Pino

A regular customer came into my job today with some art books. I told him about what I was studying last week and he got really excited and brought me these books to look at. His favorite, and the one he wanted to talk about the most, was Pino. Pino is from Italy, and he was born in 1939. Sadly, he passed away last year. Anyway, the title of his book is "Contemporary Realism," in which he showcases beautiful oil paintings. They mostly feature women, but his touch is unique. He uses fast strokes, and his work has an impressionist feel. He puts the most detail usually within the face of the subject, and the backgrounds tend to be less detailed, and "carelessly" stroked with paint, leaving the evidence of the brush behind. I've never really been drawn to painting that much (pun intended), but looking at Pino's work makes me want to invest in some oil paints. Honestly, I don't even think I've ever seen oil paints.

I just looked this book up on Amazon, and it costs around $250. Wow. His paintings are really gorgeous, though. I'm really glad talking about art with a random customer brought me Pino.

The Last Dance
www.pino-artist.com

Waiting
www.pino-artist.com

Annette Messager

"The Messengers" is Annette Messager's (obvious play on title due to her surname) 2009 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery that spans 4 years of Messager's work. Messager addresses topics such as sexuality, childhood, the body, identity, etc, in her art. She uses everyday objects in her installations such as childhood toys, photographs, and fabrics to create pretty interesting multi-media pieces. The way she sets up her installations forces viewers to look at these objects in different ways.

( from here)

I think the above piece is my favorite from "The Messengers." It focuses on body parts. They're separated, but they are still one, or a whole - and that's how it processes in my mind. I think about each image as a separate thing that makes up this great thing that is the human body, both male and female. I like how all of the images are in black and white, too. Color would have been too distracting. Some of the images are repeated in different sizes, but it does a good job of unifying the piece.

Anne Boyles

Smoking

Kids

Engaged

I stumbled upon Anne Boyles today. She's a young artist in Boise, Idaho, and I'm about 85% positive I went to high school with her.  But anyway, she's 23 and she studied in New York for awhile, but now she's back and she's been doing these awesome photorealistic paintings. Her work can be found on anneboyles.com and all of the images are pulled from that website. 

Walkens Welcome

Marilyn Monroe

I've always been envious of those who are skilled with a brush, and I've also had a fascination with photorealism. What I love about Anne's work is that I'm really not convinced they are paintings just by looking at the images of them, because they seriously look like photographs. I'd like to see them in real life! The one of the girl smoking really intrigues me. She has a nice touch with a paintbrush.

Installation Day!

I'm really proud of the way our Tootsie Pops display turned out! It looks really clean, fun and informative. We had the idea to use the Tootsie Pop labels as accents when we were putting it all together. We included one of every color. I think it adds a nice touch and ties things together even more. I'm glad we decided to organize the rows by color, it just adds a nice aesthetic touch. I keep telling friends at BSU to drop by the LA building and see the whole show, from what I saw today, the displays all look really great! I think I may be hopped up on sugar due to eating so many suckers, I feel the need to use a lot of exclamation points.

Perceptions of Color: Finished

There are some subtle differences between these pictures because I thought I was done after the first one, but my teacher thought differently. Ha, it always feels like it's never really over when I'm drawing. Even with drawings I've supposedly "finished," I wouldn't feel bad about going back and revising. Anyway. Onto the final product, ta-da! It's not something I would hang in my house, it's just not my choice subject matter, but I'm proud of what I have accomplished and what I've learned about drawing in color. The most complicated parts of this drawing were the most rewarding and after weeks and weeks I'm glad to be done with it.

Tootsie Pops

I made these before class today at work to add to our installation:

They will be Figures A, B, and C which correspond with an informational paragraph I wrote entitled "What Constitutes a Lick?" It took a few tries to get these drawings how I wanted them, but they turned out perfect. In lab we stayed an hour late finishing everything up and getting the display pretty much done for Tuesday's installment. I got to the center and it took 1,052 licks. But that's going around the orb of the sucker. If you just lick from one side, Kim and I found out it only takes about 250-350. We were reaching the center really quickly, so we altered the method of consuming the sucker to make a more pleasing display. If we would have just done one side of the sucker, the our display would only have maybe 10 suckers, despite the 3 bags (17 suckers each) that we have. Anyway, we made shelves for the Tootsie Pops, licked the Tootsie Pops, watched a silly romantic comedy, and Annelise is going to type up the title and all the information we have and we'll be ready to go on Tuesday.

James Luna

What I like about James Luna is his inclusion of himself as a piece of "art" in many of his displays. He feels like performance and installation are the loudest ways to make an impression, the best ways to get one's point across. And including himself in these performances/installations is crucial because what does he know better than himself? How can he speak of issues that mean a lot to him personally, without being personally involved? (summarized from an article here) As an Indian/Mexican-American, he has a lot to say about race, culture, prejudice and society.

In Artifact Piece, he places himself on display, as if it were a Natural History Museum.

(english.emory.edu)

He labeled places on his body, like a scar from "excessive drinking," etc. It really makes me question the  world of the museum. Why can't one put a live human on display? Why isn't it weird to put dead humans on display? We feel a kinship with living beings, and when they pass on it's an almost vile thing to be around their bodies. It makes me question what's important.