Creating anything from scratch is a difficult endeavor. If the foundation of what you’re building isn’t secure, it will never be sound, it won’t be what you planned for, what you dreamed of.
These mixed media pieces by Barcelona artist A Ruiz Villar with their structural emphasis, remind me of what we build up for ourselves.
To see more of A Ruiz Villar‘s work, please visit his website.
All images are via the artist’s website. Artist found via Saatchi.
We have a tendency to make snap judgements, to see in monochromes. You believe “A”, so you must be “B”. We quickly demonize and categorize without knowing the full story.
In her monochromatic pastel and ink drawings, artist Mila Libman finishes with what is so often our beginning, a distillation of an impression.
How often do we refuse to see past our initial perception, to give another the opportunity to be understood and appreciated? Social media these days is a firestorm of quick judgements often based on very little truth. Perhaps we have only ourselves to blame, selves that are so wrapped up in our surfaces that we fail to allow our depths to be explored.
To see more of Mila Libman‘s work, please visit her website.
Artist found via K. Imperial Fine Art. Images via K. Imperial Fine Art and the artist’s website.
It’s funny how we try to make sense of everything these days. The mystery has been removed from so many elements of life that we have this need to have an explanation for everything. We ask why and then are frustrated if we can’t find the answer. In her series of works on paper, Atlanta artist Caroline Bullock explores the hidden geometries in nature and how we connect ourselves within these structures.
It’s fascinating to think about how everything in the natural world often seems so random, yet there is so much order to be found. This flower blooms at this time every year. These animals only like this particular area of a vast world. Orcas know instinctually to migrate thousands of miles each year. Why can’t we be more like that? We rely so much of facts and perceived truths, we rarely seek out answers by our own faith and intuition. Perhaps if we did we might be as successful at life as those redwoods reaching for the sky.
To see more of Caroline Bullock‘s work, please visit her website.
All images are via the artist’s website. Artist found via Amy Parry Projects.
One of my favorite things about the West Coast that I didn’t grow up with on the Florida coast is tide pools. Mr. F and I spend lots of time exploring and examining these little microcosms teeming with life. Tide pools always seem so precious, not just because of their importance to the environment, but for their temporal state. They are only exposed for a certain amount of time, then once the tide comes in, they disappear again.
These mixed media paintings by Minneapolis artist Ashely Peifer remind me of the multitudes of creatures living together in pools between the rocks. Elements float in and around each other, patterns intersperse and lay one on top of another like seastars clinging to barnacles.
To see more of Ashely Peifer‘s work, please visit her website.
All images are via the artist’s website.
Our current vagabondish lifestyle can make it difficult to create new connections. Sometimes we are only in one spot for 13 weeks, which seems hardly long enough to foster lifetime relationships. But occasionally, we come across those people with whom we instantly click. Those that we feel like we’ve known all along. That connective act, that fostering of the newfound with our own memories brings to mind the work of Happy Red Fish AKA Dutch artist Hagar Vardimon-van Heummen.
Our friend Veronica has a way of describing those people with whom we feel instantly at ease– she calls them “zero people”. Now that may sound a bit insulting, but it means they are those rare friends who require zero energy. We don’t have to put on a show. They get our jokes and understand our hearts. It’s funny that some of our shortest stays while traveling have yielded some of the best connections. It’s something we’ve been learning along the way– when you happen across those kindred spirits, take every opportunity to foster the connection. We need more zero people in our lives.
To see more of Happy Red Fish‘s work, please visit her website.
All images are via the artist’s website.
On the way back to the Coast from Yosemite, Mr. F and I decided to spend the day in Napa Valley to do a little wine tasting. Serendipitously, we happened to pass through St. Helena where there were a few galleries I couldn’t wait to peruse. As we walked into Caldwell Snyder Gallery, Mr. F and I were both immediately drawn to the enigmatic work of Cole Morgan.
One of the best things about gallery hopping with Mr. F is when we’re both intrigued by the work of the same artist and share what we love about it. Morgan’s use of circles and shadows, along with carefully crafted yet spontaneously appearing layers give his work an interesting crypticness. Spheres seem to float yet are grounded with shadow, so which is their reality?
To see more of Cole Morgan’s work, please visit the Caldwell Snyder website.
Second image via the Gail Severn Gallery website, all other images via the Caldwell Snyder website.
Mr. F and I have a secret spot, a place that he found one summer and fell in love with, that is kind of our dreamland. It’s an amazingly beautiful, far out, off the grid place that we don’t want anyone else to discover. We fear one day we’ll return to find it developed and overrun with people. That clash between our most stunning places and the destructive hand of man is the theme of the work of Seattle artist, Mary Iverson.
click each image for a larger view
The artist, whose work can be seen at Thinkspace LA along with the work of Stephanie Bauer in their dual artist show, After, through Sept. 6th, “portrays the clash between globalization and the environment”. Her mixed media work juxtaposes broken shipping containers and other icons of global development against iconic images of some of our most wild landscapes.
As we prepare to spend some time in Yosemite next week, I find myself feeling a bit like one of Iverson’s paintings.. While I always love seeing these staggeringly beautiful places, I’m also usually struck by the crowds and the thoughtlessness that visitors give to the environment around them. Here’s hoping for pristine views and minimal destructiveness.
To see more of Mary Iverson‘s work, please visit her website and LA Artsies, be sure to check out her show at Thinkspace!
All images are via the artist’s website.
The idea of consumption was one I never thought of much until the last few years. When I was a young single woman in Florida, shopping was a hobby, a large part of the culture. Since marrying Mr. F and traveling throughout the Northwest ( which forces us to live with few belongings, no room for recreational shopping! ), my eyes have opened to a different kind of life. In his work, New York artist Peter Vahlefeld speaks to rampant consumerism and its effect on the world of art, pages torn from auction house catalogs and museum ephemera become the canvas upon which he unleashes unbridled swaths and splatters of color.
Art for art’s sake has always been a popular, if somewhat impractical notion. After all, artists need food, shelter, and clothing as much as anyone else. As much as art feeds the soul, it can’t fill a hungry belly. So, of course, artists must sell their work. But when is the line crossed into losing the soul of an artist? When the impetus behind making becomes selling and marketing? What of the “collectors” buying at auction and reselling, not for the love of the work, but simply to make a profit? And the popular personalities selling themselves as artists, creating mediocre work that is gobbled up by their “followers”, simply because a fashion magazine proclaimed it as special?
These are the questions that as an art blogger and fledgling painter that I struggle with. When does one become a sell out in order to sell?
To see more of Peter Vahlefeld‘s work, please visit his website, cleverly marketed with an address similar to a popular celebrity. Touche, sir.
All images are via the artist’s 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!
To see more of Kim Kirk Nielsen‘s work, please visit his website.
Images found via the artist’s website and his Saatchi Online portfolio. Artist found via Saatchi Online.
Last week, while Mr. F and I were out with a few of his work colleagues, we discovered that, at a table of four adults in their 30s/40s, every single one of us came from a divorced family. It seems that we all become torn and tattered as life gets ahold of us. Not just the kids of divorce, but anyone who’s gone through pain, suffering, and loss. But it’s how we deal with our circumstances that determines the people we become. In his mixed media work, artist Howard Sherman uses a process of addition and subtraction to create unruly surfaces that result in a beautiful mess.
Just as we react to our own situation, Sherman describes his work process as a bit of “call and response”.. Each action creates a reaction, and it is up to the artist whether the result is something to keep or cover up. Just as we act and react to people, events, and circumstances in our lives, it is up to us to decide how we are affected and what our own final composition will be.
To see more of Howard Sherman‘s work, please visit his website.
All images via the artist’s website. Artist found via New American Paintings.