Kenneth Price

Kenneth Price

            Kenneth Price was a well-rounded artist from America, but he was most widely known for his ceramics and printmaking.  Price created abstract shapes out of clay, and then fired it.  Instead of glazing the pieces, he painted them with bright acrylics, and then sanded them down.  Kenneth Price was extremely influenced by artist Peter Voulkos during his visit to the Otis Art Institute.  Voulkos’s influence enticed Price to commit himself to clay as his primary medium.  However, Price did not limit himself completely to clay, and has prints, drawings, and sculptures in his portfolio as well.   

            I was interested to learn that he was influenced by Mexican pottery, and that he made an effort to go visit local stores just to look at the different types of pottery.  I also learned that even though Peter Voulkos had such a strong influence over Kenneth Price, Price eventually looked for a new University to work with to try and develop his own style.  I like his ceramic sculptures that seem almost like molten lava, and I am influenced by the different method he had of coloring these ceramics.  I also really like his acrylic and ink drawings of abstract figures on a landscape scene. 

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger

            Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger is known for her black and white photography.  These photographs have text overlaid on top, most often white text with a red background for emphasis.  Kruger worked with magazine design at Mademoiselle Magazine, House and Garden, and others.  This magazine style can be seen in many of her photographs.  Kruger takes existing photos and adds text overtop of them.  The phrases on her photos are meant to provoke emotion in the viewer, and are often feminist in nature.  Among some of her famous slogans are “I shop therefore I am” and “We don’t need another hero”. 

            I like Barbara Kruger’s style of transforming existing photographs into new artworks just by simply putting phrases overtop of them.  I admire how easily recognizable her artwork is.  Also, I am inspired how she has turned words and phrases into its own type of artwork.  The photos she uses are sometimes juxtaposed with the words that are overlaid onto them, and I enjoy Kruger’s themes of feminism and commercialism.  One work she did was a bus covered with phrases to promote the instruction of art.  I like that her art is so reflective of raising public awareness, whether it is through billboards, magazine art, or public commissions. 

Jacek Tylicki

Jacek Tylicki

            Jacek Tylicki works within a wide range of art, including installation and land art.  His early works involved blank canvas paper that Tylicki left outside exposed to the natural elements.  Tylicki is also known for “Chicken Art”, which is an installation in the Now Gallery.  In this installation, live chickens were housed in the gallery, and looked at paintings of chickens that hung on the walls.  His statement about this piece was “For the chicken the most beautiful is chicken”.   The “Chicken Art” project was viewed as a statement about the overexploitation of the human form.  As an environmental artist, Tylicki’s art often questions the relationship between society and pollution.

            My favorite piece of Jacek Tylicki’s is Give If You Can-Take If You Have To.  I like his ideas about public interaction and cooperation.  This piece is also an environmental statement about human consumption, and how money is spent wastefully, therefore contributing to pollution.  His early projects involving the canvas exposed to nature also inspired me.  It is an interesting idea to experiment with blank canvas and nature, especially since Tylicki placed the canvasses in different types of environments and left them there for different amounts of time. 

Jean Wells

Jean Wells

            Jean Wells creates large-scale mosaic sculptures.  Often the subjects of these mosaics are colorful food items, such as candy, ice cream, and hot dogs.  To create these sculptures, Wells has colored glass custom made for her, and then she hand cuts each piece.  The tiny scrap fragments of glass are then used to fill in details.  The frameworks she uses to support the glass are found objects, or Wells carves armatures out of foam.  Jean Wells is often connected with Pop Art, for her six-foot-tall ice cream cones and sports cars made of glass mosaic.  Urban Fruit Tree is a particularly large sculpture in the shape of a tree which is adorned with mosaic sculptures similar to her larger iconic works. 

            Jean Wells’s art at first glance is beautiful to look at, but I like that she has a deeper meaning behind the sculptures of food.  She is interested in junk food and candy as a statement about body image, and this is reflected in her Beach Babes sculpture as well, which features larger women who are confident about their bodies wearing bathing suits.  I also like the fragmented figures that Wells has created, such as Mixed Messages, which have other objects mixed in with the glass medium.

Andrea Zittel

Andrea Zittel

            Andrea Zittel is a sculptor and installation artist.  Her main focus in her artworks is the relationships between the basic necessities to survive.  Zittel creates “Living Units”, which incorporate spaces for eating, sleeping, bathing, and other human needs into one compact structure.  These “Living Units” have bloomed into a successful business, called “A-Z Administrative Services”, which provide these simple products available to consumers.  Andrea Zittel was also commissioned by Denmark to create a floating island made of concrete, upon which Zittel lived for one month.  She has also been known to wear one outfit every day during a season, which reflects her themes about the simple necessities. 

            I am inspired by Andrea Zittel because of the simplified “Living Units” she creates.  I especially like that she uses these spaces herself within her own home.  I also like how successfully marketable these Units have become.  I am interested in the exploration Zittel’s work has between basic human needs and domestic environments.  I also like the connections her work makes between social needs versus isolation.  The thing about Andrea Zittel that inspires me the most is her willingness to make herself a part of her art, by wearing the same outfit for months, living on a concrete island alone, or remodeling her living spaces on a regular basis.    

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread

            Sculpture artist Rachel Whiteread is the first woman to have won the Turner Prize in 1993.  Her sculptures are often in the form of casts.  These casts are of ordinary objects.  Often, she will take casts of the negative space inside an object, such as the inside of a house.  One of her most famous casts is House, which is a cast she took of the inside of a Victorian style house.  Whiteread’s series Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) is a series of resin casts featuring the space underneath furniture.  Rachel Whiteread uses plaster, rubber, and resin in her casting process.  Other objects she has casted include bookshelves, furniture, cardboard boxes, and many others.    

            I think Rachel Whiteread’s casts of objects are interesting, especially the negative space casts.  I like the idea of turning negative space into positive space.  I also like that she thinks of this process as solidifying the residue of the years of use the object has seen, such as the furniture resin casts.  These minimalist sculptures really make the viewer think about these places that exist in everyday life, but are rarely noticed.  I am also inspired by her works that are displayed outside, because many of these works are the cast of the “inside” of something, yet they are being displayed outdoors.  I like the concept of her bringing the “inside” to the “outside”.

Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley

            Antony Gormley is a famous sculptor from Britain.  He is famous for his use of the human body within his works.  He has even used his own body to make metal casts for his projects.  Gormley’s use of the human body attempts to create works that viewers can identify with because the body is a reference point that we all have in common.  Many of his human figure sculptures are created out of cast iron, fiberglass, and even clay.  He also uses geometric shapes in a more abstract depiction of the body, but even these are still recognizably human in nature.   Gormley also creates drawings using a wide range of mediums, from the traditional inks and charcoals, to linseed oil, coffee, and bodily fluids as drawing utensils.    

            I am inspired by Antony Gormley’s theory about looking and finding.  Many of his sculptures, especially in his Event Horizon project, have been placed on the tops of buildings, which disrupts the skyline.  Gormley says that this disruption of the skyline makes people more aware of their surroundings, and once they begin actively looking they will find his artworks.  I also enjoy looking through Gormley’s portfolio of drawings, because of his experimentation with nontraditional drawing materials.  He always stays true to his theme of the human body as a subject of his artwork. 

Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman

 

Tom Friedman is a conceptual sculpture artist from America.  Friedman creates his sculptures by taking normal everyday objects and placing them in complicated geometric patterns.  He has exhibited work in London, Tokyo, Rome, and several other prestigious cities.  His work Untitled (sun) is representative with his use of repeated everyday objects, in which more than 3,500 wooden dowel rods were painted yellow and then glued into a Styrofoam ball.  Other famous sculptures he has made include a sphere made from 1,500 pieces of chewed bubble gum, and a self-portrait of himself in the form of a shattered person lying on the floor, made out of construction paper.

            I like Tom Friedman’s artworks a lot, and I am inspired by the items he uses.  I like that he uses everyday objects and presents them to the public in new and impressive ways.  The way he combines the objects in large repeating numbers and builds them into geometric shapes gives a good impact on the viewer.  My favorite piece of his is Untitled, 1992 which at first glance is a bunch of different sized and colored balls piled atop of one another.  However, when I did more research I learned that each of these balls was stolen by the artist.  The amount of balls Friedman stole amounts to about 200, which gives the artwork a whole new meaning. 

Eva and Adele

Eva and Adele

            Eva and Adele are a pair of artists who are known for their performance art, and their belief that they themselves are works of art.  Both are now legally viewed as women, although until recently they were viewed as a woman and a man.  As a part of their performance art, Eva and Adele dress identically, with matching makeup and bald heads.  They also work hard to keep their bodily proportions as close to each other’s as possible, such as their hip size, which is 96 centimeters for both of them.  Along with their performance artwork, Eva and Adele collect photos of themselves, self-taken as well as photos that passerby have taken of them in public.  These photos then become reference for Eva and Adele to create oil pastel self-portraits out of.  They also have some sculptures dealing with the theme of pairs and femininity. 

            I like that Eva and Adele take performance art to the next level by considering themselves walking sculptures, similarly to Gilbert and George.  Eva and Adele dedicate themselves to the process of maintaining their public image, because they take great care to dress exactly the same and are never seen without the other by their side.  I admire that they are so committed to keeping up this appearance that they refuse to go out in public if both of them are not in full makeup.  I also am inspired by the feminine theme they have, and the interesting addition of the matching bald heads. 

Jon Coffelt

Jon Coffelt

            Jon Coffelt works out of New York City on his paintings, sculptures, and other types of art, including book art and sewing.  Coffelt began his career with fashion, until switching to a full-time artist.  He has many different styles of artwork in his portfolio.  One of these types is his Ritual Sticks, in which he wraps wooden dowel rods with colored tapes.  To Coffelt, the art of the Ritual Sticks is emphasized in the process of wrapping the sticks than the finished product.  Most of Coffelt’s works, especially his Wellen series, have a theme of repetition and attention to the process of creation.

            I find it interesting that Coffelt focuses more on his method of creating the art, and cares less for how it looks in the end.  His works reflect the repetition and control that he seeks in his artistic process, and his Ritual Sticks accurately reflect that he indeed believes creating art is a ritual for him.  I also like the amount of detail and precision that Jon Coffelt puts into his work, such as with his Wellen series, which is created entirely out of small pieces of duct-tape.  I was also very interested in his Miniature Clothing Project, because it reflects his roots working in the fashion industry, and he also uses the miniature clothing items as a portrait of the person it represents, due to the emotional ties people have to clothing.     

Ronald Davis

Ronald Davis

            Ronald Davis is an artist from America who works with abstraction in his paintings.  The subjects of Davis’s paintings are geometric shapes painted with solid colors and have hard edges.  Ronald Davis also has worked with shaped canvas, in which the physical canvas is altered and “shaped” to create a new canvas.  Often these shaped canvases function as both paintings and sculptures.  These abstract paintings eventually led to Davis creating geometric art with the aid of a computer.  He also experimented with the appearance of wax on wood in his “Wax Series”. 

            I found it very interesting to read Ronald Davis’s artist statements, and I learned that he never intended to be an artist, and that he had actually had other plans for his life.  I was also inspired that he thinks the word “artist” does not hold much meaning anymore, and he suggests that the Greek word “artisan” is a better fit for the work that he does.  I was also very interested that he admits he does not know what his paintings mean, but he still enjoys the process of making them.  I like the abstract paintings that Ronald Davis creates, and I also like the idea of the altered canvas.    

Vikky Alexander

Vikky Alexander

            Vikky Alexander is a well-known Canadian artist who works with installation.  Her installations are made with photography, drawings, and collages.  She also works with sculptural objects, which are often geometric and are constructed of mirrors.  Vikky Alexander is associated with the Appropriation art movement, in which found objects are used with little or no altercations.  This idea of “borrowing” reflects in Alexander’s work, as well as the use of collage and digital transferring.  In her sculptures, such as Glass Bed With Tables, Alexander uses geometrically shaped glass to create simplistic versions of everyday household furniture.  Her large-scale photo-installations like Morning Forest are so large that the viewer feels transported into a new environment.  Her other installations that involve the use of mirrors create an altered sense of reality.

            I like Vikky Alexander’s use of mirrors within her artworks, especially in her installation pieces because mirrors are so good for altering the senses of the viewer.  I also like the large scale of photography that Alexander works at.  Although I did not like Alexander’s photography, I was inspired by the photo appropriations she used in some of her pieces.  I think that her color photography is stronger than her black and white photography.

Dennis Oppenheim

Dennis Oppenheim

            Dennis Oppenheim was a conceptual artist from America who worked with performance, photography, sculpture, and even the earth.  One of his most well-known works was Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, which was a performance piece in which he lay in the sun for five hours with a book lying open on his chest.  At the end of the five hours, the book was removed to reveal a second-degree sunburn around the outline of where the book had been sitting.  Oppenheim also did installations, such as Attempt to Raise Hell, where a figure would repeatedly strike a bell while lunging.  Dennis Oppenheim also got involved with an earthworks art movement, in which he would cut shapes into snow, wheat fields, and other types of landscapes.

            I like Dennis Oppenheim’s public artworks, such as Device to Root Out Evil, which seems to defy gravity, as a church that is upside-down and balanced on its steeple.  I also liked his Reading Position for a Second-Degree Burn because of the concept of using the sun and skin as artistic mediums.  I also really enjoyed the concept behind his Two Stage Transfer Drawings.  In these drawings, he draws a design with a marker upon a participants back, and the participant attempts to draw the same drawing on a wall based on what movements he feels on his back.  Oppenheim considers this process “drawing through him”.

Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall

            Sarah Hall is a stained glass artist from Canada.  Her projects are on such a large scale that she had to relocate her studio to Germany, in order to access professional glass artisans and the proper equipment to help her fabricate her pieces.  Hall experiments with the use of photovoltaics in her glass artworks.  Photovoltaics is a method in which electrical power is generated by capturing solar radiation and then converting it into a current.  This use of photovoltaics allows Hall to have renewable-energy glass sculptures.  One such place that her stained glass windows are being used with photovoltaics is at the Grass Valley School, located in Washington.  The glass windows are connected to an LED fixture in the main hallway, and gives visible feedback about the renewable energy that is powering it.  It is designed so that on sunnier days, the bulb will glow more brightly.

            I like the stained glass work of Sarah Hall.  I like that she is employing the use of renewable energy into her artworks.  I also like that her artwork is beautiful to look at, while still being functional.  I am inspired by the functionality of her pieces, and also the large scale in which she works.  I also like that the environmental difference that is being made can be seen visually through the brightness of the light bulb. 

Banksy

Banksy

            Banksy is a graffiti artist from England, who also works with paint and film.  Banksy believes graffiti art is just as natural as any other medium, and does not believe that it should be labeled as vandalism.  His art can be found on public spaces and he employs the use of stencils to help him create the pieces.  His film Exit Through the Gift Shop is a documentary following street artist Thierry Guetta and his journey to becoming famous.  His work auctions off for extremely high prices, which started a chain reaction of the growing popularity of street art, and new artists emerging.  Often Banksy’s works, such as his Pulp Fiction-inspired mural get painted over, which usually elicits an artistic response from Banksy.

            Banksy’s work inspires me because it is a nontraditional form of art, yet the pieces auction off at just as high of prices as famous painters’ pieces do.  I think that Banksy’s use of stencil on his street art is an efficient and imaginative way to create his pieces in a shorter amount of time and more accurately.  I was also interested in the anonymity that Banksy has attempted to retain.  His anonymity is so important to him that he works under a pseudonym and has frequently not shown up to collect money from auctions of his work.  I think part of the public attraction to his work is from the anonymity and the idea that the artist could be anyone, which is an interesting and appealing idea to play with. 

Richard T. Scott

Richard T. Scott

            Richard T. Scott is a Classical Realist painter.  Classical Realism is an artistic movement that began as a literary style, and then transformed into an artistic style.  This movement depicts love for the natural world, and includes aspects of Classicism, Realism, and even Impressionism.  Scott, like other artists associated with Classical Realism, creates his works from observation, and avoids the use of reference photos.  His paintings, such as Aurochs and Angels use dark colors and a sense of myth to portray his timeless portraits.  Scott strives for ambiguity in his pieces because it allows the viewers to add their own meanings to the work drawing from their own life experiences.  Richard T. Scott is also an active part of the Kitsch movement, which combines emotional imagery in older styles of painting.  Kitsch focuses on the concept of a piece more than the piece itself.

            I enjoy the Classical approach that Richard T. Scott brings to contemporary figure painting.  I am inspired by the sense of ambiguity that Scott wants each portrait to have.  The human figure is something that people will always bring their own meanings to, especially ambiguous facial expressions.  Another thing about Richard T. Scott’s work that I like is the dark colors and earthy tones that he uses.  I think they go very well together and help to add to the mythological and dreamlike reality that he strives for in his paintings. 

Fang Lijun

Fang Lijun

            Fang Lijun is a Chinese artist who works within the Cynical Realism movement.  Cynical Realism, typically depicted through paintings, is a movement that explores China’s transition from Communism to the modernization of today.  The perspective taken upon the social and political issues is realistic, but with a humorous touch.  Fang Lijun’s artworks feature bald people, which have social meaning in China.  Chinese men that are bald are traditionally viewed as dumb.  Lijun uses the bald figure in his paintings to emphasize judgment of a person based upon appearances.  Lijun also uses inks in traditional woodblock printing.  These prints are large scale, and are spiritual in nature.

            I liked learning about the Cynical Realism movement in China.  I am inspired by Lijun’s use of the bald figures in his paintings because of the social interpretations it holds in Chinese culture.  I also like that he uses the bald figure as a metaphor for painters, and his artworks are actually a message to the public, asking the people to view artists as normal people.  Fang Lijun is interesting because he is a contemporary artist who also revisits the ancient traditional woodblock printing that Asia is historically famous for.

Tim Slowinski

Tim Slowinski

            Tim Slowinski is an American artist from New Jersey.  He is often associated with the “Slow Art” movement, which relates to art being created slowly, with great attention to detail.  Slowinski uses his personal psyche to crate his art, by exploring social and political issues, but adding his own personal touch of humor.  His art is created from his imagination, and then is painted upon canvas in a way that makes it seem as though the images have a printed quality.  He achieves this by using very small brushes, and paints in many layers.  His distinct style includes heavy outlines, surreal situations, and cartoonish people with distinct facial expressions. 

            I like Tim Slowinski’s artistic style.  The comic drawing quality of his paintings mixed with the social and political messages remind me very much of political cartoons, such as the ones in the newspaper.  I also like that he explores these issues with humor, to give his art a lighthearted feel, yet with deeper meanings.  It was interesting to learn that Slowinski refuses to work from references.  This inspires me, because the imagination is powerful and should be relied upon more.  Tim Slowinski explores his own imagination, which allows him to create these dynamic paintings.

Sarah Ferguson

Sarah Ferguson

            Sarah Ferguson is a relatively new artist from America.  She specializes in color theory and her pieces reflect a constant experimentation with color.  Another feature common to all of her artworks is the use of geometry.  Ferguson says that “color invites freedom, geometric shapes invite control”.  Within her artworks, Ferguson explores the relationship and contrast between the geometric shapes and the color gradients.  Although her works of art look like they have been computer-generated, Sarah Ferguson paints each square painstakingly and also mixes all of the colors herself.  Sarah Ferguson’s exploration with the relationship between colors results in dynamic paintings.

            I chose to research Sarah Ferguson because she has been steadily gaining more attention from the art community.  I liked discovering the style of Ferguson, and I was amazed to learn that even though her paintings have a pixelated quality and appear to be designed graphically on a computer, they are all in fact hand painted.  I am inspired by her ability to consistently mix paint colors, and to lay them evenly on the canvas in such exact shapes.  My favorite painting of hers is B Five 1.  Sarah Ferguson used only rectangular shapes and different tones of the color blue to create the illusion of a flat plane dropping backwards into space.  

Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci

            Vito Acconci is an American artist from New York who works primarily with installation and landscape architecture.  At first, Acconci was a poet, until he transitioned into performance art.  He wanted to use his own body as a form of art, and frequently used video and photography to capture his performances.  In one of his performance pieces, titled Following Piece, Acconci would follow people in the street until they would enter a private place.  This was to emphasize the importance and role of the home in everyday life, and the privacy that a home provides.  In the 1970’s Acconci began making public sculptures that were intended for people to interact with and play upon.  Acconci’s public architecture includes nature, such as Face of the Earth #3 and Dirt Wall, which takes different types of soil and rock found in the Earth’s crust and layers them within a glass panel.

            I like Vito Acconci’s performance work in Following Piece because of the contrast between public and private spaces as well as the comforts that home provides that is often overlooked or taken for granted.  I also like the level of interaction that Acconci’s public outdoor art encourages from its viewers.  Interaction with art is always a great way to get a positive response and helps the people understand the art more.  Landscape architecture is an interesting way to connect with an audience, and I think that Vito Acconci succeeds with it.

Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley

 

            Mike Kelley was a mixed media artist from America.  He frequently used found objects and collage, as well as video.  During college and his early works, Kelley explored a wide range of mediums, but he started gaining recognition when he began using found objects.  More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid was one of his earliest works, and it contained blankets, dolls, and other soft objects on canvas to represent childhood.  Another one of his projects that lasted for several years was Kandor.  Based off of the fictional city from DC’s Superman comics, Kelley attempted to reconstruct the city of Kandor according to descriptions in the comics.  Different versions of Kandor appear throughout his series due to events that happened to the fictional Kandor, such as Kandor 10B (Exploded Fortress of Solitude).

            I was very excited to learn that Mike Kelley created a whole series of art based off of a comic book, which has inspired me to start my own series being a comic book fan myself.  I like the thought he puts into each of his Kandor pieces, and that he frequently uses the comic for detail reference.  I enjoy looking at his other mixed media projects, especially his installations.  They are very textured and appear soft.  The use of texture in art is important to me. 

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

            Jeff Koons, an American artist, is most widely recognized for his reproductions of objects, frequently made to look like balloon art.  He has several series, including The Pre-New, The New, Equilibrium, Statuary, and Celebration.  In the Pre-New series, Koons takes ordinary household objects and attaches them to light fixtures to create new objects.  Equilibrium is an interesting series containing basketballs floating in water.  Some of the tanks, called 50/50 Tanks, are filled halfway with water, and then the basketballs float on the surface.  Other tanks, titled Total Equilibrium Tanks, are completely filled with water, and then salt is added inside the basketballs to suspend them in the middle of the tank.  Another recognizable work by Jeff Koons is his 43 foot tall Puppy constructed out of flowers.  His work Tulips was one of the most expensive artworks ever to be sold by a living artist.  Tulips is a bouquet of large balloon-style tulips, made of stainless steel and covered with a reflective finish.

            I liked looking at Jeff Koons’ balloon-style artworks because of the juxtaposition of ideas.  Balloon art is expectedly lightweight and soft, while his sculptures are made of metal, and therefore heavy and solid.  They are also very large, which makes them interesting because I like the idea of normal, everyday objects being portrayed in new ways, such as exaggerating the size.  My favorite series of Koons’ is his Equilibrium series.  I enjoyed learning about the science that happened behind the scenes, and even though the basketballs floating inside the water look like an optical illusion, it is real.  Scientist Richard Feynmann helped Jeff Koons make the project possible.