It’s Tuesday.. you know what that means! Head over to Escape Into Life to check out the artist I’m featuring there today, Matt Wisniewski. If you liked Pakayla Biehn’s work yesterday, I think you’ll love Matt’s digital collages.
Matt Wisniewski on Escape Into Life
3/7– Please note that Escape Into Life has been undergoing some website changes, resulting in delayed postings, so this feature wasn’t live when I scheduled this post ( it normally would be ). It’s up now!
Have you ever been so enraptured by the natural beauty surrounding you that you feel as if the wonder of it actually becomes a part of you? I have suspect Pakayla Biehn has encountered this feeling. Her dreamlike works tell me she is one who also has visions of laying in a field of flowers and floating down sparkling streams.
Biehn’s work has such a quiet, poetic beauty. To look upon them seems as if we are encountering a hidden, magical place, filled with fairies and wood nymphs.
They remind me of the enchantment of the most beautiful places I’ve seen and of places from my dreams I have yet to visit.
To see more of Pakayla Biehn’s work, please visit her website. If you’re in Cali, you can see her work at Gallery Hijinks in San Francisco or at Thinkspace Gallery in LA.
Spring is almost upon us, artsies! Did you lose yourself in a lovely place over the weekend?
Featured image is The Study of the Structure of Subversive Existence, oil & acrylic on canvas, 28×20. All images are via the artist’s website.
Many of you know that my hubby & I are living a bit of a vagabond life. My other half is working as a medical traveler, so since May 2011, we’ve moved across the good ol’ USofA from Florida to the Northwest, living in a new town every 13 weeks. So these days, we’re traveling light. Everything live with fits into the back of our mid-size SUV and a 4’x8′ UHaul trailer. All our other belonging are stored in a 10’x10′ storage unit in Jacksonville. The rest is gone. In preparation for this move and change in lifestyle, we sold or gave away all of our furniture except for a few sentimental pieces of mine. When I first saw these works on paper by Massachusetts artist Candice Smith Corby, they resonated with this slightly displaced soul.
I am no stranger to the competing feelings of freedom and loss that come from purging your life of unnecessary stuff. In our society, our possessions define us in so many ways. They demonstrate to the world, our tastes, our values, our experiences. The things that we live with become a part of our memories, so to be separated from them may result in a disconnect with our past. Of course, that could be viewed as positive or negative..
While I do often dearly miss some of my lovely things ( especially when living in some furnished rentals! ), there is also an incredible sense of liberty that comes with knowing that we can live ( almost ) anywhere. We no longer have the mortgage and maintenance of owning a home filled with rooms and stuff we rarely use.
Smith Corby’s works speak to that overwhelming sense of being possessed by our possessions. How many of us have gone into large amounts of debt just to have the homes of our dreams? Oh, how difficult it can be when we insist on holding on, when what we really need is to just let go.
So have I made you want to give away all your worldly goods? 😉 Maybe just a spring cleaning is in the cards.. To see more of Candice Smith Corby’s work, please visit her website.
This artist found via Lost at E Minor.
Featured image is Bunny Love by Candice Smith Corby. All images are via the artist’s website unless otherwise noted.
I’ve heard that some people only dream in black and white. My dreams are always in color, but muted, like faded photographs or old home movies. It seems that German born artist Catrin Welz-Stein has been somehow seeing into my dreams. Her digital collages are strikingly similar to the palette and imagery of my dreams..
So perhaps the imagery isn’t exactly like the images of my own slumber, but the atmosphere is the same. And there are always animals. And lots of flying. And sometimes flying animals.
The artist,while working as a graphic designer, experimented with mixed media and collage, eventually moving to digital imagery and her current surreal style. Using license-free, non-copyrighted images, photos and illustrations, Catrin breaks apart the original images and transforms them into her own creations.
The images she creates are at times ethereal, melancholy, disturbing, reassuring and sweet. They truly run a gamut of emotions. Just as our dreams do.
To see more of Catrin Welz-Stein’s work, please visit her page on ImageKind. She has three fabulous galleries of imagery, prints available of all– I’m certain you find one 0r ten to love!
Featured image is Sisters, digital collage. All images are via the artist’s ImageKind site.
There are certain artists who create worlds so beautiful, I find myself wishing I could live inside one of their paintings, even if just for a little while. Today’s Escape Into Life artist, Brad Kunkle is such an artist. He creates stunning images of visual fairy tales.
Brad Kunkle on Escape Into Life
Be sure to check out my feature on Brad’s work on Escape Into Life ( linked above ) and to read more of my thoughts on his work, check out his Artsy Forager feature here.
I’ve always been interested in the interplay between color and pattern, how each effects the other and the visual impact both can have, even in small doses. Australian artist Kirra Jamison’s works are a beautiful, modern mastery of both.
Her warm and pure palette allow her compositions to pop against neutral backgrounds. Saturated, cut-out like shapes call to mind the collages of Henri Matisse, though Jamison’s compositions tend to be a bit more complex and detailed. But anyone whose work reminds me of Matisse is an automatic fave!
Some of her pieces, such as Willow Weep ( above ) are a delightfully dizzying kaleidoscope of color and detail. I am drawn in by the playful patterns of color, then enchanted by the surprises that await.
Patterned backgrounds in works like Belong To Me ( above ) appear, upon first glance to be a symmetrical repeat, but each element is revealed to be unique. It is amazing how our eyes fool us into thinking that all are the same.. there is something poetic in that, isn’t there?
To see more of Kirra Jamison’s work, please visit her website. Thank you to Tamara Lynn Photography for introducing Artsy Forager to this artist!
Featured image is Cut Out V, vinyl on paper, 57×38 cm. All images are via the artist’s website.
If you’ve ever taken an art class, I’m sure you’ve copied the work of a “master”. Redrawing and painting great works of art is one of the tried and true methods used to teach basic skills. I love the way some artists are taking masterworks and recreating them in fun and interesting ways. Check ’em out!
Have a fantastic weekend, Artsies! Any plans for museum visits this weekend?
Cesar Santos ( His official website seems to be down. You can see some examples of his work at Art Renewal Center. )
Featured image is Picnic in Central Park by Cesar Santos ( via Art Renewal Center ). All images are via the artist’s websites, unless otherwise stated.
I guess by technical definition, I’m a housewife. Besides writing and curating this blog ( which is completely a labor of love at this point ), I don’t work outside the home. Housewife would be a lot easier to explain than “art blogger” when people ask what I do. For the first time in my life, I’m taking care of a household consisting of more than just myself. In her Domestic Series, Massachusetts artist Leslie Graff explores perceptions about domestic life and relationships in our post-modern world.
Her cropped compositions and classic environmental and clothing choices create a universality to the imagery. These could be snapshots of life from virtually any decade in the last six decades.
As much as our roles seem to have evolved over the years, have things really changed that much? My own husband definitely never pushes for our home to be immaculate or for dinner to be delicious and perfect every night, but as a woman, I find myself striving for that perfection and disappointed when I don’t deliver. Why is that?
Why, even when our husbands are happy to help with cooking, cleaning and kid care, do we still expect ourselves to be able to “do it all”? Is it Martha Stewart syndrome? Are we comparing ourselves to standards impossible to keep?
How about those among us who are artists as well as spouses, parents and perhaps have another day job, as well? How do you do it?! 🙂
Featured image is So Satisfying, acrylic on canvas, 30×40. All images are via the artist’s website.
This artist found via Pinterest.
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.
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.