Artists featured in a solo spot on Artsy Forager
Does this sculpture by New York artist Tom Fruin remind you of anyone?
I’ll give you a hint..
Do you see it? Love how these very different works compliment each other! Read more about Karen Schepf’s work here and Tom Fruin’s workhereand on Design Boom.
Featured images is Light & Shadow Play, Kolonihavehus, photographed by Nuno Neto. Images are via the artists’ websites unless otherwise noted.
Being a hyper visual person, I remember imagery like nobody’s business. Names, however, often escape me. So I was very excited when on Pinterest last week, I spotted the Omaha artist Karen Schnepf. We’d carried a few of her paintings while I was working in a gallery, purchased through an art rep, so we’d never had any contact with her personally. I was so delighted to find her again so that I could share her striking, color saturated work with you!
Let me just say that none of these photos do Karen’s work justice. Her canvases are super high-gloss, making it nearly impossible to get accurate photos. But that deep shine is one of the things that I love about her work.
The glossy surface enhances the brilliance of her saturated color palette. Her use of such vibrant color tempered with black and lustrous surfaces call to mind modern stained glass on canvas. The color seems to virtually ooze across the canvas. I want to swim in it!
To see more of Karen Schnepf’s work, please visit her website.
Featured image is Painting-033. All images are via the artist’s website.
I have a feeling that I held on to my childhood dolls longer than most young girls. I think I may have been almost thirteen before I finally stopped playing with them, although my favorites still held a place of honor in my room while I was young. Those were the symbols of childhood that I couldn’t bear to part with. I never wanted to forget the countless hours of play and joy those plastic babies had brought me. In her Doll series, Canadian artist Fausta Facciponte, confronts us with imagery of the forgotten dolls of our childhood, reminding us of the innocence we’ve left behind.
When we’re young, many of our toys teach and shape who we may eventually become. Dolls seem especially important to teach children how to care and nurture. How many times have you “personified” a doll so that a child will know to be gentle with a baby? I can vividly recall a niece swinging a doll by her hair..
We dress and undress them, feed them plastic food, bathe them, swaddle and cuddle them. But as we mature, we reach a point where we realize that it is all pretend. That caring for a real baby is much more work, much more complicated. As we transition from childhood, perhaps we realize that the doll play mimics a much more scary reality.
So we put away the childish toys, discarding them as infantile. But maybe what we are really putting out of our prepubescent minds is the inevitable reality of growing up and being faced with the actuality of the world we were playing and preparing for.
To see more of Fausta Facciponte’s work, please visit her website. Are there any childhood toys that were touchtones for your transition from childhood to the adult world?
Featured image is Peter by Fausta Facciponte, archival pigment print. Images are via Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Every time I go back to the work of Portland artist Anna Magruder, I fall more in love with it. Come and see why over on Escape Into Life today!
I am craving color. It seems like spring has sprung everywhere except where we are. Don’t get me wrong, I love winter, but after almost 4 months without flowers, I am ready for blooming! So it should be no surprise that this week I’m drawn to the work of Anne Harper.
Spring is full of contrasts– bright flowers glowing against skies wet with rain. Harpers work parallels for me the loveliness of an urban spring. Her liquid color reminds me of my first spring visit to Seattle, where the cherry blossoms littered wet sidewalks. It seemed magical. ( Probably didn’t hurt that I was newly in love, both with the city and my then soon-to-be hubby! )
Then, the rainy days of spring gradually dry, giving way to the glorious glow of summer. I am ready. Are you?
To see more of Anne Harper’s work, please visit her website. In addition to being a fantastic painter, she is also a talented musician! You can listen to her tunes here.
This artist found via Saatchi Online.
Featured image is a detail of Persuasion #4. All images are via the artist’s website.
I can sort of relate to Linus van Pelt, of Peanuts fame. I have a favorite blanket, too. It was never a security blanket of the type that is carried around and a meltdown ensues when it is forgotten, lost or laundered. But rather, I have a blanket ( quilt, actually ) given to me by my grandmother that is a repository of memories and is one of my prized possessions. I imagine Los Angeles artist Erin Payne understands emotional connections to a cherished textile.
In her Piles series, Payne sets up still lifes constructed of heaps of blankets, sheets, tablecloths and other household fabrics set against landscaped dioramic backgrounds, forever memorializing these stacks on canvas. Just as I find comfort in the warmth of my grandmother’s quilt, both physically and emotionally, so do many once ordinary items become cherished vessels of remembrance.
But what happens when the person most connected to those memories is gone? The beloved item may be forgotten, thrown out or given away, becoming a hollow receptacle, now ready to be imprinted upon by a new owner.
Will their new keeper appreciate the past life of an object that may be a bit worn? Will they even give thought to whose history this article has been a part of?
I hope my grandmother’s blanket will be with me, reminding me of sniffles comforted and snuggles under a reading lamp. But even if it somehow finds its way out of my grasp, I hope the love that it carries radiates from its worn threads. To see more of Erin Payne’s work, please visit her website.
Featured image is Pile 4, acrylic on canvas, 24×24. All images are via the artist’s website.
Hubby and I are treehuggers. Not in a holier-than-thou, I-always-recycle, never-ever-use-plastic-grocery-bags kind of way ( though there may be a little of that ), we’re more the Babe!-did-you-see-the-size-of-that-tree, doesn’t-that-tree-trunk-look-like-the-Venus-de-Willendorf, oh-I-want-to-hug-it variety. As the days get longer and the weather gets slightly warmer, we’re beginning to plan lots of treks into the woods to do some tree-gazing. One of our favorite things to do is lay on the ground and look up at the trees and their branches. So to get you in the mood for perhaps a little tree-gazing of your own, here are a few artists who share our woodsy love!
Adam Shaw | Liz Ruest | Angie Renfro |Susan Goldsmith
So how about you, Artsies? Any tree-hugging plans this weekend? 🙂
Featured image is The Truth Calls Us Into Being by Adam Shaw, oil on canvas, 70×50. All images are via the artist’s websites, linked above.
The creative minds of artists are an unending source of fascination for me. They way they each devise their own visual language in order to express to the world what they find most important and intriguing amazes me. Sharing a common human nature, we often see overlapping meaning and ideas, yet the method by which those views are interpreted and conveyed is as unique as each artist. In her work, Portland artist Tamara English explores how our own inner atmosphere informs the way we experience the world, but she does so in a marvelously distinct fashion.
From the artist:
“The paintings integrate the visual vocabularies of quantum physics, Islamic tile-work, illuminated manuscripts, and abstracted forms derived from the natural world. In particular the multi-layered paintings reference the rhythm and movement of the decorative elements found in mosques, Turkish dervish lodges, and medieval European books of hours, which for me evoke the unseen energies that move in our lives.”
Through the use of abstract texture, forms and movement, English references the “ocean of particles in constant motion informing the physical and subtle world” which characterize her take on quantum physics. Her use of naturalistic elements associated with Islamic tile-work and illuminated manuscripts manifest for us those physical symbols of inner life. Within each of us exists that same push and pull, our conflict between the wonder of either our faith in or the possibility of the divine and the concrete certainty of what we can see with our own eyes.
To see more of Tamara English’s work, please visit her website.
Featured image is The Queen’s Birthday ( detail ), oil on canvas, 18×18, All images are via the artist’s website unless otherwise noted.
We all know what it is like to wait. Wait to grow up. Wait in line for coffee. Wait on hold for customer service. Wait for a new life to come into the world. Sometimes it seems that life is a series of transitioning from one type of waiting to another. Toronto artist Shaun Downey captures fleeting occasions of expectancy in his subtly emotional scenes.
How many of us have consoled ourselves with the monotony of the every day while we long for the arrival of what we have been waiting for? Even when we have no idea what or who it may be.
How do we console ourselves when it seems our waiting is in vain? We wait and wait and wait, but the door never opens.
Perhaps we are too distracted when our awaited arrives to even notice and before we know it, the opportunity is gone. Or maybe it remains and is just watching for us to awake to its presence. And sometimes, once the waiting is over, the transition is bittersweet. Because who knows what is around the corner? More waiting, perhaps more wonderful.
To see more of Shaun Downey’s work, please visit his website. I’m waiting for spring to finally arrive here in North Idaho. What are you waiting for today?
Featured image is Packing Up, 48×48. All images are via the artist’s website. Found via artist Brad Kunkle.
One of the things I loved about studying art history in college was learning the backstories and narratives behind works that seem, on the surface, simply decorative. Throughout the history of art, still lifes have been used to convey deeper meaning through the symbolism of the objects they portray. In her Peek series, Chicago artist Claudia Smalley looks past the narrative to distill the still life into its simplest values– color, shape and light.
Smalley successfully interprets what some might consider a mundane subject ( not me, though! ) into exciting, contemporary abstract interpretations full of movement and texture.
She captures the essence of the genre in terms of composition ( what every art student studies still lifes for! ) and that glorious chiaroscuro employed by masters of the staged vignettes. Her canvases move and glow with the same delicate rhythm.
While I was in painting studio in college, I remember my favorite instructor telling us to squint in order to see how strong our light and composition was. Smalley’s Peeks extracts the strongest elements of detailed compositions and redefines them in an equally elegant, though much more modern way.
To see more of Claudia Smalley’s interpretational work, please visit her website.
Featured image is Still Life 2, oil on canvas, 36×24. All images are via the artist’s website.