Li Hongbo-2/24/15

Li Hongbo is an artist from China. He works primarily with thousands of white paper, glued together in a honeycomb like formation. His sculptures are made in statues of people, usually sitting on pedestals. His works are all of the world, the nearest museum holding his pieces being in New York City. I really enjoy how visually interesting his works are, almost like a slinky going down there stairs, it relates back to that. I don't understand how he makes what he makes, because it is so intense and so foreign that it doesn't comprehend. The museums that hold his pieces have workers constantly moving his sculptures, what I would do to be able to touch one of his sculptures! They seem almost like a plastic, when looking at a perfectly still sculpture they look as if they are a mold of some sort; not paper like at all. Overall, I want to see one of his pieces in the near future.

Janine Antoni- 2/22/15

Janine Antoni is an contemporary artist from the Bahamas. She attended the Sarah Lawerence College and then later on went to The Rhode Island School of Design. In class we recently came across her work. When I first saw her work, I was shocked and blown away. She uses her own body, such as her hair and eyelashes to make art. I can't even come to grips with the idea of applying mascara and brushing it up against a canvas, thousands of times to make her famous Butterfly Kisses piece is insane to me. This is one artist that I find super interesting, how she thinks of making art that way and how successful it is, its something that everyone could find interesting. While she hasn't made pieces for quite some time, most of them are quite well known. My favorite piece is Loving Care, where she dumped her hair into dye and painted with her hair. How this idea came to her I have no idea, but it is genius and wonderful. I really appreciate how unique of an artist she is, she pushes normal art, and makes it so fun to know the stories behind her work.

Chuck Close- 2/22/15

Chuck Close is an American photorealist painter and photographer. He quotes "I went to the Seattle art museum when I was 14. I saw this Jackson Polluck drip painting with aluminum paint, tar, gravel and all that other stuff. I was absolutely outraged and disturbed. It was so far from what I thought art was. However, within 2 or 3 days, I was dripping paint all over my old paintings. In a way I've been chasing that experience ever since." Chuck graduated from The University of Washington in Seattle. He then won a scholarship to the Yale Summer School of Art and Music, he then continued school there. Most of Closes' early pieces were huge painting of friends and other artists. Chuck suffers from face recognition, and says that painting helps him remember the faces of people. Chuck worked/ works and mastered working with many of these materials; ink, silk, watercolor, crayons, etching and woodcuts, etc. He suffered a seizure in 1988 and was paralyzed from the neck down, however he continues to paint with a brush taped around his wrist. We watched a short clip of him in class and I was amazed at how wonderful he still is at everything. He loves painting and it is very obvious when you see him working in his studio. His own self portrait (younger) , shown below, was originally a photograph that he started painting, he paints by squares, and this is my favorite piece of his. The second self portrait was painted in 1998, and it shows the transition in his works.

Bric-a-Brac Article Response

In the beginning of this article Bric-a-Brac: The Everyday Work of Tom Friedman, talks about what bricolage and braconnage is. Jo Aplin argues that Friedman's process of making and making do, draws on the twin strategies of bricolage ("do-it-yourself") and braconnage ("poaching"), terms which turn poaching respectively from Claude Levi- Strauss. Farther on in the article,  Levi- Strauss's model of bricolage is a temporary, do-it-yourself form of collecting, reordering and recycling- a borrowing from other spheres and practices in order to generate if not something new than at least something else. And braconnage relies not on established modes of reading, in which readers passively absorb the text before them, but is rather a dynamic process in which the readers as braconneurs establish their own routes through the given material. Both bricolage and braconnage are tactical rather than strategic methods of making and thinking: that is they rely on a day-to-day form of piecing together and making sense of the world, not pre-planned, but made up as you go along.

Examples of bricolage are the following.

Tom Friedman- Gum wall mount 

Examples of Braconnage 

Geoff McFetridge- 2/17/15

Geoff McFetridge (born 1971) is a artist based in Los Angeles California. Born in Canada, he was schooled at the Alberta College of Art and the California Institute of the Arts. He is part of the Beautiful Losers Exhibition, and makes solo exhibitions from Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, London, the Netherlands and Japan. Instinctively ignoring creative boundaries McFetridge is a truly multidisciplinary artist, an all round visual auteur. From poetry to animation, from graphics to 3D work, from textile and wallpaper to paintings, McFetridge has complete control over these widely divergent disciplines.  Understatement is central to the impact of his work, inviting participation. It gets through the filters by offering the viewer an opportunity to play with a puzzle for a moment, a puzzle that doesn't have one simple answer. Often imitated, but never equaled, in the past ten years, Los Angeles-based McFetridge has created in his work and in his commissions a unique imagery, which is detailed and abstract at the same time. Full of hands and teeth, objects and animals, hands and heads. I like McFetridge, because of how diverse of an artist and how talented he is, with each different type of art. He uses bright bold colors, that make his pieces statements. 

Art Exhibit (2/3)

On Friday, February 6^th, I attended Launch: 2015 Annual Student Juried Exhibition in the Visual Arts Center.  While I was in the same vicinity I attended Project 35 Volume 2: An International Traveling Video Exhibition and Other People’s Feelings Are Also My Own in the Hemingway Building. In the visual arts center, there were quite a few pieces hanging up, as well as on pedestals. My favorite pieces viewed were among the following, a gun made of bibles, and a set of digital double exposures. I enjoyed this exhibit more than the Hemingway exhibit. When I entered the Hemingway exhibit, on the big screen an eighteen- minute video of an artist crawling through the streets of Korea. I watched all eighteen minutes and was honestly extremely confused the whole time. I tried to understand why she was doing this, what her motive was. What I got was that the whole time the artist went about the streets, she didn’t get looked at or even noticed. She went through this unnoticed and ignored. Overall, I liked the exhibits, a lot of people showed up and it ended up great.

Peter Hite- 2/8/15

Peter Hite is local Houstonian artist. When I was younger everyone knew Peter's kids, and also knew that his dad was an artist. However, I really never knew what he did until just today, when my mom said that he had released new art. I then found out that he works primary with large planes of canvas and decks them our with stamps. Some of his stamps date back to the 1800s, from around the world. He gets commissioned from museums all over the world to make certain pieces, his last piece is called The River created for Jacksonville, Florida. It is made with more than 300,000 vintage native stamps to Florida. He also has a series of pieces commissioned for the Texas museum. My mom and dad are very partial to these pieces, seeing as he only lives a few blocks away from my house. Unfortunately, I have only just seen his work for the first time. I knew he was an artist, but never knew what he did, or the uniqueness to his work. After looking at this, I which I had known before! Such talent, from my home of Houston, Texas!

Jeffery Veregge- 2/9/15

Jeffrey Veregge is a Native American artist and writer whose creative mantra in best summed up with a word from his tribe's own language as: "taʔčaʔx̣ʷéʔtəŋ", which means "get into trouble".  He is a member of the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe, was raised and spent a majority of his life on the reservation known locally as Little Boston, which is located near Kingston, Washington. He now works out of Seattle. Although he is enrolled there, he is also both of Suquamish and Duwamish tribal ancestry. Jeffrey is a honor graduate from the Art Institute of Seattle, and has studied with Tsimshian master carver David Boxley for a short time learning the basics of Salish form-line design. For the past 10 years he has been employed as Lead Designer/Studio Manager for a media agency that specializes in Non-Profits.  His works show a reflection of a lifetime love affair with comic books, toys, TV and film. Taking his passions and blending them with his Native perspective, artistic background and the desire to simply be himself.  Jeffrey has said “Basically I am just trying to have fun and get back to that kid that went to art school to begin with, wanting to create artwork that I want to see and make just for the hell of it.” I think what he makes is really cool, and smart! He has been published in quite a few magazines and is pretty popular. I also like his old school work, which really shows how talented he is. 

Dr. Woo Scc 2/8/15

Dr. Woo Sac is a famous american tattoo artist, he works in LA, California. Not much is known in his bio, he is occasionally called "the master of fine lines" I follow him on instagram and he posts daily pictures of his work. Famous people that he has tattooed are a few of the following; Sarah Hyland, Miley Cyrus, and Rihanna.  He is so popular for his contemporary, modern style that he is booked everyday until August. He is great at dot work, and black and white patterns. While he isn't a 2D artist, he still is an artist that works on human canvas as his work. Sure, there are thousands of tattoo artists, and some are extremely talented. Therefore I consider him a very talented tattoo artist. It is really impressive to be able to do what he does, and for so many people to know about him. Some of his clients tell him stories, or ideas and he relays them into pieces of art on a body. Maybe this doesn't go under the standard 'artist' more or less. What makes an artist an artist? Anyone could really say they are an artist, in tons of aspects. So to me, Dr. Woo is an artist, and a really talented one at that.

Matthew F. Fisher- 2/10/15

Matthew F Fisher is from Three Rivers Michigan and currently resides in Brooklyn New York.  He attended Columbus College of Art & Design but dropped out and went to Virginia Commonwealth University where he got his degree in painting and printmaking. His works tend to remain close to some of the themes from: still life, animals, landscape and stacking of objects and of course a twisted sense of historical period.  He looks up to the Hudson River School and luminist painters of the 1860’s tend to be his point of inspiration. He works with mainly canvas and acrylic paints. Fisher brings a stylized, Pop/ Surrealist panache to his paintings. Fisher's pop/folk-art/surreal canvases have grown increasing stylized over the past few years, almost to the point of abstraction. But their fine rendering and odd subject matter bring undeniable panache to taking apart art-historical categories such as landscape, still life and Tromp L'oeil painting. He will think of an idea and make a set of paintings in each genre. While Fisher isn't a very popular painter, I feel like he plays with pieces that will become well known. His style is really different and interesting, and I like it. The set of these prints is called "Ocean". It looks like something that you would see in a local museum. 

Jane Balsgaard- 2/8/15

Jane Balsgaard is a artist from Copenhagen, Denmark. She makes her pieces with very natural materials such as willow that she has grown from her own garden. While there isn't much on this artist, she said that a lot of her inspiration comes from Denmark. She lives in Copenhagen which is between the Baltic sea and North sea. She gets a lot of her inspiration from boats and shapes and colors that she observes on walks through her town. I was introduced to her pieces in class when we were working on the skin and skeleton project. And now after working with this project, there is a lot more that I understand about. For example, trial and error was a huge factor in my piece. It constantly failed, the skin being too heavy for the piece to stay up. Multiple times it collapsed and I had to add weights to it. Because of this project I now understand how great her pieces come out. She probably fails tons of times also, but all of her works is extremely meticulous and beautiful. The colors she uses in each piece are very different but they work well with what she does. I can't imagine the time she puts into each piece, and that makes her a very patient artist, very different from myself. The middle piece sold for $4,000 dollars, it is my favorite of her works! I love the use of different colors and intertwining of the willow wood.