Tag Archives: sculptor

Day 347- Amedeo Modigliani- “When I know your soul, I will paint your eyes.”

It’s Day 347 and I’m honored to pay tribute to today’s artist.  I love his portrait paintings so of course I had to do another self portrait.  While researching him I kind of got a big crush.  Please join me in honoring Amedeo Modigliani today.

Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani

Portrait of Juan Gris- Amedeo Modigliani

Portrait of Juan Gris- Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Italian pronunciation: [ameˈdɛo modiʎˈʎani]; July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920) was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by elongation of faces and figures. His production is known for its nudes, which were not received well during his lifetime, but later found acceptance. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance, until he moved to Paris in 1906. There he came into contact with prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuşi.

Modigliani’s oeuvre includes mainly paintings and drawings. From 1909 to 1914, however, he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. The main subject is portraits and full figures of humans, both in the images and in the sculptures. During his

The Beautiful Confectioner- Amedeo Modigliani

The Beautiful Confectioner- Amedeo Modigliani

life, Amedeo Modigliani had little success, but after his death he achieved greater popularity and his works of art achieved high prices. He died at age 35 in Paris of tubercular meningitis.

Modigliani was born into a Jewish family in Livorno, Italy. A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion, and was home to a large Jewish community. His maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee.

Modigliani’s mother (Eugénie Garsin), who was born and grew up in Marseille, was descended from an intellectual, scholarly family of Sephardic Jews, generations of whom had resided along the Mediterranean coastline. Her ancestors were learned people, fluent in many languages, known authorities on sacred Jewish texts, and founders of a school of Talmudic studies. Family legend traced the Garsins’ lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The family business was believed to be a credit agency with branches in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis, and London. Their financial fortunes ebbed and flowed.

Reclining Nude from the Back- Amedeo Modigliani

Reclining Nude from the Back- Amedeo Modigliani

Modigliani’s father, Flaminio, hailed from a family of successful businessmen and entrepreneurs. While not as culturally sophisticated as the Garsins, they knew how to invest in and develop thriving business endeavors. When the Garsin and Modigliani families announced the engagement of their children, Flaminio was a wealthy young mining engineer. He managed the mine in Sardinia and also managed the almost 30,000 acres of timberland the family owned. A reversal in fortune occurred to this prosperous family in 1883. An economic downturn in the price of metal plunged the Modiglianis into bankruptcy. Ever resourceful, Modigliani’s mother used her social contacts to establish a school and, along with her two sisters, made the school into a successful enterprise.

Modigliani was the fourth child, whose birth coincided with the disastrous financial collapse of his father’s business interests. Amedeo’s birth saved the family from ruin; according to an ancient law, creditors could not

Portrait of Frans Hellens- Amedeo Modigliani

Portrait of Frans Hellens- Amedeo Modigliani

seize the bed of a pregnant woman or a mother with a newborn child. The bailiffs entered the family’s home just as Eugenia went into labour; the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of her.

Modigliani had a close relationship with his mother, who taught him at home until he was 10. Beset with health problems after an attack of pleurisy when he was about 11, a few years later he developed a case of typhoid fever. When he was 16 he was taken ill again and contracted the tuberculosis which would later claim his life. After Modigliani recovered from the second bout of pleurisy, his mother took him on a tour of southern Italy: Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi, then north to Florence and Venice.

Portrait of Woman in Hat - Great Artist Amedeo Modigliani

Portrait of Woman in Hat – Great Artist Amedeo Modigliani

His mother was, in many ways, instrumental in his ability to pursue art as a vocation. When he was 11 years of age, she had noted in her diary: “The child’s character is still so unformed that I cannot say what I think of it. He behaves like a spoiled child, but he does not lack intelligence. We shall have to wait and see what is inside this chrysalis. Perhaps an artist?”

Modigliani is known to have drawn and painted from a very early age, and thought himself “already a painter”, his mother wrote, even before beginning formal studies. Despite her misgivings that launching him on a course of studying art would impinge upon his other studies, his mother indulged the young Modigliani’s passion for the subject.

At the age of fourteen, while sick with typhoid fever, he raved in his delirium that he wanted, above all else, to see the paintings in the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence. As Livorno’s local museum housed only a sparse few paintings by the Italian Renaissance masters, the tales he had heard about the great works held in Florence intrigued him, and it was a source of considerable despair to him, in his sickened state, that he might never get the chance to view them in person. His mother promised that she would take him to Florence herself, the moment he was recovered. Not only did she fulfil this promise, but she also undertook to enroll him with the best painting master in Livorno, Guglielmo Micheli.

Modigliani worked in Micheli’s Art School from 1898 to 1900. Among his colleagues in that studio would have been Llewelyn Lloyd, Giulio Cesare Vinzio, Manlio Martinelli, Gino Romiti, Renato Natali, and Oscar Ghiglia.

Marie Daughter of the People- Amedeo Modigliani

Marie Daughter of the People- Amedeo Modigliani

Here his earliest formal artistic instruction took place in an atmosphere steeped in a study of the styles and themes of 19th-century Italian art. In his earliest Parisian work, traces of this influence, and that of his studies of Renaissance art, can still be seen. His nascent work was shaped as much by such artists as Giovanni Boldini as by Toulouse-Lautrec.

Modigliani showed great promise while with Micheli, and ceased his studies only when he was forced to, by the onset of tuberculosis.

In 1901, whilst in Rome, Modigliani admired the work of Domenico Morelli, a painter of dramatic religious and literary scenes. Morelli had served as an inspiration for a group of iconoclasts who were known by the title “the Macchiaioli” (from macchia —”dash of colour”, or, more derogatively, “stain”), and Modigliani had already been exposed to the influences of the Macchiaioli. This localized landscape movement reacted against the bourgeois stylings of the academic genre painters. While sympathetically connected to (and actually pre-dating) the French Impressionists, the Macchiaioli did not make the same impact upon international art culture as did the contemporaries and followers of Monet, and are today largely forgotten outside Italy.

Jeanne Hebuterne with Hat and Necklace- Amedeo Modigliani

Jeanne Hebuterne with Hat and Necklace- Amedeo Modigliani

Modigliani’s connection with the movement was through Guglielmo Micheli, his first art teacher. Micheli was not only a Macchiaiolo himself, but had been a pupil of the famous Giovanni Fattori, a founder of the movement. Micheli’s work, however, was so fashionable and the genre so commonplace that the young Modigliani reacted against it, preferring to ignore the obsession with landscape that, as with French Impressionism, characterized the movement. Micheli also tried to encourage his pupils to paint en plein air, but Modigliani never really got a taste for this style of working, sketching in cafés, but preferring to paint indoors, and especially in his own studio. Even when compelled to paint landscapes (three are known to exist), Modigliani chose a proto-Cubist palette more akin to Cézanne than to the Macchiaioli.

While with Micheli, Modigliani studied not only landscape, but also portraiture, still life, and the nude. His fellow students recall that the last was where he displayed his greatest talent, and apparently this was not an entirely academic pursuit for the teenager: when not painting nudes, he was occupied with seducing the household maid.

Despite his rejection of the Macchiaioli approach, Modigliani nonetheless found favour with his teacher, who referred to him as “Superman”, a pet name reflecting the fact that Modigliani was not only quite adept at his art,

Amedeo Modigliani painting: Woman with Black Cravat

Amedeo Modigliani painting: Woman with Black Cravat

but also that he regularly quoted from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Fattori himself would often visit the studio, and approved of the young artist’s innovations.

In 1902, Modigliani continued what was to be a lifelong infatuation with life drawing, enrolling in the Scuola Libera di Nudo, or “Free School of Nude Studies”, of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. A year later, while still suffering from tuberculosis, he moved to Venice, where he registered to study at the Regia Accademia ed Istituto di Belle Arti.

The Servant- Amedeo Modigliani

The Servant- Amedeo Modigliani

It is in Venice that he first smoked hashish and, rather than studying, began to spend time frequenting disreputable parts of the city. The impact of these lifestyle choices upon his developing artistic style is open to conjecture, although these choices do seem to be more than simple teenage rebellion, or the cliched hedonism and bohemianism that was almost expected of artists of the time; his pursuit of the seedier side of life appears to have roots in his appreciation of radical philosophies, including those of Nietzsche.

Partial biography is from wikipedia.

“When I know your soul, I will paint your eyes”
― Amedeo Modigliani

I hope you enjoy my tribute today!  I was about to take a reference photo of myself and then saw a cloche that I had sitting around and decided to use it for

My reference photo...

My reference photo…

my piece!  I felt that it was appropriate. 🙂  I felt chills while reading Modigliani’s quote above.  And realized that he hardly painted people’s eyes fully.  Just filled them in with blue, black or a solid color.  There’s only a few portraits where he fully painted the eyes.  Fascinating!  I will see you tomorrow on Day 348.  I can’t believe how fast the days are flying by.

Best,

Linda

Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

 

Day 345- Joseph Cornell- Poetic Theater

It’s Day 345 and I finally got to do a shadow box.  I love today’s artist.  The crazy storm that hit the Bay Area has caused power outages and flooding everywhere, but I still did my piece!  I am posting now just in case the power goes out.  Please join me in honoring Joseph Cornell today.

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell

Untitled (Swan Box)- Joseph Cornell

Untitled (Swan Box)- Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker.

Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to Joseph Cornell, a well-to-do designer and merchant of textiles, and Helen TenBroeck Storms Cornell, who had trained as a kindergarten teacher. The Cornells had four children: Joseph, Elizabeth (b. 1905), Helen (b. 1906), and Robert (b. 1910).

Both parents came from socially prominent families of Dutch ancestry, long-established in New York State. Cornell’s father died in 1917, leaving the family in strained circumstances. Following the elder Cornell’s death, his wife and children moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Cornell attended Phillips Academy inAndover, Massachusetts, in the class of 1921, although he did not graduate.

Except for the three and a half years he spent at Phillips, he lived for most of his life in a small, wooden-frame

Untitled- Joseph Cornell

Untitled- Joseph Cornell

house on Utopia Parkway in a working-class area of Flushing, along with his mother and his brother Robert, whom cerebral palsy had rendered physically challenged.  Aside from the aforementioned period he spent at the academy in Andover, Cornell never traveled beyond the New York City area.

Cornell was wary of strangers. This led him to isolate himself and become a self-taught artist. Although he expressed attraction to unattainable women like Lauren Bacall, his shyness made romantic relationships almost impossible. In later life his bashfulness verged toward reclusiveness, and he rarely left the state of New York. However, he preferred talking with women, and often made their husbands wait in the next room when he discussed business with them. He also had numerous friendships with ballerinas, who found him unique, but too eccentric to be a romantic partner.

Pink Palace- Joseph Cornell

Pink Palace- Joseph Cornell

His last major exhibition was a show he arranged especially for children, with the boxes displayed at child height and with the opening party serving soft drinks and cake.

He devoted his life to caring for his younger brother Robert, who was disabled and lived with cerebral palsy. This was another factor in his lack of relationships. At some point in the 1920s, or possibly earlier, he read the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, including Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Cornell considered Eddy’s works to be among the most important books ever published after the Bible, and he became a lifelong Christian Science adherent.

He was also rather poor for most of his life, working during the 1920s as a wholesale fabric salesman to support his family. As a result of the American Great Depression, Cornell lost his textile industry job in 1931, and worked for a short time thereafter as a door-to-door appliance salesman. During this time, through her friendship with Ethel Traphagen, Cornell’s mother secured him a part-time position designing textiles. In the 1940s, Cornell also worked in a plant nursery (which would figure in his famous dossier “GC44”) and briefly in a defense plant, and designed covers and feature layouts for Harper’s Bazaar, View, Dance Index, and other magazines. He only really began to sell his boxes for significant sums after his 1949 solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery.

Cornell was a highly regarded artist towards the end of his career, yet remained out of the spotlight. He

Hotel Eden- Joseph Cornell

Hotel Eden- Joseph Cornell

produced fewer box assemblages in the 1950s and 1960s, as his family responsibilities increased and claimed more of his time. He hired a series of young assistants, including both students and established artists, to help him organize material, make artwork, and run errands. At this time, Cornell concentrated on making collages, and collaborated with filmmakers like Rudy Burckhardt, Stan Brakhage, and Larry Jordan to make films that were evocative of moving collages.

In 1967 the artist was reported in possession of two or three original drawings from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The exiled Saint-Exupéry’s wife, Consuelo, was similarly an artist and sculptor.

Cornell’s brother Robert died in 1965, and his mother in 1966. Joseph Cornell died of apparent heart failure on 29 December 1972, a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday.  The executors of his estate were Richard Ader and Wayne Andrews, as represented by the art dealers Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen, and James Corcoran. Later, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation was established, which administers the copyrights of Cornell’s works and represents the interests of his heirs. Currently, the Foundation is administered by Trustees, Richard Ader and Joseph Erdman.

Medici Princess- Joseph Cornell

Medici Princess- Joseph Cornell

Cornell’s most characteristic art works were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple shadow boxes, usually fronted with a glass pane, in which he arranged eclectic fragments of photographs or Victorian bric a brac, in a way that combines the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled.

Like Kurt Schwitters, Cornell could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects he found on his frequent trips to the bookshops and thrift stores of New York. His boxes relied on the Surrealist use of irrational juxtaposition, and on the evocation of nostalgia, for their appeal.

Cornell never regarded himself as a Surrealist; although he admired the work and technique of Surrealists like Max Ernst and René Magritte, he disavowed the Surrealists’ “black magic,” claiming that he only wished to make white magic with his art. Cornell’s fame as the leading American “Surrealist” allowed him to befriend several members of the Surrealist movement when they settled in the US during the Second World War. Later he was claimed as a herald of pop art and installation art.

Cornell often made series of boxed assemblages that reflected his various interests: the Soap Bubble Sets, the Medici Slot Machine series, the Pink Palace series, the Hotelseries, the Observatory series, and the Space

Object Abeilles- Joseph Cornell

Object Abeilles- Joseph Cornell

Object Boxes, among others. Also captivated with birds, Cornell created an Aviary series of boxes, in which colorful images of various birds were mounted on wood, cut out, & set against harsh white backgrounds.

In addition to creating boxes and flat collages and making short art films, Cornell also kept a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary “dossiers” on themes that interested him; the dossiers served as repositories from which Cornell drew material and inspiration for boxes like his “penny arcade” portrait of Lauren Bacall. He had no formal training in art, although he was extremely well-read and was conversant with the New York art scene from the 1940s through to the 1960s.

His methodology is described in a monograph by Charles Simic as follows:

Untitled (Grand Owl Habitat)- Joseph Cornell

Untitled (Grand Owl Habitat)- Joseph Cornell

Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they’ll make a work of art. That’s Cornell’s premise, his metaphysics, and his religion….Marcel Duchamp and John Cage use chance operation to get rid of the subjectivity of the artist. For Cornell it’s the opposite. To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.

Cornell was heavily influenced by the American Transcendentalists, Hollywood starlets (to whom he sent boxes he had dedicated to them), the French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Gérard de Nerval, and great dancers of the 19th century ballet such as Marie Taglioni and Fanny Cerrito.

Christian Science belief and practice informed Cornell’s art deeply, as art historian Sandra Leonard Starr has shown.

Biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my piece today!  I will see you tomorrow on Day 346.

Best,

Linda

Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Side-View Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Side-View
Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 1 Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 1
Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 2 Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 2
Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 3 Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 3
Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Day 342- Odilon Redon- Ambiguous Realms

It’s Day 342 and I had a good time with today’s piece.  I was torn on what style I wanted to paint in because the artist did so many styles.  I decided to do a charcoal based piece because I wanted to experience charcoal a bit more before this project ended. 🙂  Thanks to my friend Mark Rachel for recommending today’s artist.  Please join me in honoring Odilon Redon today.

Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon

Cyclops- Odilon Redon

Cyclops- Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon (born Bertrand-Jean Redon; French; April 20, 1840 – July 6, 1916) was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.

Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine to a prosperous family. The young Bertrand-Jean Redon acquired the nickname “Odilon” from his mother, Odile. Redon started drawing as a child and at the age of ten he was awarded a drawing prize at school. He began the formal study of drawing at fifteen, but at his father’s insistence changed to architecture. Failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he briefly studied painting there under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864. (His younger brother Gaston Redon would become a noted architect.)

Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe

The Winged Man (The Fallen Angel) - Odilon Redon

The Winged Man (The Fallen Angel) – Odilon Redon

Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. His artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-Prussian War.

At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, and resumed working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. He called his visionary works, conceived in shades of black, his noirs. It was not until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters; he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve, in 1879.

The Eye- Odilon Redon

The Eye- Odilon Redon

Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled À rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon’s drawings.

In the 1890s pastel and oils became his favored media; he produced no more noirs after 1900. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel’s.

Redon had a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture. The figure of the Buddha increasingly showed in his work. Influences of Japonism blended into his art, such as the painting The Death of the Buddha around 1899, The Buddha in 1906, Jacob and the Angel in 1905, and Vase with Japanese warrior in 1905, amongst many others.

Baron Robert de Domecy (1867–1946) commissioned the artist in 1899 to create 17 decorative panels for the dining room of theChâteau de Domecy-sur-le-Vault near Sermizelles in Burgundy. Redon had created large decorative works for private residences in the past, but his compositions for the château de Domecy in 1900–1901 were his most radical compositions to that point and mark the transition from ornamental to abstract painting. The landscape details do not show a specific place or space.

Only details of trees, twigs with leaves, and budding flowers in an endless horizon can be seen. The colours used

Portrait of Violette Heymann- Odilon Redon

Portrait of Violette Heymann- Odilon Redon

are mostly yellow, grey, brown and light blue. The influence of the Japanese painting style found on folding screens byōbu is discernible in his choice of colours and the rectangular proportions of most of the up to 2.5 metres high panels. Fifteen of them are located today in the Musée d’Orsay, acquisitioned in 1988.

Domecy also commissioned Redon to paint portraits of his wife and their daughter Jeanne, two of which are in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay and the Getty Museum in California. Most of the paintings remained in the Domecy family collection until the 1960s.

Le Silence- Odilon Redon

Le Silence- Odilon Redon

In 1903 Redon was awarded the Legion of Honor. His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by André Mellerio in 1913; that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show.

Redon died on July 6, 1916. In 1923 Mellerio published Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur. An archive of Mellerio’s papers is held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition entitled “Beyond The Visible”, a comprehensive overview of Redon’s work showcasing more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and books from The Ian Woodner Family Collection. The exhibition ran from October 30, 2005 to January 23, 2006.

The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland is showing a retrospective from February to May 2014.

Redon’s work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to “place the visible at the service of the invisible”; thus, although his work seems filled with strange beings and grotesque dichotomies, his aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind. A telling source of Redon’s

Little Flowers (Human Heads), 1880. Charcoal on paper- Odilon Redon

Little Flowers (Human Heads), 1880. Charcoal on paper- Odilon Redon

inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journalA Soi-même (To Myself). His process was explained best by himself when he said:

“I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.”

The mystery and the evocation of Redon’s drawings are described by Huysmans in the following passage:

“Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged

Head on a Stem- Odilon Redon

Head on a Stem- Odilon Redon

in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance—heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top—recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.”

Redon also describes his work as ambiguous and undefinable:

“My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.”

Biography is from wikipedia.

I was really drawn to Redon’s charcoal or “noir” drawings.  So I decided to focus on that style.  I hope you enjoy my piece for today and I’ll see you tomorrow on Day 343.

Best,

Linda

Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Side-View Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Side-View
Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 1 Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 1
Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 2 Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 2
Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 3 Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 3
Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Day 326- KAWS- Infusion

It’s Day 326 and I’m pooped…had a show last night and then heading out to rehearsal in a little while.  Please join me in honoring KAWS A.K.A. Brian Donnelly today.

KAWS Brian Donnelly

KAWS Brian Donnelly

kaws

kaws

Brian Donnelly (born 1974), professionally known as KAWS, is a New York-based artist and designer of limited edition toys and clothing. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

KAWS was born Brian Donnelly in Jersey City, New Jersey. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration in 1996. After graduation, KAWS briefly worked for Disney as a freelance animator painting backgrounds. He also contributed to the animated series 101 Dalmatians, Daria and Doug.

He began his career as a graffiti artist growing up in Jersey City, New Jersey. Later moving to New York City in the 1990s, KAWS started subverting imagery on billboards, bus shelters and kaws aldrich invite-thumb-523x358phone booth advertisements. These reworked advertisements were at first left alone, lasting for up to several months, but as KAWS’ popularity skyrocketed, the ads became increasingly sought after. In addition to New York, KAWS has done work in Paris, London, Berlin and Tokyo.

In the late 90s, KAWS began to design and produce limited edition vinyl toys, “an instant hit with the global art toy-collecting community,” especially in Japan, where this genre is well respected and widespread. More toys and later clothing were made for Original Fake, a recent collaborative store with Medicom Toy, in the Aoyama district of Tokyo where an original limited edition product is released each week.

KAWS- The Nature of Need Exhibition

KAWS- The Nature of Need Exhibition

KAWS has also participated in other commercial collaborations with Nigo for A Bathing Ape, Jun “Jonio” Takahashi for Undercover, Michael “Mic” Neumann for Kung Faux, snowboard projects with Burton, and sneakers with Nike and Vans. His most recent collaboration was with Comme des Garçons. As of August 2010, it is reported that Kaws has designed a limited edition bottle for Dos Equis, a Mexican beer brand. The bottle was released in Mexico in early September 2010.

KAWS’ acrylic paintings and sculpture have many repeating images, all meant to be universally understood, surpassing languages and cultures. One of KAWS’ early series, Package Paintings, was made in 2000. This series, entitled The Kimpsons,subverted the famous American cartoon, The Simpsons.

KAWS explains that he “found it weird how infused a cartoon could become in people’s lives; the impact it could have, compared to regular politics.” In addition,

kaws toys

kaws toys

KAWS has reworked other familiar icons such as Mickey Mouse, the Michelin Man, the Smurfs, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Recent solo exhibitions include Original Fake at the Bape Gallery in Tokyo (2003) where his sculpture “Wonderful World” sold for $400,000. KAWS has been periodically showing both paintings and products at Colette in Paris since 1999. His work is included in the traveling exhibition Beautiful Losers, which started at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center and will be traveling through 2009 throughout the US and Europe, including his largest museum show to date, which will be held at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.

kaws installation

kaws installation

KAWS’s “Companion,” a grayscale figure based on Mickey Mouse with his face obscured by both hands, was adapted into a balloon for the 2012 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as part of the parade’s “Blue Sky Gallery” feature.

For the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards KAWS’s company redesigned the iconic moonman statue.

Biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my tribute today for KAWS.  I love his work and it makes me want to design toys!  I also enjoyed fusing my favorite cartoon character Spongebob and his artwork today. 🙂  I will see you tomorrow on Day 327!

Best,

Linda

Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Day 324- André Derain- Intoxicated With Color

It’s Day 324 and there’s water falling from the sky!  I really hope it’s doing something to help the drought here in California.  I love the rain…my dogs and joints don’t however.  Well, I’ve got to finish up some other things like feedback for my writing group tonight so please join me in honoring André Derain today!  I had so much fun with playing with color.  Fauvism has definitely become one of my favorite movements as I journeyed through this challenge.

André_Derain circa 1903

André_Derain circa 1903

Self Portrait in Red Cap- André Derain

Self Portrait in Red Cap- André Derain

André Derain (10 June 1880 – 8 September 1954) was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.

Derain was born in 1880 in Chatou, Yvelines, Île-de-France, just outside Paris. In 1895 Derain began to study on his own, contrary to claims that meeting Vlaminck or Matisse began his efforts to paint, and occasionally went to the countryside with an old friend of Cézanne’s, Father Jacomin along with his two sons. In 1898, while studying to be an engineer at the Académie Camillo, he attended painting classes under Eugène Carrière, and there met Matisse.

In 1900, he met and shared a studio with Maurice de Vlaminck and together they began to paint

Big Ben London 1906- André Derain

Big Ben London 1906- André Derain

scenes in the neighbourhood, but this was interrupted by military service at Commercy from September 1901 to 1904. Following his release from service, Matisse persuaded Derain’s parents to allow him to abandon his engineering career and devote himself solely to painting; subsequently Derain attended the Académie Julian.

Derain and Matisse worked together through the summer of 1905 in the Mediterraneanvillage of Collioure and later that year displayed their highly innovative paintings at the Salon d’Automne. The vivid, unnatural colors led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to derisively dub their works as les Fauves, or “the wild beasts”, marking the start of the Fauvist movement.

Charing Cross Bridge- André Derain

Charing Cross Bridge- André Derain

In March 1906, the noted art dealer Ambroise Vollard sent Derain to London to produce a series of paintings with the city as subject. In 30 paintings (29 of which are still extant), Derain presented a portrait of London that was radically different from anything done by previous painters of the city such as Whistler or Monet. With bold colors and compositions, Derain painted multiple pictures of the Thames and Tower Bridge.

These London paintings remain among his most popular work. Art critic T.G Rosenthal: “Not since Monet has anyone made London seem so fresh and yet remain quintessentially English. Some of his views of the Thames use the Pointillist technique of multiple dots, although by this time, because the dots have become much larger, it is rather more simply the separation of colours called Divisionism and it is peculiarly effective in conveying the fragmentation of colour in moving water in sunlight.”

In 1907 art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler purchased Derain’s entire studio, granting Derain financial stability. He experimented with stone sculpture and moved to Montmartre to be near his friend Pablo Picasso and other noted artists. Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s mistress at the time, described Derain as:

Slim, elegant, with a lively colour and enamelled black hair. With an English chic, somewhat striking. Fancy waistcoats, ties

André Derain

André Derain

in crude colours, red and green. Always a pipe in his mouth, phlegmatic, mocking, cold, an arguer.

At Montmartre, Derain began to shift from the brilliant Fauvist palette to more muted tones, showing the influence of Cubism and Paul Cézanne. (According to Gertrude Stein, there is a tradition that Derain discovered and was influenced by African sculpture before the Cubists did.) Derain supplied woodcuts in primitivist style for an edition of Guillaume Apollinaire’s first book of prose,L’enchanteur pourrissant (1909). He displayed works at the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich in 1910, in 1912 at the secessionist Der Blaue Reiter and in 1913 at the seminal Armory Show in New York. He also illustrated a collection of poems by Max Jacob in 1912.

Andre Derain - The Turning Road, L'Estaque - 1906

Andre Derain – The Turning Road, L’Estaque – 1906

At about this time Derain’s work began overtly reflecting his study of the Old Masters. The role of color was reduced and forms became austere; the years 1911–1914 are sometimes referred to as his gothic period. In 1914 he was mobilized for military service in World War I and until his release in 1919 he would have little time for painting, although in 1916 he provided a set of illustrations for André Breton’s first book, Mont de Piete.

After the war, Derain won new acclaim as a leader of the renewed classicism then ascendant. With the wildness of his Fauve years far behind, he was admired as an upholder of tradition. In 1919 he designed the ballet La Boutique fantasque for Diaghilev, leader of the Ballets Russes. A major success, it would lead to his creating many ballet designs.

The 1920s marked the height of his success, as he was awarded the Carnegie Prize in 1928 and began to exhibit extensively abroad—in London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, New York City and Cincinnati, Ohio.

During the German occupation of France in World War II, Derain lived primarily in Paris and was much courted by the Germans because

Portrait of Matisse- Andre Derain

Portrait of Matisse- Andre Derain

he represented the prestige of French culture. Derain accepted an invitation to make an official visit to Germany in 1941, and traveled with other French artists to Berlin to attend a Nazi exhibition of an officially endorsed artist, Arno Breker. Derain’s presence in Germany was used effectively by Nazi propaganda, and after the Liberation he was branded a collaborator and ostracized by many former supporters.

A year before his death, he contracted an eye infection from which he never fully recovered. He died in Garches, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France in 1954 when he was struck by a moving vehicle.

Derain’s London paintings were the subject of a major exhibition at the Courtauld Institute from 27 October 2005 to 22 January 2006.

Biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my piece today.  I really wanted to do a seascape painting.  I also didn’t want to use all pointillism and mix up his styles a bit.  I was torn with doing a portrait of myself…but sometimes I get sick of staring at my own mug with all the self portraits I’ve done and today was one of those days! 🙂  I will see you tomorrow on Day 325!  40 to go?  I’m a little sad.

Best,

Linda

Voilier sur l'eau- Tribute to André Derain Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Voilier sur l’eau- Tribute to André Derain
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Voilier sur l'eau- Tribute to André Derain Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Voilier sur l’eau- Tribute to André Derain
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Voilier sur l'eau- Tribute to André Derain Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Voilier sur l’eau- Tribute to André Derain
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Voilier sur l'eau- Tribute to André Derain Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Voilier sur l’eau- Tribute to André Derain
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Voilier sur l'eau- Tribute to André Derain Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Voilier sur l’eau- Tribute to André Derain
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Day 323- Barry McGee- Outside the Art World

It’s Day 323 and I worked on today’s piece a bit last night and this morning.  I spent most of my afternoon running errands and getting soaked in the rain.  Now I have to do stuff at home before heading out to improv class tonight.  I worked really hard on today’s piece and I am very happy with the result!  Join me in honoring Barry McGee today. 🙂

Barry McGee

Barry McGee

Barry McGee

Barry McGee

Barry McGee (born 1966 in San Francisco) is a painter and graffiti artist. He is also known by monikers such as Ray Fong, Lydia Fong, Bernon Vernon, P.Kin, Ray Virgil, Twist and further variations of Twist, such as Twister, Twisty, Twisto and others.

McGee graduated from El Camino High School in South San Francisco, California. He later graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 with a concentration in painting and printmaking.

McGee rose out of the Mission School art movement and graffiti boom in the San Francisco Bay Area during the early nineties. His

Barry McGee Installation SF MoMa.

Barry McGee Installation SF MoMa.

work draws heavily from a pessimistic view of the urban experience, which he describes as, “urban ills, overstimulations, frustrations, addictions & trying to maintain a level head under the constant bombardment of advertising”.

McGee’s paintings are very iconic, with central figures dominating abstracted backgrounds of drips, patterns and color fields. He has also painted portraits of street characters on their own empty bottles of liquor, painted flattened spray cans picked up at train yards and painted wrecked vehicles for art shows.

Barry McGee- Bottle

Barry McGee- Bottle

McGee has had numerous shows in many kinds of galleries and was also an artist in residence at inner-city McClymonds High School in Oakland, California in the early 1990s.

He was married to the artist Margaret Kilgallen, who died of cancer in 2001. The couple has a daughter named Asha.

The market value of his work rose considerably after 2001 as a result of his being included in the Venice Biennale and other major exhibitions. As a result, much of his San Francisco street art has been scavenged or stolen.

McGee was highly influential on the urban art scene that followed in his wake. He popularized use of paint drips in urban-influenced graphic design, as well as the gallery display technique of clustering paintings. These clustered compositions of pictures are based on similar installations he saw in Catholic churches whilst working in Brazil.

He also was an early participant in the practice of painting directly on gallery walls, imitating the intrusive

Barry McGee- Untitled

Barry McGee- Untitled

nature of graffiti. His use of chisel tip markers has heavily influenced sticker art and graffiti in general, which can be clearly seen in works produced by artists like sure, faust, and mecro.

McGee learned his later lowbrow style from Margaret Kilgallen, but was taught graffiti in 1989 by SR-1, mentor to both Barry McGee and artist “Dan Plasma”, and the founder of the THR graffiti crew, of which Barry was the second member.

Barry McGee

Barry McGee

McGee was involved in a controversy regarding the Adidas Y1 HUF, a shoe for which he provided the artwork. This gave rise to a protest campaign by some Asian-Americans who claimed that the picture on the shoe’s tongue depicts a racist stereotype. McGee responded to the controversy in a March 2006 press release. He stated that the drawing was a portrait of himself as an eight-year-old child. Barry McGee is half Chinese.

In 2004, as part of an exhibit, McGee spray-painted “Smash the State” on the walls of San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez’ City Hall office (City Hall is a registered national landmark).” Gonzalez told the press that he knew his office would be repainted for the next occupant.

Quotes-

  • “The more I learned about the art world, the more my interest in what was going on outside of it increased, I didn’t have any desire to bring graffiti inside the school’s walls or anything.”
  • “Compelling art to me is a name carved into a tree. Sometimes a rock soaring through a plate of glass can
    Barry McGee

    Barry McGee

    be the most beautiful, compelling work of art I have ever seen.”

  • “I’m not a sweet person. I’m OCD, ADD, but DFW and say thank you obsessively.”

Biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my piece today.  The most challenging part was painting the geometric pattern as precise as I could.  I got some new fancy brushes and boy, do they make a difference!

I will see you tomorrow on Day 324!

Best,

Linda

My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
My Secret Friend- Tribute to Barry McGee
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Day 311- Fred Sandback- Perceiving Forms

It’s Day 311 and it’s a pretty hectic day…gotta post this and then get things done before heading out to my improv show tonight.  Join me in honoring Fred Sandback today!

Fred Sandback

Fred Sandback

Fred Sandback

Fred Sandback

Fred Sandback (August 29, 1943 – June 23, 2003) was a minimalist conceptual-based sculptor known for his yarn sculptures, drawings, and prints. His estate is represented by David Zwirner, New York.

Frederick Lane Sandback was born in Bronxville, New York where, as a young man,

Fred Sandback Print

Fred Sandback Print

he made banjos and dulcimers. He majored in philosophy at Yale University (BA, 1966) before studying sculpture at Yale School of Art (MFA, 1969) where he studied with, among others, visiting instructors Donald Judd and Robert Morris.

Sandback is primarily known for his Minimalist works made from lengths of colored yarn. The artist’s early interest in stringed musical instruments led him to make dulcimers and banjos as a teenager. In 1967, he produced the sculpture that would establish the terms of his mature work. Using string and wire, he outlined the shape of a 12-foot-long 2-by-4 board lying on the floor. 

Fred Sandback Untitled, 1979

Fred Sandback
Untitled, 1979

Though he employed metal wire and elastic cord early in his career, the artist soon dispensed with mass and weight by using acrylic yarn. His yarn, elastic cord, and wire sculptures define edges of virtual shapes that ask the viewer’s brain to perceive the rest of the form.

In that way his work can be considered visionary or imaginative, as well as minimal

Fred Sandback Untitled, 1984

Fred Sandback
Untitled, 1984

and literal. Indeed Sandback was fond of installing “corner” pieces whose shadows assist with this form completion process.

In describing his work he stated, “It’s a consequence of wanting the volume of sculpture without the opaque mass that I have the lines.” and “I did have a strong gut feeling from the beginning though, and that was wanting to be able to make sculpture that didn’t have an inside.” Sandback himself referred to his sculptures operating in pedestrian space, acknowledging both the viewer’s movement through a space and as something to be engaged actively.

Fred Sandback Untitled, 1984

Fred Sandback
Untitled, 1984

Sandback’s first one-person exhibitions were at the Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, and the Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, both in 1968, while the artist was still a graduate student. Following this debut, Sandback exhibited widely his minimalist sculptures and prints in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

His artwork was included in the 1968 Annual Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Biennale of Sydney in 1976, and the Seventy-third American Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979. In 2003, several large Sandback sculptures were permanently installed at Dia’s museum in Beacon, New York. That same year, Sandback created Mikado (Sculptural study for the Pinakothek der Moderne) as site-specific at the then newly opened Pinakothek der Moderne.

Sandback’s work was the subject of an extensive survey exhibition organized in 2005 by the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (which traveled to the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and the Neue Galerie am Joanneum, Graz, in 2006). His work is represented in many public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Sandback was one of a small group of avant garde artists sponsored by the Dia Center for the Arts. In 1981 the Dia Art Foundation initiated and maintained a museum of his work, The Fred Sandback Museum in Winchendon, Massachusetts, which was closed in

Fred Sandback Untitled (Jahn #35), 1975

Fred Sandback
Untitled (Jahn #35), 1975

1996. Dia presented exhibitions of his works in 1988 and in 1996–97. In 2007 the Fred Sandback Archive, a non-profit organization was established primarily to create and maintain an archival resource on Sandback’s work. At Christie’s New York, his four-part installation Untitled (1968) was sold for $266,500 in November 2010.

Biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my piece today!  I will see you tomorrow on Day 312.

Best,

Linda

Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Side-View Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Side-View
Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Untitled 311- Tribute to Fred Sandback
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Pen on Canvas

Day 310- Ad Dekkers- Geometric Relief

It’s Day 310 and I had a great time creating today’s piece.  I worked entirely with wood pieces and made a somewhat architectural piece, working with squares and rectangles only.  It was geometrical…algebraic even! 😉  Okay, joking aside, I had a wonderful zen-esque experience.  Join me in honoring Ad Dekkers today.

Ad Dekkers

Ad Dekkers

Broken cirle in Amsterdam- Ad Dekkers

Broken cirle in Amsterdam- Ad Dekkers

Adriaan “Ad” Dekkers (Nieuwpoort, South Holland, 21 March 1938 – Gorinchem, 27 February 1974) was as Dutch artist mostly known for his reliefs involving simple geometrical forms.

Dekkers was born to Hendrik Pieter Dekkers, a school principal, and Anna Elizabeth Berdina Godtschalk. Adrian attended his father’s school and also received training as a decorative painter. Between 1954 and 1958 he studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy in

Ad Dekkers, Reliëf met zwarte driehoeken

Ad Dekkers, Reliëf met zwarte driehoeken

Rotterdam where he was mostly engaged in drawing of landscapes and still images. In February 1960 Dekkers entered military service, and in December 1961 married Machelina Hendrika van Bruggen, with whom he had one son.

Since early 1960s Dekkers became dissatisifed with painting and focused on reliefs, mostly made of plastic. By 1968 he was recognized as a master in this area and started creating monumental sculptures and reliefs in architectural environment.

Ad Dekkers - Relief met afgeschuinde blokjes

Ad Dekkers – Relief met afgeschuinde blokjes

His works became accepted at major international exhibitions, such as the Biennale de Paris in 1965, São Paulo Art Biennial in 1967 and documenta in Kassel in 1968. He also had a number of solo exhibitions in the Netherlands. After his death in 1974, his works were exhibited in Eindhoven and Düsseldorf and placed in museums in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, England and the United States.

Biography is from wikipedia.

Below is from tate.org.uk.

Dutch artist, born in Nieuwpoort. Studied at the Academy in Rotterdam 1954-8.

Ad Dekkers Verschoven Kwadraten 1965

Ad Dekkers Verschoven Kwadraten 1965

Began to make reliefs in 1961 influenced partly by Mondrian, built out of layers of flat geometric shapes and with asymmetrical compositions. Then abandoned the use of colour and began to work entirely in white.

Ad Dekkers, Variaties op cirkels IV

Ad Dekkers, Variaties op cirkels IV

First one-man exhibition with Jan van Munster at the Galerie De Drie Hendricken, Amsterdam, 1963. From about 1965 his reliefs became more systematic and linear, constructed out of fewer planes or with lines cut into a flat surface; they were often based on the transformation of one regular geometric shape into another, such as a square into a circle. Also made some three-dimensional sculptures from 1968. Died in Gorinchem.

~

I hope you enjoy my piece today.  I think the one thing I should’ve done more was sanding down the wood pieces, but I like my design.  I wanted to capture his style, but also retain something unique.  I will see you tomorrow on Day 311!

Best,

Linda

Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Side-View Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Side-View
Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Close-Up 1 Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Close-Up 1
Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Close-Up 2 Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Close-Up 2
Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Close-Up 3 Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Close-Up 3
Rechthoeken En Vierkanten- Tribute to Ad Dekkers
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Wood Panel

Day 305- Invader- Invasion!

It’s Day 305!  I have a show tonight and had only a few hours of sleep last night…so I finished my piece early so that I can take a little nap and relax a bit today.  Join me in honoring Invader today!

Invader

Invader

Invader

Invader

Invader is the pseudonym of a well-known French urban artist, born in 1969, whose work is modelled on the crude pixellation of 1970s 8-bit video games. He took his name from the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders, and much of his work is composed of square ceramic tiles inspired by video game characters.

Although he prefers to remain incognito, and guards his identity carefully, his distinctive creations can be seen in many highly-visible locations in more than 60

cities in 30 countries. He documents each intervention in a city as an “Invasion”, and has published books and maps of the location of each of his street mosaics.

In addition to working with tiles, Invader is one of the leading proponents of indoor mosaics created using stacks of Rubik’s Cubes in a style he refers to as “Rubikcubism”. He is also known for his QR code mosaic works.

As a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts, or Tiling School on Mars, Invader initially derived inspiration for his creations from video games from the late 1970s to early 1980s that he played when he was growing up, particularly characters from Space Invaders, from which he derived his work name. Games of the era were constructed with 8-bit graphics, and so lend themselves well to the mosaic treatment, with each tile representing one pixel. Invader likes tiles for their robustness and permanence. Invader’s first mosaic was installed in the mid 1990s in his home city. It was a sleeper for several years before the full “invasion” programme was conceived in 1996.

In this project, the idea is to bring the virtual world into reality. One can see many things in it, but it refers to the early days of digital and the video game.

The first wave of “invasion” began with his home city in 1998, and then spread to 31 other cities in France. Since then, Invader’s works have appeared in 60 cities in 30 countries around the world.  He has invaded New York five times, and Hong Kong on three separate

Invader

Invader

occasions. He has tagged historic buildings and other locations. One of the more prominent places where the mosaics have been installed is on the Hollywood Sign.  The first was placed on the letter D on 31 December 1999 to mark the Y2K bug. During subsequent trips to Los Angeles, Invader placed mosaics on the eight other letters of the sign.

In June 2011, Invader marked the installation of his 1000th work in Paris with an exhibition at La Générale entitled “1000”. Since 2000, the artist has installed in excess of 70 pieces of work dotted around Hong Kong; the artist has declared the third wave undertaken in city, with 50 works, “probably my most accomplished city invasion wave”. By June 2011, 77 cities have been invaded, 2,692 Space Invaders placed comprising some 1.5 million ceramic tiles; 19 invasion maps have been published. Invader estimates that more than 15% of his early pieces, ones that were small and placed rather low, have been removed. To combat their removal or damage by building owners, thieves or fans, Invader places many out of easy reach.

In 2012, Invader made a short film Art4Space documenting his attempt to launch one of his aliens into space on a modified weather balloon. Invader is also known for his QR code works. Created using regular black and white tiles, the patterns can be decoded using apps

installed on smart phones. One decoded message reads “This is an invasion”.

Invader

Invader

Invader works incognito, often masked and largely at night. To guard his anonymity, he pixellates his own image or wears a mask as a disguise for interviews. He claims that only a few people know his real name and his face, and that even his parents think he works as a tiler in the construction industry.

By June 2011, Invader had travelled around the world six times and spent 22 nights in prison cells. Invader accepts arrest as an occupational hazard. He was arrested in 2010 for placing a mosaic on the Hollywood sign, charged with vandalism and made to pay a fine. In July 2011, the Los Angeles Police Department detained two French nationals on suspicion of vandalism near MOCA’s Little Tokyo gallery with tile and grout in hand. The police asserted that one of them was Invader, but released the pair without charge. He was also arrested by plain-clothed police in October 2013 in New York, just as he had completed installing a mural in Orchard Street in East Village in the early hours. He was again fined; the owner of the building took down the work featuring Princess Peach and had it preserved. Invader said that whilst creating installations he had been accosted by police in Hong Kong, but was left alone once they realised he was not committing any crime.

Invader sees himself as a hacker of public space spreading a virus of mosaic; the streets are his canvas, his invasions gifts to the city and its people. He believes that museums and galleries are not accessible to everyone, so deliberately makes his works public by installing

them at street level for ordinary people to enjoy on a daily basis.

The sites for the mosaics are not random. These are scouted and carefully researched, often with local support, and are also chosen for the

Invader

Invader

visibility (strategic), local interest (aesthetic) and symbolism (conceptual) they provide. Although high visibility is one objective, Invader may choose locations that are less prominent. He has said that “A spot is like a revelation… it jumps out at you.“

Although many of his works feature the signature aliens, no two pieces are alike. The subject matter may also be themed and adapted to their context. Invader’s repertoire of subjects now includes Star Wars characters (London), as well as the Pink Panther and Mega

Invader

Invader

Man(Paris).  Sites near major bank buildings are marked with dollar sign mosaics. His works in Hong Kong have a more oriental theme: with some martial arts characters; gold and red colours have been employed more often to reflect the traditional Chinese colours for fire and earth. Typically, mosaics are placed ten to fifteen feet above the ground, and on street corners in areas of high visibility. He has developed methods and techniques to attain those potentially dangerous and hard-to-reach locations. Invader unveiled a massive Spider-Man (PA 1040) very high up in the 11th arrondissement April 2013.  In his invasion of Hong Kong in 2014, he planted mosaics that featured Hong Kong Phooey, Thomas from Kung-Fu Master and Popeye.

Invader has said: “I don’t know what ‘holidays’ means because anywhere I go, I can’t resist bringing tiles and cement with me.” His mosaics are half-built in advance. The weight and fragility of the tiles are constraints that influence his planning and site choices. When Invader arrives in a city, he usually stays in a city for two or three weeks.  He obtains a map and spends at least a week installing the mosaics, which are catalogued (each given an identifier with the city code and sequential number), photographed (one close-up and one in its context) and mapped to indicate their locations within the city. He prints and distributes “invasion maps” within the city he is visiting, and they are later sold in his on-line shop. In Montpellier, the locations of mosaics were chosen so that, when placed on a map, they form an image of a giant Space Invaders alien.

Since about 2004, Invader has been working on another project that involves making artworks exclusively using Rubik’s Cubes. He may

Invader

Invader

be the originator, and is certainly one of the foremost proponents of the art form he calls “Rubikcubism”.  Invader takes an image from popular culture, uses a computer program to work out the precise disposition of the six colours for each image. He then manipulates nine pixels for each Rubik’s Cube to give the required pattern – taking perhaps ten seconds per cube, constructs a full image by stacking them, after which the cubes are glued to a backing board. A piece typically composed of approximately 300 cubes, measures about 0.9 by 1.3 metres (3 ft × 4 ft), and weighs approximately 36 kilograms (80 lb), but the exact size depends on the subject and the desired level of detail.

The works are themed along three axes: “Bad Men”, where he reinterprets villains such as Osama bin Laden, Jaws and Al Capone; “Masterpieces” where famous paintings by artists such as Delacroix, Warhol, Seurat, Lichentenstein are given a workover; and “Low Fidelity” based on iconic album art such as Country Life, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and Nevermind.[12][26][29] He has created images of the Mona Lisa and the Dalai Lama with this technique. He received a lot of attention for the 2005 portrait of Florence Rey he made with the technique, which has since been much imitated.

Space Invader tours have been organised by third parties in Paris. Invader has had solo exhibitions at art galleries in Paris, Osaka,

Invader

Invader

Melbourne, Los Angeles, New York City, London and Rome. Space Invader has shown in many galleries, art centres and museums, from the 6th Lyon contemporary art biennale (2001), the MAMA Gallery in Rotterdam (2002), at the Paris based Magda Danysz Gallery (2003), at the Borusan Center for Culture and Arts in Istanbul, Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles (2004).

In 2010, he was one of the featured artists in the Banksy production Exit Through the Gift Shop shot by Thierry Guetta (Mr. Brainwash), Invader’s cousin. In 2011, he took part in the MoCA LA show at the Geffen Contemporary  : “Art in the streets” curated by Jeffrey Deitch.  His work, when sold in galleries, often fetches six-figure sums.

Fellow street artist Shepard Fairey wrote in Swindle:

Invader

Invader

Invader’s pop art may seem shallow, but by taking the risk of illegally re-contextualizing video game characters in an urban environment that provides more chaotic social interaction than a gamer’s bedroom, he makes a statement about the desensitizing nature of video games and consumer culture. In a postmodern paradox, a game like Grand Theft Auto takes the danger of the streets and puts it in a safe video game, while Invader takes a safe video game icon and inserts it into the danger of the streets.

Invader’s work is not universally welcomed. During his Hong Kong invasion in early 2014, Invader installed 48 works all over the city. However, the city’s Highways Department admitted to removing at least one work later

Invader

Invader

that month, taking down a roadside mosaic in Fortress Hill “to ensure safety of road users”. Local residents were disappointed, and saw the removal as an example of the government only paying lip-service to promoting the arts in the city.  The artist expressed his sadness, saying he “never faced a situation where a public authority would systematically and rapidly remove the art from the streets”.

Biography is from wikipedia.

I had such a fun time with today’s piece!  I hope you enjoy it.  I will see you tomorrow on Day 306.

Best,

Linda

ART- Tribute to Invader Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

ART- Tribute to Invader
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Side-View ART- Tribute to Invader Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

Side-View
ART- Tribute to Invader
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 1 ART- Tribute to Invader Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 1
ART- Tribute to Invader
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 2 ART- Tribute to Invader Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 2
ART- Tribute to Invader
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 3 ART- Tribute to Invader Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 3
ART- Tribute to Invader
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Day 303- Robert Indermaur- The Theater of Man

It’s Day 303 and I’m feeling slightly under the weather…hopefully it’s just allergies and not a cold or flu…I have shows coming up that I don’t want to miss!  My friend Jon told me about today’s artist and lent me a book of his and I love his work.  It was really challenging finding much information on him online AND it was difficult to paint in his style…but it was very inspiring and thought-provoking.  I love the images and people he portrays.  Join me in honoring Robert Indermaur today!  I did find a small biography on his website.

Robert Indermaur

Robert Indermaur

Der Kuckuck 1981- Robert Indermaur

Der Kuckuck 1981- Robert Indermaur

Robert Indermaur

Born 1947 in Chur / Graubünden.

I went to school in Chur until completion at the Grisons teacher seminar in 1967.

In the following years I was traveling with friends across Europe, Asia and Africa.

In between, I taught as a primary school teacher in St.Antönien, Passugg, Domat / Ems and Chur.

With my future wife and a few friends I founded in 1974 in Chur, the first small theater (Klibühni Schnidrzunft) in Graubünden, which we initiated ten years and accompanied.

30 years ago I began to make my favorite activity to the profession. First, as an abstract, then as a figurative painter and sculptor later I showed my works at more than one hundred solo and many group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad.

In 1977, the graphic artist Albert Brun and I, six issues of the satirical magazine

Kopf V 1988- Robert Indermaur

Kopf V 1988- Robert Indermaur

“The ball horn” out.

I am married since 1975. My wife, Barbara, gave birth to our three children, daughter Rebecca and their two sons Alexander and Adrian.
I have different sculptures and murals for public spaces – created and for three theater productions the stage.

Fenster V 1988- Robert Indermaur

Fenster V 1988- Robert Indermaur

1989/90 we spent a year in California / USA. Otherwise, since 1983, we live in Almens / GR. I work there – and from 2004 also in my second studio in the neighboring village Paspels.

Biography is from www.indermaur.net.  The translation is kind of wonky, but understandable!

Below is text transcribed from the book that was loaned to me.  Robert Indermaur- Departure (Bilder 1983-1989) I wanted to include more information. 🙂 Photos are also from the same book.

Excerpts from Ambiguous Dramas, Tangible Dreams: The Art of Robert Indermaur- By Katherine Gregor

Robert Indermaur’s paintings capture this bittersweet quality of human experience in a powerful, wonderfully visual fashion.  His work makes the unspoken tangible; in his odd, often mysterious images we instinctively recognize our own internal doubts, perceptions, moods, anxieties.  Indermaur’s world of muted palettes and deep shadows, isolated individuals, empty rooms, and ambiguous drams

Frauenhaus 1988- Robert Indermaur

Frauenhaus 1988- Robert Indermaur

seems to map a kind of universal psychological terrain.  The searching characters at the center of this world, who carry on and look for meaning despite the oddness of their circumstances, serve as our allegorical stand-ins, so that ultimately these paintings portray not individuals but something larger and more tentative – the difficulties and tensions of being human.

Many of these paintings are strongly narrative, literary, even theatrical.  They tell us stories, complete with characters and settings and dramatic tension, but their tales are strange, absurdist, incomplete; they provoke our need to explain.

In other works Indermaur explores the idea of the theater of man – Humans on display in another sense, by their own choice.  An audience is almost never visible in these works; the issue seems to be the individual’s act of exposure, the experience of being publicly “on stage”.

Der Freund 1982- Robert Indermaur

Der Freund 1982- Robert Indermaur

Through works like these, Indermaur stimulates us to think deeply about the experience of being human.  Sometimes these paintings suggest the artist’s own conclusions; more often they pose open-ended questions, merely hinting at shades of meaning. To solve the puzzles of these paintings present, we must supply pieces of ourselves.

~

I hope you enjoy my piece today.  It was much more difficult that I initially thought it was going to be this morning.  I couldn’t quite get the brushstrokes right and if I was feeling better, I could spend more time on it, but I think it turned out well enough.  I really like the concept of my piece and I hope you do too!

I will see you tomorrow on Day 304!  Whew, I can’t believe I haven’t missed a day this year yet!  Knock on wood.  Knock knock.

 

Best,

Linda

Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Lachen ist Leben- Tribute to Robert Indermaur
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas