Fire is fascinating. At once necessary and dangerous. Delicately beautiful and vigorously potent. It lives and breathes. It is no wonder that artist’s embrace its beauty and harness its power. Take a look at these artists who are using their firepower for good.
Birds are creatures meant to soar. They inspire us to reach new heights ourselves. Those avian characteristics are what make London artist Kate McGwire’s work so poignant and powerful.
McGwire uses fallen feathers to create sculptures reminiscent of birds at rest, coiled upon themselves. By often placing her sculptures in antique cabinets and cloches, she creates a dichotomy between the suggested creature and its cage.
Her sculptures have an otherworldly sense to them– as if they are alien beings, captured long ago for scientific observation or simply decoration.
The tension in her work is so palpable, it seems that if one just broke the glass, the creature inside would uncurl itself and rise above its shattered prison.
To see more of Kate McGwire’s work, please visit her website.
Artist found via My Modern Metropolis.
Featured image is Vex ( detail ), mixed media with pigeon feathers in antique museum cabinet, 183 x 110 x 61 cm. All images are via the artist’s website.
I absolutely love watching the evolution of an artist’s work. And the latest round of paintings from abstract painter, Casey Matthews blew me away. They are unmistakably hers, but she continues to grow in her use of color, elegance of form and sophistication. So it thrills me to feature her today on Escape Into Life!
I’m a firm believer that anything you eat will taste better served on pretty china or a lovingly decorated table. The work of Russian born artist Olga Antonova celebrates these every day objects, elevating them using her technical prowess tinged with a hint of charm and whimsy.
The delicate porcelain vessels are stacked, one on top of each other, creating dainty monuments of indulgence. Tea or coffee sipped from colorful china induces us to have a seat, slow down, have a leisurely chat. Antonova’s work does the same, creating a calm sense of elegant consumption.
Her depictions of the smooth, shiny surfaces and colorful patterns make me want to fall down a rabbit hole and crash a tea party hosted by a bunny with a crazy chapeau.
To see more of Olga Antonova’s work, please visit her website or the websites of her representing galleries or check them out in person, if you can at — Gallery Henoch in New York, Selby Fleetwood Gallery in Santa Fe, Beth Urdang Gallery in Boston, Gardner Colby Gallery in Naples and Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown, MA.
Featured image is Composition With Cups, oil on canvas, 30×15.
Dance is one of the few art forms requiring no materials, only ourselves. Santa Fe artist Gigi Mills, a former dancer now self-taught painter, transfers her dancer’s fluidity and grace into her compositions.
Mills’ work focuses on simplified forms, figures and shapes are reduced to their simplest outlines, planes and colors, so that the viewer is instead caught by the emotional power present.
By keeping her color palette neutral, her use of the occasional bright color takes on a much more powerful significance, it becomes the staccato highlight, delightfully drawing the viewer’s attention.
Gigi Mills doesn’t currently have a website, so check out her work online at representing galleries: Gallery Orange in New Orleans, Watts Fine Art in Indiana and Selby Fleetwood Gallery in Santa Fe.
This artist found via Gallery Orange.
Featured image is Ocean With Sea Birds and Yellow, oil on canvas, 60×36. All image sources are noted above.
Henry David Thoreau said, “This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” Street artists take that idea quite literally, by taking art out of the isolating artistic environments of galleries and museums, bringing the art to a public that might not otherwise be exposed to it. Check out these examples of art full of street cred!
Keep your eyes peeled for street art while you’re out and about this weekend! Would love to see some examples from your community!
Featured image by Alice Pasquini. Click on each image to view the source.
As many of you know, my husband and I are currently living in a new locale every three months. Each new place has its own personality and part of the excitement ( and scariness! ) of our journey is to find where we fit within each community. Peruvian-born artist Cecilia Paredes‘ work explores, what to me, are very personal themes of displacement and relocation.
Parades uses make-up, body paint and costume to visually blend into intricate backgrounds. This visualisation of our desire to fit, to be a part of who or what surrounds us resonates with me, not only as someone not currently rooted, but also because I am in many ways, still learning who am I apart from what or who surrounds me.
In each image, though her figure is well disguised, we are still given a hint to her presence, whether it be through her hair or the whites of her eyes. She is hidden in full view. Blending in, yet waiting to be discovered.
Normally, this is where I would direct you to the artist’s website. Cecilia Paredes does, indeed, have a website, but unfortunately, at the time of this posting, it doesn’t seem to be working. You can find her on ArtNet or check out any number of reviews that come up on Google. I found her via Lost at E Minor.
All images are via Cecilia Parades’ feature on My Modern Metropolis.
When was the last time you wrote a hand-written letter? Or read a book made of paper instead of on your Kindle? Wrote a check? As we shift closer and closer to becoming a paperless society, it seems that by foregoing that physical connection with common materials, we are losing some little part of the soul of our humanity. Albuquerque, New Mexico artist, Valerie Roybal takes the forgotten ephemera of the past and resurrects it, giving it a new life through her work.
Just as much of the joy of a handwritten card comes from the process– the choosing of just the right design, taking the time to sit down and write, the physical sensation of putting pen to paper, walking it to the mailbox– so is Roybal’s work process-driven. From her artist statement, “Order, association, and reverence emerges from the sorting, arranging, and placement of each accumulated piece into a whole.”
In her “In the Library” series, the artist uses that process of sorting and arranging to create compositions reminiscent of stacked book spines. There is a kind of random orderliness to these not unlike a library of treasured collections.
Through her work, Roybal also explores natural physiological processes such as cell mutations. The resulting compositions possess the seeming precision of scientific illustrations, but with the bursts of life and color that remind us of the wonder of the organic world.
To see more of Valerie Roybal’s work, please visit her website. Thanks to Hillary at Stellers Gallery Ponte Vedra for introducing Artsy Forager to this artist!
Featured image is Transmission, mixed media. All images are via the artist’s website.
My post this week on Escape Into Life features an incredibly amazing artist with a poignant story to tell.
Don’t miss out on Lee Price’s work.
Artists and designers have been inspiring each other for centuries. Whether we realize it or not, much of the clothes we wear, jewelry we sport and objects we use are a result of the symbiosis between art and design. And I for one, love to celebrate such connections! For this first feature in the new Artsy Fodder series, let’s have some fun with artfully inspired jewelry designs. These pieces may not have directly influenced each other, but there is an unmistakable resemblance.
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Do find yourself buying pretty baubles that remind you of your favorite artwork? Take a look inside your own closet or jewelry box and I’ll bet you’ll see some similarities!