I enjoy his work because I, like a many illustrators, have the difficulty of finding the patience to create works similar to Birch’s in a digital format. What I mean, more specifically, is the creation of vector artwork with translucent layers, similar to what Birch has done.

What’s more beautiful is the traditional oil medium. The motion is still there, typical of the cubist movements, but there is intense motion and stillness at the same time. I recognize the moving figure, but I see it also as one body, beautiful and complex in color and form.

His work is really beautiful. Check him out.

Without a doubt my lack of exposure to this type of art is a direct result of growing in rural areas, too close to the cows and away from the art culture centers of the nation. I have grown up a bit, the Internet has become wildly popular, and I am much more educated and sensitive to the art world. So what am I waiting for? A conversation with another artist.

A new colleague shared with me a link to a NYTimes article.

At 5 p.m. Monday one of the longest pieces of performance art on record, and certainly the one with the largest audience, comes to an end. Since her retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art on March 14, the artist Marina Abramovic has been sitting, six days a week, seven hours a day in a plain chair, under bright klieg lights, inMoMA’s towering atrium. When she leaves that chair Monday for the last time, she will have clocked 700 hours of sitting.

…

Visitors to the museum were invited, first come first served, to sit in a chair facing her and silently return her gaze. The chair has rarely, if ever, been empty. Close to 1,400 people have occupied it, some for only a minute or two, a few for an entire day.

Consider performance art as a new viable art form? Check.

Jinks’ work is fascinating in his utilization of emaciated figures as a means of provocation. Still Life (Pieta) [below] is a reinterpretation of Michelangelo’s Pieta. Mary embraces the dying body of Jesus, stoically mourning the passing of the son of Christ. In Jinks’ rendition, he provides a curious replacement of Mary, a contemporary man in modern dress holding the old, withered and saggy body of an anonymous man. It may or may not be Jesus as it lacks the typical visual clues. Moreover it is a juxtaposition of old and young, clothed and naked, alive and dead. Though all of Jinks’ sculptures are lacking life as it seems, part emaciation part solitude.

His photorealism works paired with the lifelessness of individuals who appear to exist is a beautiful harmony. Definitely a favorite sculptor of mine.

I somehow had neglected revisiting Flickr 9000′s photostream, even after bookmarking it years ago. This anonymous person’s work is ripe with satire, dark comedy, and a twang of social commentary. The works are refreshing with many pieces revisiting a mid-century vintage style.

Check them out. You won’t regret it.

He jumped out at me for a few very different reasons. My contemporaries would classify me as a heavily Swiss influenced designer. That is just one side of the spectrum. Works like We Are America and Trouble at the Pump are some excellent examples that quantifies the polar opposites my design aesthetic takes sometimes.

Victore’s work stuck out at me because of the personal utility of his design. His work is reflective of strong opinions coupled with highly controversial imagery, one of the large inspirations for the We Are America poster. After all, political posters should stir discomfort in the viewer in order to maintain an effective communication. This is one of the main reasons propaganda works, due in part to the successfulness of sensation.

But this brings about an interesting point when discussing the viability of sensationalism in design. I remember in my fine art training being warned about the plague of sensation, more specifically the over indulgence many artists sometimes fall into. Examples can be portraits of children, images of death, etc… Typically these images contain a sensation unique to the artist, though arguably social context gets dragged in alongside it. When boiled down to the bare minimum, you don’t want to give your viewer image porn.

Sensationalism in the graphic arts is another story as this term was never used in the classroom. James Victore’s work would be an excellent example of sensationalism in design, visa vie my two projects linked above. The fascinating dichotomy of design is the tension of art vs. commercial utility. Victore’s work is the embodiment of sensation and opinion, delivered to viewers in the medium of print using the traditional methods of a commercial designer.

I might be on to something here as I try and rationalize my education to real world experiences. I’ve come to find that some of the most popular design is based largely on sensation, which is the direct opposite to the fine arts.

When the movie posters and trailers began to emerge for Where the Wild Things Are, I remember being taken aback by the type. In fact, it was one of the main reasons I was excited to go and see the movie.

Geoff Mcfetridge is the mastermind behind the hand-drawn child-like type of the movie. There is something really beautiful about type inspired by the scribblings of children. The marks are fresh and unconscious, rendered seaming-less.

It might seem simple to recreate a typeface such as this, but in reality, its the coupling of the concept that drives it home for me. A beautiful juvenile font, massive puppets, the tainting of a child on an untouched rabble of simple creatures; all of these variables make the type more believable, more credible. Geoff’s work falls on this aesthetic of wonky reminiscent doodles of childhood. Definitely a designer to watch.

Artists come and go from my sphere of inspiration. I’m not sure what variables allow an artist to stay on my scope, but Elina Brotherus has all of those.

I was first exposed to her work a year ago in an advanced photography class I was taking. Her famous image Der Wanderer (above) was present in a chapter outlining contemporary landscape imagery. It was interesting at first to see how an obscured figure, back to the viewer, created a collection of requirements necessary to be deemed “good” contemporary photography. If there is one thing that my photography studies has entailed, it is the quest for identity and how we identify ourselves and the world that is defined as the “contemporary war.” With the identity expectation in hand, Brotherus piqued my interest in that she combines her formal painting training into her photography.

Enter Brotherus’ New Painting Series. From a description of her work on her website, where the images of the series can also be viewed, she states that she brings new life to her painting skills by photographing. In a later statement, she denotes her body of work as:

Like in my earlier work, I frequently use myself as a model. However, these new works escape from the inherent problem of self-portraiture, the problem of «representing oneself». They do not aim at drawing a psychological portrait of the subject, but rather presenting him/her as an object of investigation, not for the inner properties but for the external ones.

With all the changes in my life at the current moment, I am left appreciating how small she makes herself in her landscape images. Instead of her against the world, its the world against her.

I stumbled across the work of Nick Leperd via a friend’s tumblr. When I saw the image above at a smaller size, I grumbled to myself and thought, “Another big brush stroker.” That style is seen a lot in contemporary painting.

After digging through his website, I began to notice my first inkling was completely off the mark. All too often I am left with negativity when faced with the question: does the technique contribute to the content? Big brush strokes, for the sake of big brush strokes, is mundane and automatic. What really struck me about Leperd’s work was his statement regarding his work:

In my most recent work I explore notions of singularity, concepts of time and patterns of change.

Today, modernity requires that each of us navigate a blizzard of information. How this maelstrom of data is interpreted and synthesized constructs an individual’s paradigm. However, the qualities of the data are subject to a Catch-22: while the data works to describe an individual’s paradigm, an individual’s paradigm likewise works to describe the data.

With so much accessible information, yet so little certainty, are our interpretations of the world more complex or confused, more varied or more refined? Is the course of progress more accessible, or more elusive?

(via)

The rush, the confusion, the feeling of smallness; Leperd’s technique contributes to his concept. The world is a busy place, and the blurs and semi-pointilism of his work enforces the idea that the viewer is constantly receiving information and piecing it together. What can be more beautiful then seeing the world through this fragmentation and abstraction? Beautiful.