Can you believe we’re entering into the last lazy days of summer, Artsies? I hardly can, but I intend to enjoy it to the fullest! Beginning the end of summer today with the marvelous work of this month’s Featured Artist, Gigi Mills!
studio dog with girl and chair, oil, paper, crayon, and graphite on paper, 19×22
bird dog and the saint, oil and paper on book board, mounted on panel, 9×22
morning with sara, oil on book board, mounted on panel, 14 1/8 x 22 1/8
seaside in a wicker chair, oil on book board, mounted on panel, 10×17
girl with figs and flowers, oil on book board, mounted on panel, 6×17
In this latest series of work, being featured in her solo show, This Life at GF Contemporary, Mills invites us to sit and contemplate the moment in the midst of the pulse and entanglements of this fast paced existence. The artist continues to perfect her reductive style, distilling each captured moment to its fleeting presence.
To see more of Gigi Mills’ work, please visit the websites of her representing galleries, GF Contemporary and Gallery Orange and here on the blog all August long! Be sure to check out the Artsy Forager Facebook page to see an album of my Gigi faves!
From the outside, this traveler’s life must seem incredibly exciting and adventurous, and yes, in many ways it is. But even so, Mr. F and I still deal with life’s drudgery like work, insurance, and laundry. Add to that worries about illnesses among family and friends and we’re both craving an escape from reality. In her conceptual photography, Lebanese artist Lara Zankoul provides her own retreat into dreamland.
The surreal situations painted in soft, dreamy palettes make Zankoul’s work visually stunning, but it is the human element that packs the punch. Figures in enigmatic scenes allow the viewer to eschew the bounds of reality. Floating in a tea cup sounds so lovely, doesn’t it?
It can be so easy to push what we are or what we’re feeling back into the depths. Everyday life necessitates that we “get on with it” and we genuinely want to. But not being real with ourselves and with the people around us leads to surface relationships in which we just can’t be real. This series by Hungarian artist Flora Borsi beautifully seems to illustrate the struggle to balance self protection and vulnerability.
We need those people in our lives we can get real with. The ones that will cry with us, listen to us, laugh us through the weeping. Maybe we think no one else will understand our struggle. But if we never give them the chance, how will we know?
Borsi mixes photographic elements with painting techniques to create these emotionally charged images. To see more of Flora Borsi‘s work, please visit her website.
Sometimes it feels as if we are simply tumbling through life, being swayed to and fro like a pinball or a tumbleweed. In these incredible large scale drawings, Brooklyn artist Leah Yerpe multiplies her figures as they spill through the air.
Placing her figures on a blank background, we lose any sense of situation, leaving them to float through the air as if caught in a tornado, hurtling down toward the ground. There’s a sense of a loss of control, yet the faces are calm and peaceful– though the winds blow, they simple let themselves be carried.
byEllen C. Caldwell In my series of guest posts for The Artsy Forager, I have been writing about my time in Bali during an arts residency earlier this year. I was introduced to painter Federico Tomasi by another artist Giovanni Lovisetto on a trip to Bali in 2012 and upon my return, I was lucky to revisit Tomasi’s studio and discuss his current works.
As many of us in creative fields know, artistic inspiration is always something of a process. As artists, we are constantly pursuing new creative styles, mediums, subjects, narratives, and voices. Through this process of searching for ourselves, we get used to the circle of finding our grounding, losing our footing, and continuously rebuilding our foundations.
This process can feel painful, isolating, and challenging, but it can also offer creative redemption, freedom, and inspiration. As I discussed in an earlier essay The Writer’s Ledge, these moments on the creative “ledge” are simultaneously terrifying, jarring, and exciting, ultimately yielding the most creative and unique results. It was a joy to visit with Tomasi and discuss the pitfalls and roadblocks we all endure during the creative process—while also seeing the moving and dynamic results coming from this beautiful struggle.
In discussing the beauties and beasts of the unknown, the cycle of returning back to our roots and formal training, and the bounty of this very endeavor, Tomasi and I explored the ongoing challenges that come with living the creative process. Ellen Caldwell | Please tell me about the large-scale, monumental portraits you are working on in your studio now.
Federico Tomasi | The large, vertical-scaled portraits are simply the desire to make them have a monumental aspect even if they are paintings—more as sculptures, huge and oversized for a different perspective. The chromatic choice of colors goes from that marbled, transparent feeling to the copper and bronze. And of course the unusual dimension (3 meters tall and 1 meter wide) helped me to reach what I had in my mind. I actually like them leaned on the wall rather than hung so they look more three dimensional, as sculptures are. It’s still an open chapter for me so let’s see how it will end.
EC | How do they differ from your previous bodies of work?
FT | I don’t think those particular ones are very different from my previous paintings in terms of technique and apart from what I mentioned before, of course. There is a step forward or a research of something different, chromatically speaking, and there are more visible parts of the body instead of the close up facial portraits I used to focus on. There are so many elements that occur to me in this process so it’s a bit difficult to give a harmonic answer… EC | Who are you painting in your portraits now? Could you tell me a little bit about how you have chosen your current subjects or is it still too soon to discuss?
FT | I really don’t know where I’m going right now! I’m trying different things at the same time and the subjects just come either from pictures or movies or my own sketches. I’m still waiting for that sparkle to arrive and a bit of anxiety made me just paint without thinking too much! I have been working on two large portraits of my grandmother who passed away last year. She was incredible, so that brought me to another level. I remember working day and night on those pieces as they where so personal to me. I painted them with oils, which also made it very intense.
EC | We talked a lot about artistic background and training – how often an artist will learn to paint by copying and mimicking the masters. And you were saying that in some ways you felt like you had to return to this time and go back to more of your original training. What inspired you to move in this direction?
FT | Well each artist has his masters and backgrounds to actually admire and learn from—it depends on your goal—for sure not by copying, but what I was saying was that there are skills when it comes to figurative art that have to be there and it’s important to feed those skills to be able to move on. I believe you have to know how to do things in a traditional way to be able to do something very different in the future. I guess it’s the technique that matters in my case… When I feel it’s time to move forward, I always start from some basic skills (traditional) and from there find my own direction
EC | Where do you see yourself moving, having circled back to this original training? Do you see it taking you in an entirely new direction now?
FT | I see myself in moment of transition—a bit frustrating when things are not always coming out how I thought. But that’s part of the game; persistence will take me to a new direction. EC | Yes, that’s part of the beauty and agony of the process, right? How has living and practicing your art in Bali impacted your work—or has it?
FT | Unconsciously probably, it’s more the lifestyle—the freedom and the beauty everywhere that makes the difference but not more than that. Bali is not the same as when I arrived; the tourism and the development of businesses became very chaotic in the last years so it’s not really inspiring me anymore. And I’ve been here for 14 years almost so maybe it’s time to move again!
EC | When did you first start painting and how did you learn or train?
FT | My father was studying at the Academy of Arts in Stockholm when I was around eight years old and I was always surrounded by creative people, so that was my first introduction to that world. After I decided to study five years of art school in Rimini, Italy, and that’s where I started to take my first steps… I’m still learning and hopefully I will learn more in the future. EC | Regarding plastic in Bali, we discussed the over-packaging of products and how there is such a vast amount of plastic debris all over – in the rice paddies, on the streets, and filling the ocean and beaches after big rains… Could you discuss this a bit?
FT |This is a global problem not only about Bali, and it’s very sad. It’s about a lack of education and personal responsibility towards mother nature. For sure there are solutions, but there are too many businesses involved to change unfortunately. It’s incredible, sometimes I manage to see such a perfection and beauty in nature compared to what we humans have been able to do …we are terrible! Sometimes I feel ashamed to be a human being.
EC | Do you feel like you address this plastic problem as an artist or activist – or more simply just on an individual level?
FT | It’s difficult as an individual to change the world but you can always be aware of things in your little microcosm. I collect stuff on the beach, just walking with my dog, for example. I do it even if I know it will not solve the problem, hoping someone sees and gets the message. I said before it’s all about education so let’s start ASAP. It will take a generation to change if we are lucky… Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Federico Tomasi began showing his work in 1997 after moving to Asia. Since then, he has shown internationally in Italy, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Lebanon, and the U.S.
It hardly feels like summer. Here on the Northern Cali coast, the temps have barely ever gotten out of the sixties– I’m still wearing scarves and boots on occasion! In addition to the cooler weather, Mr. F and I both seem to be having trouble getting into a relaxed summer vibe these days. There always seems to be something on the agenda, something to be done, something to plan, somewhere to go. I feel like we’re missing out a bit on the carefree feeling that summer brings, but these paintings by Massachusetts artist Carol O’Malia bring me that much closer.
Any time we’re able to get to the beach, a river or waterfall, any body of water, really, and I see the ripples sparkling in the sun, my mind instantly relaxes and calms. O’Malia really captures the radiance of summer light, not just sunlight, but the way we feel more effervescent in summer. I’m still waiting for that weightless feeling, forgetting everything that’s happening in the world and just soak it all in. I hope it comes soon.
To see more of Carol O’Malia’s work, please visit her website.
Tell me you remember Spirographs? That ubiquitous toy that combined the worlds of math and art and captured the imagination of many an artsy kid. Danish born, Paris based artist Kim Kirk Nielsen adds his own spriroriffic drawings to appropriated imagery, adding graphic punch and curves in all the right places.
I love the way Nielsen is using these spherical forms to emphasize certain areas of each image, as well as playing with scale as in the last piece to create a surreal, dreamlike scene. The Fibonacci like spirals that echo the patterns of lace doilies ( an ongoing theme in Nielsen’s work ) provide an interesting graphic foil to the photographs he’s chosen to manipulate. That’s it, I’m going to track down a Spirograph and start drawing all over everything!
Two artist posts in one day?! I know I don’t usually do this, but when I saw this artist’s work on Booooooom! I just couldn’t wait until next week to share it with you. Mostly self-taught New York artist Marcelo Daldoce creates these absolutely incredible folded watercolor paintings in which the figure hides and reveals itself through the artist’s manipulation of his surface.
From his artist statement, “My work focuses on the terrain beyond the conventional two-dimensional landscape of paper and canvas. In bringing to life a flat surface, I strive to create a puzzle between what is real and what is illusion..” Isn’t it interesting how we tend to do this for ourselves, folding in and hiding the parts of us we don’t what others to see, manipulating our own surface so that we only reveal a studied portrait of the person we’d like everyone else to assume we are. I’d like to be more transparent, to unfold my own portrait so that I’m no longer hiding any part of me. So that what you see is what is me.
Mr. Forager and I love to share dreams. I’m not just talking about the speculative, what if, kind of dreams, but the productions put on by our subconscious while we’re sleeping. If either of us has an interesting or unusual dream, we always share it. The work of Belgian artist Marie Rosen has the same surreal, things are not quite what they seem feeling, so often found in our dreams.
Flat planes and barren landscapes defy reality and keep us from knowing for certain how the elements of each piece fit together– landings leading to nowhere, tiny feet gather beneath a giant covered table. It’s that same incongruity that so often leads us feeling out of sorts following a particularly vivid dream. Things seem almost real, yet we know they are only imaginings.
Summer is officially here! ‘Tis the season we take to the water! Perhaps as an escape from the heat, but even more so, we are drawn to watery places this time of year because of the calming effect of water upon our souls and spirits. In summer, we give ourselves permission to pause and it’s tough to be stressed and harried when gazing out over the ocean’s horizon. Toronto artist Elizabeth Lennie captures the way summer draws us to the water and out of our depths.
While Lennie’s portfolio is filled with more typical watery palettes of blues and greens, it was to these warmer pieces that I found myself most drawn. Something about these peachy tones reminded me so much of the slowing down we do in the summer time. Perhaps they recall the glow of sunset over a day spent in nothing but play, with no plans to stop any time soon. A day when we let ourselves linger, whether on the beach or simply over dinner on the patio at home, we relish relaxation in summer, a lesson we could all carry over into every other season.
To see more of Elizabeth Lennie‘s work, please visit her website. Mr. Forager & I have lots of waterside backpacking and camping planned for this summer. How are you relaxing this summer?
