medium of watercolor, allowing subtle atmospheric life to fade in and out of precious worlds within worlds. I can render and blur with subsequent layers to create a feeling of memory and nostalgia. Although I mine past ideals of art history (Rococo, Symbolism, Wunderkammen, Romanticism, etc.) I intentionally use a palette that suggests a contemporary lens: shifts in CMYK colors evoke digital misprints, psychedelic patterns destabilize centralized imagery and color fields crack open spontaneously. Modern imaging technology provides me with patterns unknown before the last twenty years. Cell structures based on scans from electron microscopes act as cobblestone. Shapes and patterns disconnect from form, creating frictions in receding perspective. I try to entangle within all the detail and visual delight, a sense of reality slipping away, opening floodgates of the subconscious. My hope is that the intimate images induce a desire to climb within, to preserve what memories remain, before they fade away.
Steve Kim paints everyday scenes from his life in an attempt to transform visual experience. Using photographs of seemingly mundane events, Kim renders them almost unrecognizable by employing a skewed perspective, leaving large sections of canvas blank and morphing everyday events into something uncanny and unsettling.
by Chris Berens
When I was a boy, my father brought me to many exhibitions of the Dutch Golden Age painters, including Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer, and those images became infused into the internal world he began imagining as a child. He studied illustration at the Academy of Art and Design in Den Bosch, graduating in 1999.
While working as a freelance illustrator, I began to teach myself to paint in several dilapidated buildings in the rural area near my childhood home. Attempting to emulate the painting methods of the Old Masters and 19th-century academic artists like Ingres and Bouguereau, I learned by copying their work, and eventually came upon a technique which allowed me to achieve an otherwordly dreamlike impression of the qualities I admired in my predecessors.
My technique is not one I at one time ‘made up’. I tried thousands of things and combine the ones that work for me. It is not an isolated technique. It took me 8 years to get to the tecnical point where I am now and it is still very much evolving and will probably be completely different again in a couple of years. The particular ink, paper, brushes, water, varnish, laquers, glue and panels I use happen to work for me for now. And I like to keep that particular information to myself as it is useful only to me.
So don’t get hung up on the technique too much. It’s just ink and paper. It’s no magic ink. Or magic paper. I try and find my own language in imagery, as in my opinon it all comes from gesture -being the aesthetic of the brushstrokes and their emotional impact- your imagination and trying to stay true to yourself. When images come from deep within, they’re sincere and genuine. And nothing can beat that.”
by Nicolás Santiago Romero Escalada
I was born, they fed me, educated me, instructed me, and shaped me, but no one ever made me “discover” graffiti. We came together by chance upon seeing and analyzing one another (with the street in the middle) and we taught one another, getting to know each other in the moment just before my pre-teen period (it was either masturbate or paint something).
First I thought that it could be a passtime, and then I realized that I had quit cigarettes but not graffiti. On the contrary, I felt that it was growing more each day…there is no day when I don’t think about: what to paint, where to paint, how to paint, what day, what hour, basically organizing my life around it.
At the end of this new decade I realized the value of the message left behind within 48 hours of the exercise (painting). Thinking that revolutions are told on the walls says a lot about that, let’s say, as a sort of direct protest of society for society. I think that graffiti is a point of connection for people, at least that’s what I like to explore with this beautiful activity.
I discovered my style by accident, when love (maybe the culprit of the greatest idiocies of mankind) brought me to creating the face of an ex girlfriend and I saw that it came relatively easily…maybe I made her a little fat and her nose a bit crooked, but from a distance it looked just like her. The thing is that I had always been fascinated by the human body, the meat that hides the bones, what we hold inside, and more than that of just its function, no?
So, to combine a small obsession for the body with a love of experimentation with people, the only way is with the idealization of something with a religious slant. Religion has put symbols in our heads that come out even today in our ways of representing the body. Each person sanctifies when they ignore.
This is the result of my work, to give importance to the inconsequential, to “deify” an unremarkable person.
My work deals with animals. The depiction of animals through drawing and lore is as ancient as the imagination. The impressions and ideas they provoke range from symbolism to science. I make large scale, 2-dimensioal drawings, sometimes bizarre and fantastic, other times simple and subtle. All of this stems from a long interest in the natural sciences. The work grows from thoughts and research on biological and ecological concerns as well as along narrative and mythical dimensions.
I depict my animals in various ways. I use techniques inspired by the clear careful illustrations of field guides, through a range of expressive and abstract artists. A lot of my work bumps representation up against its limits. Abstraction comes into play in many ways. At times an animal, drawn in larger than life scale will melt away into aggressive strokes of color and marks, robbing the animal of its form. Other times I assemble animals into geometric formations, or I’ll attempt to merge scientific diagrams with the myths that precede them.
My work is very much about drawing itself. The line plays a crucial role in the development of my subject matter. I draw with a quick, gestural, playful delivery, which I believe gives the subject a liveliness that often eludes a slower, more meticulous, depiction. I use a variety of media from all sorts of drawing tools, such as graphite, charcoal, and wax, to different water-based pigments as inks, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache. I team lines with washes to build or negate my subjects. I strictly work on paper, preferably larger than a person. To me, drawing has more of a romantic relationship to paper than to other surfaces, like wood or canvas. The paper allows my pencils to glide when they move and embraces my washes in some symbiotic manner. The grand scale creates a 1 to 1 ratio between work and viewer. Conceptually I think this is interesting and intrinsic to the dialogue between man and nature. The scale is also conducive to the loose descriptions and allows a greater arena to suggest the infinite details nature provides.
I revel in the idea of continuing the long inscription of drawing, painting, sculpting and believing in animals. I draw inspiration from prehistoric cave paintings, totemic symbols, the great artist/naturalists like Seba, Haeckel, Audobon, and a contemporary art world increasingly more aware and intrigued with issues of the natural world. Fact and fiction, past, present and the future, all play a role in my work. I aim to express and conjure the flesh and magic of evolution, classification, environment, bio-diversity, mutation, and extinction.
by Ben Grasso
Like technology or like the instrumental rewriting of history, painting too can make more immediate the things we experience. Painting recasts these things in new terms, in new ways. My painting does not seek to present something impossible or particular; instead it represents something contingent, a re-imagining of what actually exists, a re-alignment of logic that makes plastic the anxiety underlying objects in the world. A house floating into space or collapsing into itself, a beehive attacked by paper airplanes; here we see the nonsensical apocalypse imminent in all things.
Mars 1 & Doze Green
by Ian Francis
Ian Francis was born in 1979 in Bristol, England, and graduated from the University of the West of England with a degree in Illustration. His work concentrates on the particulars of modern experiences things like television, world events, celebrities, and day-to-day living.
