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January 29, 2013
 I have never been accused of being a nature kind of gal. Sailing trips in a heart beat, but camping, just not my thing. But in having been introduced to Andy Goldsworthy’s work, I can honestly say I
may have a change of heart and entertain the thought of possibly hiking in the woods!
Andy Goldsworthy is a brilliant British artist who collaborates with nature to make his creations. Besides England and Scotland, his work has been created at the North Pole, in Japan,
the Australian Outback, in the U.S. and many others.
Goldsworthy regards his creations as transient, or ephemeral. He photographs each piece once right after he makes it. His goal is to understand nature by directly participating in nature as
intimately as he can. He generally works with whatever comes to hand: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns.
“I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and “found” tools–a sharp stone, the quill of a feather, thorns. I take the opportunities each day offers: if it is snowing, I work with snow, at leaf-fall it
will be with leaves; a blown-over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn. ”
 
“Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as
important as the energy and space within. The weather–rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm–is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it.
It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there.”
January 28, 2013
 Everyone that knows me, knows I am in love with the color white! My all time favorite artist for this was always ellsworth kelly, but tha’s for another post!
Today, I am bringing you another
Robert Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1930. Ryman studied at the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and the George Peabody College for Teachers,  Nashville, before serving in the United States Army (1950-52). Ryman’s work explodes the classical distinctions between art as object and art as surface, sculpture and painting, structure and ornament.
Emphasizing instead the role that perception and context play in creating an aesthetic experience. Ryman isolates the most basic of components‚ materials, scale, and supports‚ His work enforces limitations that allow the viewer to focus on the physical presence of the work in space.
Since the 1950s, Ryman has used primarily white paint on a square surface, whether canvas, paper, metal, plastic, or wood, while working with the nuanced effects of light and shadow to animate his work. In Ryman’s work , wall fasteners and tape serve both practical and aesthetic purposes. Neither abstract nor entirely  monochromatic, Ryman‚’s paintings are paradoxically surrealist.
About his work, Ryman says,
“I don’t think of my painting as abstract because I don’t abstract from anything. It’s involved with real visual aspects of what you are looking at whether wood, paint, or metal‚ it’s how it is put together, how it looks on the wall and works with the light…Of course, realism can be confused with representation. And abstract
painting‚does not mean abstracting from representation‚ My work is involved mostly with symbolism. It is about something we know, or about some symbolic situation…I am involved with real space, the room itself, real light, and real surface.”
January 25, 2013
 I guess back to Dadism! Jean Arp has always been one of my all time favorite artists! You will be very familiar with his work, even if you are not  familiar with him. His work has inspired so many artists on so many levels. the photo of the sculpture alone, you will recall newer artists ahving similar thoughts.
Have a wonderful day!
Love, Jamie
Jean Arp was born in Strasbourg, France. He began drawing at a very early age but soon tired of “the everlasting copying of stuffed birds and withered flowers,” and turned to poetry for relief,
On a visit to Paris in 1904 he came into contact with Modern painting. Within a few years, Arp had returned to the life of an art student, first at the Weimer Art School, and later (in 1908) at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1911 he helped organize an exhibition in Lucerne under the title “Moderne Bund” which showed his works and those of Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and others.
 And so, Arp started making his first experiments with free forms. By the time he was twenty-five, Arp had emerged as a poet and painter of great distinction. In 1914, Arp lived in Paris where he became friends with Picasso , Apollinaire, Modigliani and Delaunay. The following year he moved to Zurich and exhibited his first mature collages and tapestries.
While in Zurich, Arp became active in the Dada movement, collaborating with Max Ernst. The playfulness of Dada appealed to him and aided the  development of his unique symbolic pictographs. As the Dada movement waned, Arp (like many of his colleagues) gravitated toward Surrealism, and in 1925 he took part in the first group exhibition of Surrealist artists at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. His work at this time derived its composition from the “laws of  chance” as much as from the workings of the unconscious – the cardinal principles underlying early Surrealism. Gradually Arp abandoned
the earlier Dada-like forms, which were meant to shock, and began to emphasize organic growth and structure. Arp’s Surrealist work is of the  abstract or “automatic” variety practiced by Joan Miro, in which lines and forms of half-consciously perceived inner impulses suggested themselves on the surface of the canvas.
January 24, 2013
 New introduction to the Fourteenth Street school of art! I had never heard of this school of art, did some digging and found this incredible artist! His work is very reminiscent of Degas and several others.
I hope you enjoy this post!
Love, Jamie
Raphael Soyer was a prominent American Social Realist painter of the Fourteenth Street school of the 1920s and 1930s, which included Isabel Bishop, Edward Laning, Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller.
Many members of the group worked or maintained studios in the vicinity of Union Square in Manhattan. The son of a liberal Russian Hebrew scholar, Raphael immigrated with his parents and siblings to the United States around 1912;
the family settled in the Bronx. Raphael studied at Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Educational Alliance Art School (1914–1922). He taught at the Art Students League from 1933 to 1942, when American scene
painting was the predominant artistic style. A prolific painter, lithographer, and illustrator, Soyer excelled in social scenes that often featured figures caught in reflective moments of self-absorption, even as they might be immersed in
 otherwise bustling cityscapes. In the 1940s he and his twin brother, Moses, were encouraged by the Russian émigré painter David Burliuk to establish seasonal studios in Hampton Bays, where they exhibited and fraternized with a kindred
circle of Social Realist painters.
 Regarded as America’s leading advocate of realism, Raphael Soyer devoted his long, productive life to “painting people … in their natural context-who belong to their time.” During the 1930s, Soyer’s poignant portrayals of
New York City’s office workers
and the unemployed secured his reputation as a major Social Realist. There was a shift in Soyer’s work of  the 1940sfrom urban environments towards interior scenes. In this work, he has combined two common themes of his oeuvre:
intimate studies of
solitary women, often nudes, and portraits of fellow artists, reflecting his great affection and admiration for them.
January 23, 2013
 Chilean-born artist Roberto Matta was an international figure whose worldview represented a synthesis of European, American and Latin American cultures. As a member of the Surrealist movement and an early mentor to several Abstract Expressionists, Matta broke with both groups to pursue a highly personal artistic vision. His mature work blended abstraction, figuration and multi-dimensional spaces into complex, cosmic landscapes. Matta’s long and prolific career was defined by a strong social conscience and  an intense exploration of the his internal and external worlds.
 I have always been a fan of MATTA’S work. It is a bit phantom and very, sometimes eerie, but i love his sense of style and where the thoughts came from. I do hope you enjoy this post!
Love,
Jamie
Matta’s earliest works were abstract crayon drawings produced using the Surrealist practice of automatism. In these drawings, he referenced organic growth patterns, microscopic views of plants and the non-Euclidean geometry described by mathematician Jules Henri Poincare. Matta transitioned from drawing to oil painting in 1938, while working in Brittany with the British artist Gordon Onslow Ford. The works that Matta created around this time were the first of what he called his “Psychological Morphologies”. In these paintings, Mata explored his subconscious mind through a language of abstract forms and constantly evolving,
multi-dimensional spaces. Matta also referred to these works as “Inscapes”, with the implication that they depicted the interior landscape of the artist’s mind, interconnected with his external reality.
Matta was well established within the Surrealist group by the time that he was forced to flee Europe for America in the fall of 1939. When Matta arrived in New York City, he was the youngest and most outgoing of Surrealist emigres. These traits, combined with a shared interest in automatist
art-making techniques, allowed Matta to quickly form relationships with several of the young New York School artists. Throughout the first half of the 1940s, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes, Peter Busa, Robert Motherwell and others met frequently with Matta to learn about
 his personal ideas about Surrealism.
In the mid-1940s, Matta’s work changed dramatically. Responding to the continuing horrors of the Second World War, Matta expanded his artistic interests beyond his exploration of the subconscious mind. He moved towards a more active engagement with the world in a series of works that he called
“Social Morphologies”. Many of Matta’s paintings from this period incorporate strangely menacing, machine-like contraptions and totemic human forms. He pitted these elements against each other in seemingly constant battle within a landscape of amorphous spaces and vaguely architectural planes.
These works have a new emotional immediacy, reverberating with a formal tension created by the often violently oppositional forms.
January 22, 2013
 Born in 1903, Jensen belongs to the heroic generation of Barnett Newman Jackson Pollock Mark Rothko and Myron Stout and Forrest Bess . Jensen is one of the greatest abstract painters of his or any other generation. It’s a continuing mystery as to why he has never received anything like the attention he deserves.
Alfred Jensen was an eccentric citizen of the world who had traveled everywhere, spoke five languages and personally knew many of the giants of modernism. He studied with Hans Hofmann in Germany and Despiau and Dufresne in France, had a studio upstairs from Mondrian in Paris, was friends with Dubuffet, Rothko, Miro, Duchamp, Breton, and Allan Kaprow. He was a Byzantine primitive, an anonymous Peruvian carpet maker, an Egyptian high priest, a Chinese sage, a crazy autodidact living in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.
Actually, to call Alfred Jensen an abstract painter is misleading, because the paintings are so concrete. They don’t just illustrate or describe ideas; they contain a tremendous amount of concrete information. The paintings may allude to a complex web of ideas, but they are almost absurdly specific. Nothing in these paintings is anything other than itself.
The mature paintings are flat patterns mapping a wide range of numerical and philosophical systems.  Each square inch of the paintings is carefully plotted out and composed. Many paintings are actually covered with numbers including Arabic, Mayan, Chinese, and other ancient counting systems. Some paintings include symbols from the I-Ching, Mayan calendars, and scientific diagrams. Other paintings are completely abstract, subtle checkerboards structured with eccentric but absolutely particular logic. Many paintings include written notations, headings, titles, and quotations in large, loopy script. The paintings are dense, condensed and impacted with ideas, theories, symbols, and grand schemes.
 They are painted with pure color oil paint squeezed straight out of the tube and spread over the surface with a palette knife. The paint is presented as actual colored dirt sitting on the surface. Jensen is never asking the paint to be something other than itself, like a nose, or the sky, or deep space, or atmosphere, or almost any kind of space.
Jensen knew everyone, but remained alone, an outsider in the middle of the art world. He avoided attachments to any school or movement. He developed later as a mature artist than his contemporaries the Abstract Expressionists and was never fully accepted by many of them. He was a major influence on some conceptual and minimal artists, but declined to be included in their pivotal group shows in the early 1960′s. He has been pigeonholed as a bridge between generations, as a “mystic,” an eccentric, a difficult artist.
Have a great day!
Much love,
Jamie
January 21, 2013
 I was introduced to Vladimir Kush’s art not to long ago, as I had made a comment to a friend of mine that where are the living surrealists?
Well, I found one! I hope you enjoy this post and his work! I love the imagery!
Kush predominantly works in the medium of oil painting on canvas or board, with many of the original paintings also sold as limited  edition canvas prints.
 His bronze-colored sculptures are small-scale and usually based on imagery from his paintings, such as Walnut of Eden and Pros and Cons.
Although his style is frequently described as surrealist, Kush himself refers to it as “metaphorical realism” and cites the early influence on his style of Dali’s surrealist paintings as well as landscapes by the German Romantic painter Friedrich.
January 18, 2013
 I was recently introduced to CHANTAL JOFFEE’S amazing artwork! Her images, some dark and a bit disturbing, offer glimpses into a world of potential artists and their struggle to get what they are looking for out of their chosen porfession! Some of the characters you may recognize or feel akin to!
I love her work and hope you enjoy this post!
Have a great day!
Love, Jamie
Chantal Joffee’s work centres around a powerful group of female images!
Her art offers complex fictional portrayals of the artist’s heroines painted chronologically and moving towards us in time from the 1840′s. As well as conceptual explorations of
representations of female icons, the works also engage with key moments in literature, painting and feminist history. Both specific and non-specific, these are imagined  depictions of women - some are real individuals and others hybrid figures – born out of Joffe’s consideration of works of art and literature and the social climate in which they
 were created. Manet’s The Drummer Boy, the writings of Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, the paintings of Lee Krasner and Tamara de Lempicka are all referenced here along  with the intimate musings of Edmund White and the
passionate polemics of Susan Sontag. Each painting shows these young women at a point early in their lives, when they are
beginning to find a voice and question what it means to pursue a dream of being an artist. Set against dark backgrounds and located somewhere not of this time, the strongly contoured bodies are depicted in awkward or
sexual poses, distorted or kneeling but equally conveying a sense  of vulnerability. The models – as is often the case in Joffe’s work -
are taken from photographs in contemporary fashion magazines and bear little or no resemblance to their imagined counterparts.
January 17, 2013
 I had the pleasure many years ago of meeting Manuel Neri and getting to spend some time with him His work is tremendous and so inspirational to me.
I hope that you enjoy learning about these amazing talents! And that you find them inspirational!
Manuel Neri has taken up the existential quest of the beauty of the unfinished, the unfinishable. His sculptures have extremes of surface and texture that relate to their creative birth and their succeeding stages of ‘death’ (and perhaps rebirth) through the artist’s continued re-working of the surfaces and form. It was in Neri’s surprising and substantial body of early paintings and painted papers, figurative as well as nonfigurative, that he developed his special skills for polychromy and brushwork, which he then applied radically to sculpture, his primary sensual and public medium.Neri’s works on paper encompass almost every artistic approach, and show a broadly talented sculptor intelligently, urgently, and creatively probing color, form, materials and the nature of graphic invention. |
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 Manuel Neri (b. 1930) is one of the premier figurative sculptors working today. Born in Sanger, California, Neri began exploring new forms and materials in sculpture and painting in the early 1950s while studying in San Francisco. It was during this period that
such prominent Bay Area artists as David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn began to take a renewed interest in the human figure. Their efforts to combine the human form with abstract expressionist practice had a lasting influence on Neri.
Initially, Neri began sculpting in “junk”—burlap, wire, cardboard—and, soon thereafter, in simple plaster. His lone female figures, often in frankly erotic or naturalistic poses, were lauded immediately not only for their vitality and rawness but also for being simultaneously
contemporary and timeless. From the onset, Neri painted the “skin” of his figures with patches of bright color—a conscious bow, he has said, to the painted sculpture of Marino Marini and to the ceramics of Pablo Picasso, as well as to the visceral expressionism of Willem de Kooning.
Neri’s figures and abstractions on canvas and on paper are equally expressive. Rendered in oil, pastel, tempera, graphite, and charcoal, these works are, in the words of Jack Cowart, former chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the “record of an artist anxiously,
constantly, experimenting and visualizing his craft.”1 Some of Neri’s most important nonsculptural works include the “Window Series” paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and a series of drawings dating from 1976 onward that feature a monumental figure placed in the center of a painted sheet.
Over the past twenty years, Neri has sculpted in Carrara marble even as he continues working in bronze, in some cases, adding brushstrokes of paint, scratches, and other marks atop the marble surface or bronze patina. Recent unpainted marbles are exceptionally notable for their monumentality
and sharp delineations between rough and polished surfaces, and their clear references to classical sculpture.
By casting, carving, and hand-painting his sculptures, Neri is able to explore the life processes of transformation and disintegration. According to writer Bruce Nixon, this “collision of hand and material is fundamentally existential … [and represents] a literal, physical effort to erase the gap between [artist and model].
Indeed, throughout Neri’s entire career, a lone, archetypal woman has been the vehicle for his most ambitious formal and symbolic goals.
 ENJOY!
LOVE
JAMIE
January 16, 2013
 I was recently in a gallery in The City that had beautiful woodcuts. Woodcuts are really quite interesting when you think how they are made and the printing technique that goes into them. I have put two into the post so you can see by changing the paint how it changes the same image.
I was not familiar with this artist , so I am bringing you a bit about his work and himself today!
Enjoy!
Love,
Jamie
Louis Schanker was born in the Bronx in 1903. He studied art at The Cooper Union, the Educational Alliance, and the Art Students League, and traveled through Europe from 1931 to 1933. During the 1930s, Schanker
supervised several artists in the New York City mural division of the WPA. His own work included a large project in the lobby of WNYC Radio in the Municipal Building, a series of circus murals at a children’s hospital, and a mural in
the Science and Health Building at the 1939 World’s Fair. He was one of the founders of the Associated American Artists and was also a founding member of “The Ten: Whitney Dissenters,” a group protesting the  museum’s preference
for American Scene painting and Social Realism. Ilya Bolotowsky, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb were also part of the group, which actually began with nine members. An innovator in woodcuts and printmaking, he was also a sculptor.
Starting in 1949, he had a home in Sag Harbor, and many of his sculptures came from local trees that had been cut for firewood there. In 1962, Schanker married the noted blues singer Libby Holman, and they soon purchased “Dune House”
off Further Lane in East Hampton, though he continued to work at the studio in Sag Harbor until he sold the building in the mid-1970s. He divided his time among New York City, East Hampton, and Stamford, Connecticut, until his death in 1981.
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