It feels like things are sort of finally getting back to normal.. almost. After being gone for what seemed like an eternity, I’m back on Escape Into Life today sharing the work of Nicolas Kuligowski in my Artist Watch. Head on over to EIL to see more!
Nicolas Kuligowski on Escape Into Life
Image via the artist’s website.
Seattle, Seattle, Seattle ( Marcia Brady voice ).. we arrived on Saturday and are completely in love with the city but overwhelmed by apartment hunting. So this week, I’m re-running posts featuring some favorite Seattle artists. Sorry for the repeats, hope to be back to normal artsy blogging next week!
There are some artists whose work just sticks with me. I first saw Seattle artist Victoria Johnson’s work during my art consulting days through art publisher Grand Image. I loved using Grand Image for unique, stylish, colorful work and Victoria’s paintings definitely hit all those criteria. So when I spotted a painting of hers leaning against the wall at Lisa Harris Gallery in Seattle– boom! The love for her work came flooding back to me.
Free-flowing, organic forms drift in and out of her canvases’ planes, creating enticing visual rhythm and movement.
The placement of shapes lend the idea of landscapes to these abstracts, yet their enigmatic colors and forms keep the work abstract and modern.
A warm palette juxtaposed with muted, more neutral-hued highlights create even more depth and spatial play.
To see more of Victoria Johnson’s work, please visit her website. Thanks to the Lisa Harris Gallery for reminding me of Victoria’s work!
Featured image is Lady of the Lake, pigmented resin on panel, 80×20. All images are via the artist’s representing Seattle gallery, Lisa Harris Gallery.
During our time in Joshua Tree, every time we’ve driven to San Diego or made the trek “down the hill” into Palm Springs, we’ve experienced the wind tunnel that exists in the San Gorgonio Mountain Pass, where over 4000 windmills provide energy to Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. When I saw the latest collage series by Lisa Hochstein, Missing Pieces, the shapes seem to echo the turbines and the torn papers reminded me of wind’s inherent power.
Whether wind and its harnessing machines were an influence to the artist, I do not know. But I can’t help but see in the grid lines an aerial view looking down onto the giant arms of these energy producers as they spin, some barely moving others cycling at a steady pace.
In the shredded pages that make up these collages, I see the destructive nature of the desert’s blasts of air. All over, we’ve seen evidence of wind wreaking havoc across the landscape, even in our own backyard here in Joshua Tree.
That’s what I see in Lisa Hochstein’s work. What do your eyes see? If you’d like to check out more of this artist’s work, please visit her website.
All images are via the artist’s website.
In this world, it’s difficult sometimes to find something truly genuine. Everything seems to be derivative of some earlier idea. In her We’re Going on Vacation series, sculptor Erin McKenna takes fragments of hot tubs and plays with their inherent imitator qualities to create sculptures recalling sea life, both of the artificial and organic variety.
So hot tubs are designed to look like the inside of shells– thinking that somehow our simple minds might be fooled into thinking we are in some sort of tropical hot spring instead of where we really are, a plastic box full of chlorinated water. McKenna takes broken pieces of jacuzzi plastic and reminds us of the artificiality they represent by recreating them into artificial representations of actual seashells.
I think that’s what I find most interesting about McKenna’s Vacation series.. the glorification of imitation. Taking an object that emulates nature and fashioning it into objects that parody that same nature. There’s a parallel with our own lives in there somewhere. How often do we borrow ideas only for them to echo back to us their counterfeit nature?
To see more of Erin McKenna’s work, please visit her website.
All images via the artist’s website.
For an artist or avid art lover, often the joy and specialness of a work of art is to be found not in the overall meaning or composition but in the mark making. Those little strokes that mean so much. The work of Australian artist Camille Hannah gives us pause to consider how each mark of the brush is made.
In each squiggle, the light and shadow moves along with the paint. These strokes create form, line and texture, all through choice of paint loaded onto the brush and the way in which the hand of the artist guides it.
This adept “play with paint” is always what draws me in. There is such beauty in the way the paint swirls from the bristles of the brush, the way the colors mix together on the surface, catching the light and deepening not just the visual but the visceral experience of the painting!
To see more of Camille Hannah’s work, please visit the website of her representing gallery, the Nellie Castan Gallery.
All images via the Nellie Castan Gallery.
The nights here in the desert are full of stars! The work of Sarah Giannobile, featured in my Artist Watch on Escape Into Life today, reminds me of the constellations hovering above us. See my Artist Watch featuring Sarah here!
These abstracts by Canadian artist Karen Darling are so full of contradiction– love the contrasting dark black surfaces mixed with translucent brights! I’m featuring Karen’s work in my Artist Watch on Escape Into Life today, so head on over and check it out here!
Karen Darling on Escape Into Life
Image via artist’s website.
Happy April, Artsies! I’m excited to welcome in the month of April for many reasons, A | we finally leave the desert this month!, B | I get to celebrate one of my favorite days of the year, the day Mr. Forager was born ( never mind that my own b-day is in there, too, ugh ) and C | the celebration of a fabulous new Featured Artist! You may remember New York artist Hooper Turner from my post featuring work from his Catalog and Fashion series n which he meticulously depicts the imagery found in luxury catalogs and fashion magazines.
In his latest body of work, Typeforms, Turner continues his fascination with fashion and found imagery, this time extending his reach into the commodified art world. In choosing to paint letters and numbers directly onto found art auction catalog pages, the artist is perhaps speaking to the struggle of contemporary artists to find their own voice in among the masses.
Although I’ve chosen to focus on his auction catalog pages, Turner also gives found imagery of celebrities and models the same treatment. Perhaps in doing so, he is reflecting upon the artist as celebrity and what that elevated status means for the art marketplace.
Bold and striking, whatever their message, these pieces are saying it loudly and proudly. To see more of Hooper Turner’s work, please visit his website and be sure to stop by the Artsy Forager Facebook page to see his cover image and an album of a few of my favorite Turner pieces ( in addition to these, of course! ).
Last night, as Mr. Forager and I were taking our evening walk around Joshua Tree, we spotted the most amazing little creature! Appearing to be a hummingbird, we moved in closer and took a few photos in the quickly disappearing dusk light. Imagine my surprise when I opened the photos this morning and saw that it wasn’t a hummingbird at all– but an insect of some kind! ( A pair of antennae we couldn’t see last night being an easy tell ). A quick Google search confirmed what we had seen as a striped hummingbird moth! It seems such a fanciful little thing, not quite real somehow. Similarly, ceramic artist Renee Brown crafts her own fanciful interpretations of nature’s forms.
In carefully straddling that line between reality and fantasy, Brown’s work may leave us questioning the vision before us. Are my eyes deceiving me? Is that a hummingbird I see?
Artist found via Daily Dolan Geiman. All images are via the artist’s website.
What do you think of when you hear the phrase “spiritual experience”? Does a mountaintop epiphany come to mind? Or beachside meditation? Spiritual experiences come to us in all sorts of guises, for example, Mr. Forager & I had one last year as we drove up the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park, both awed by the beauty and shedding tears of thankfulness that we were able to share it with one another. Australian artist Marisa Purcell pursues spiritual experiences in her abstract work– encounters with paint so mystical they embody spiritual sensation.
Floating, ghostly orbs of color appear and recede before our eyes. We squint to try to get a closer look, but even as we narrow our gaze, the forms do not become clear.
Suggestions of shape, illusions of form, are all the hints we are given. Light permeates and glows from each piece, enveloping the canvas and the viewer. We are left with the feeling that something has just happened, yet we aren’t sure quite what.
To see more of Marisa Purcell’s work, please visit her website.
Artist found via Liz Tran. Thanks, Liz!