visual arts blog, painting, drawing, sculpture, illustration and more!
Silvia Pelissero (aka Agnes-Cecile), is a young artist from Rome, Italy. Pelissero studied at Liceo Artistico Giorgio De Chirico in Rome and works in a variety of mediums including watercolour, oil, acrylic, varnish, and digital paintings.
To see more visit Pelissero’s portfolio on Deviant Art. There is also a video on YouTube showing the artist in action.
Annie Owens is a native of California’s Bay Area and is currently living in Albany as the co-founder of Hi-Fructose magazine. She’s shown in various gallery group exhibits over the last three years with her first solo show last May. Her work is Primarily rendered in watercolors and ink on paper. Her figurative paintings depict sullen faced girls who confront viewers with sometimes malicious stares, sometimes with a baleful gaze. The figures represent qualities within familial relationships and the varying complicated degrees of affection, malice, distrust, pain and love which exist within them. (bio from Rivet)
To see more of Owens’ work, visit OuchClub.com.
Born in 1976, Long Beach, California based painter Ali Smith has a B.S in Studio Art from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York and an MFA from California State University.
“Smith uses the canvas as an open space of exploration; an empty landscape that serves as the starting point for investigation into abstract terrains. The recurring visual trope of Rococo-like excess and abundance performs a celebratory re-assertion of the endless possibilities available to the painter. Smith weaves together fleeting thoughts, moments of time, the fine lines between fact and fiction and subjective desires within her canvases, which in turn present the hopeful attitude of the artist, in the face of the realities of life and experience.”
Smith has had solo exhibitions in New York, Houston and Los Angeles. She has been included in numerous group shows, including the Laguna Art Museum (CA), Irvine Fine Arts Center (CA), as well as shows in Boston, Tokyo and Basel. Her work is included in the collections of the Laguna Art Museum (CA), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), Progressive (OH) and the Chaney Family Collection (TX).
Ali Smith is represented by Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. For more information, visit AliSmith.org.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu moved to New York in the mid-1990s. She received her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000.
“Mutu’s work explores the contradictions of female and cultural identity and makes reference to colonial history, contemporary African politics and the international fashion industry. Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional crafts, science fiction and funkadelia, Mutu’s works document the contemporary myth making of endangered cultural heritage.
Piecing together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials, Mutu’s elaborate collages mimic amputation, transplant operations and bionic prosthetics. Her figures become satirical mutilations. Their forms are grotesquely marred through perverse modification, echoing the atrocities of war or self-inflicted improvements of plastic surgery. Mutu examines how ideology is very much tied to corporeal form. She cites a European preference to physique that has been inflicted on and adapted by Africans, resulting in both social hierarchy and genocide.
Mutu’s figures are equally repulsive and attractive. From corruption and violence, Mutu creates a glamorous beauty. Her figures are empowered by their survivalist adaptation to atrocity, immunised and ‘improved’ by horror and victimisation. Their exaggerated features are appropriated from lifestyle magazines and constructed from festive materials such as fairy dust and fun fur. Mutu uses materials which refer to African identity and political strife: dazzling black glitter symbolises western desire which simultaneously alludes to the illegal diamond trade and its terrible consequences. Her work embodies a notion of identity crisis, where origin and ownership of cultural signifiers becomes an unsettling and dubious terrain.” (bio from Satchi Gallery)
Mutu’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous major art museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2010, Mutu was selected as Deutsche Bank Group’s Artist of the Year.
To see more of Wangechi Mutu’s work, visit WangechiMutu.com or Satchi Gallery.
Related Books:
Wangechi Mutu: A Shady Promise
Wangechi Mutu: In Whose Image
Contemporary African Art Since 1980
Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Lisa G. is a self-taught artist working and living near Paris, France. Of her work Lisa says, “It is a universal language by which all my emotions passes from my mind. It is my way of existing, my breath.”
To see more of Lisa G’s work, visit LisaGPeintre.Blogspot.com.
Xiau-Fong Wee is a young artist living and working in San Francisco, California. She currently is a student at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University and has participated in numerous shows across the Bay Area. Xiau Fong enjoys live painting demonstrations and ”art battles” during exhibits. Her work was recently published along with other AAU artists in the book “Chromagination.” Wee intends to continue drawing, painting, and continue her studies to earn a Masters in Fine Art with a concentration in painting.
To see more of Xiau-Fong Wee’s work, visit XiauFong.com.
Source: Urban Muse
Beth Robinson is a self-taught artist based in Vermont, New England who has been sculpting her very unique dolls since 2003. Previously a painter and illustrator, Beth changed course when a friend introduced her to Japanese ball-joint dolls.
Clearly not meant for children, each of Robinson’s “little people” is hand made using polymer clays, vintage fabrics, acrylic paint, and sometimes real human hair or teeth. Each oddly proportioned, strangely dressed character is one of a kind, having its own individual story. Robinson’s dolls are a mix of not quite creepy and darkly cute, and are a unique merger of design, sculpting, painting, and sewing.
Robinson’s work has been shown in galleries throughout the USA, England, the Netherlands and Germany. As well, her dolls have been featured in magazines such as Art Doll Quarterly, SPIN, Stuff, Maxim (UK and Hong Kong), Rue Morgue (Canada), Nokia CP (Turkey), RIP (Russia), and Nordic Vision (Norway).
For more information about Beth Robinson, visit StrangeDolls.net.
Born on January 18, 1954, in Nuremberg, Germany and raised in South Orange, New Jersey, Kiki Smith studied at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut from 1974 – 1976. Recognized as a “leading figure among artists addressing the philosophical, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature,” Kiki Smith’s career has incorporated sculpture, printmaking, installation, and drawing. Her body of work has covered an equally diverse array of subjects, from the human body and domesticity, to classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death, and resurrection are leitmotifs in much of Smith’s work, and she is widely credited for treating the female form with extraordinary honesty and vulnerability.”
The Kitchen in New York hosted Smith’s first solo exhibition in 1982. She has exhibited annually from 1982 at the Fawbush Gallery in New York. In 1990, Smith received significant acclaim for her exhibition in the Projects Room at the Museum of Modern Art. “By manipulating everyday materials such as glass, ceramic, fabric and paper, Smith’s work examined the dichotomy between the psychological and physiological power of the body.”
Smith has also had major solo showings at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (1990), Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts (1992), Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1995), Museum of Modern Art in New York (2003), and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2006).
In 2009 Smith was awarded the Brooklyn Museum Women In The Arts Award. She currently lives and works in New York.
More about Kiki Smith from Amazon
Sources: Art Knowledge News, DAF, PBS
Based in Lviv, Ukraine, Irena Zablotska (aka Joulu) finds inspiration in music, beautiful views, friends, country trips, in love, in sufferings, and in dreams that have not come true. Zablotska also works as a designer and an urban artist. She has exhibited in the Ukraine, Costa Rica, U.S., France, and Russia.
To see more, visit Zablotska.com.
It’s been over a year since I last caught up one of my favourite abstract artists – Netherlands based Esther Barend. Since that time she has been busy moving to a new studio, exhibiting in numerous solo and group shows, and creating a series of new paintings and portable art bags.
Barend’s vivid paintings are created by mixing the paint colours on the canvas with a lot of layers both thick and thin, resulting in a spontaneous, intensely coloured, yet balanced form of personal expression.
“Impulsions and Thoughts – Running Through My Head” (the featured image above) actually has four sides. The image shown here is Esther’s favourite. “It reflects the vortex of impressions, impulsions, and thoughts running through my head, together with the feelings running through my heart. The world literally is getting smaller every day. There are positive and negative aspects to this. The negative ones give me feelings of sadness, powerlessness, and sometimes anger. Often they confuse me because I cannot comprehend what people are capable of doing to each other. I prefer to focus on the positive aspects which warm my heart and give me the necessary wings to keep going. That is why the main colour of this painting is red.”
Barend has also created a new series of her fantastic one-of-a-kind art bags. “These art-bags are much more wearable, functional, and durable than the first collection. Although they are unique pieces of art, valuable and vulnerable, you can still walk in the rain without having to worry!”
Esther’s next exhibition is at Gallery Tatiana Tournemine in Paris starting at the end of January 2011.
To see more of Esther Barend’s work or to inquire about her art bags, visit EstherBarend.eu. You can also check out her blog at EstherBarend.Blogspot.com.
