Ana Mendieta, Artist

Tree of Life, 1976

"Mendieta’s work is both beautiful and haunting as it draws on the life long pain the artist experienced after being ripped from her Cuban homeland as a young orphan. Mendieta’s insatiable desire to reconnect with her motherland runs though her work and seems to almost give each piece a heart and a soul of its own. This connection with the earth is reflected in her choice of materials which included flowers, grass, soil, rock, gunpowder and fire. Unconcerned with the monetary value or collectibility of her work Mendieta would often create pieces which lasted mere minutes, or even seconds as was the case with her ‘sculptures in the sky’ made from smoke. As a result many pieces exist only as photographic records and a fair portion of the exhibition is devoted to displaying the extensive body of photographs and records that she kept of her works and performance pieces."

Above image and text source link here.

Source link here.

Above two images from huffingtonpost.com

Ana Mendieta, Artist

Untitled (Body Tracks), 1974

Source link here.

Francesca Woodman, Artist

Francesca Woodman: Untitled, Boulder, Colorado 1976

Source is New York Book Review

Cornelia Parker, Artist

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991

An ordinary garden shed, blown to smithereens by the army and then suspended in mid-air.

Christian Boltanski, Artist

French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker. Self-taught, he began painting in 1958 but first came to public attention in the late 1960s with short avant-garde films and with the publication of notebooks in which he came to terms with his childhood. The combination in these works of real and fictional evidence of his and other people’s existence remained central to his later art. As well as presenting assemblages of documentary photographs wrenched from their original context, in the 1970s he also experimented inventively with the production of objects made of clay and from unusual materials such as sugar and gauze dressings. These works, some of them entitled Attempt at Reconstitution of Objects that Belonged to Christian Boltanski between 1948 and 1954 (1970–71; see 1990 exh. cat., p. 11), again included flashbacks to segments of time and life that blurred memory with invention. -source is MOMA

The Stories From The Ground, Artists

Source is Pia Jane Bijkerk.  Link here. 

Lakbay, The FOB Show

Shadows

Source is Flickr

Source is Flickr

Source Unknown

Source is Book Porn

Source of Unknown

I keep a Pinterest Board, "Shadows and Silhouettes".  

Feel free to check it out for more images of shadows. 

Link here.

Francesca Woodman, Artist

"Taken between 1972 and 1981, Woodman’s photographs are almost all black-and-white and have a general softness of focus not often seen these days. They depict a world almost identical to the one captured by earlier generations of photographers, as if Woodman’s camera were a filter through which the neon clutter of contemporary life could not pass. Some of these images have the polished smoothness of Surrealist photographs, like those of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer, in which precisely-rendered objects are arranged so deliberately it seems the slightest movement would alter the meaning entirely. (Fluent in Italian, Woodman spent her junior year in Rome, where she paid frequent visits to the Libreria Maldoror, a bookshop-gallery that specialized in work about and by Surrealists, and which ultimately hosted her first small show.) She makes use of many Surrealist motifs, among them mirrors, gloves, birds, and bowls. Like Magritte, she often shrouds her subjects in white sheets."

Image and text source from The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman by Elizabeth Gumport, The New York Review of Books.  Link here to read and see more. 

Christine Kaiser, Artist

Drawing on carved wood.

Source link here. 

Marc Trotereau, Artist

Source is Le Territoire Des Sens.  Link hère. 

Fumiaki Goto, Artist

A pencil lead is a type of ceramic.

It is made with mixing clay with graphite and baking it at high temperature. 

These vessels are made with the same recipe as a pencil lead. So they are not only ceramic vessels but also tools for drawing.

The special way of baking makes the white part normal ceramic and makes the black part a pencil lead. So the user can grab the white part and can use the pencil without making a hand dirty.

Source link here.

Robert Howsare, Artist

Forget two turntables and a microphone—focus instead on two turntables and some wooden arms. In Drawing Apparatus Robert Howsare turns a pair of turntables into an automated drawing machine, swapping rotating vinyl for two wooden arms that draw geometric patterns as the turntables spin around.

Varying the speed or shortening the wooden arms leads to different patterns being created, with Howsare seeing the resulting images as markers of temporality rather than simply drawings. As he explains:

The revolutions of the records create drawings that serve as a markers of temporality. The drawings also speak to the idea of the editionable print through their ability to be replicated using domestic materials.

From The Creators Project. source link here

Mark Making Tools

A washer has been used to convert this Staedtler Mars Lumograph 8B stub into a spinning top. It turns and spins on a piece of paper leaving behind its spirals and circles in perpetually new combinations. Proving there is still life in the old stub.

Knowleagable as he is in all pencil matters Gunther informs me that he used the Lumograph 8B because (like the 7B but unlike the 6B) it contains a small amount of shoot which produces a blacker black. A soot-less pencil turns a little longer and with less friction but the marks it leaves behind are not so intense.

Above image and text source link here. 

Chris Weaver

Yukimi Annand

Source Unknown

Source Unknown

Thomas Forsyth, Artist

Artist's Website.

Mark Making Tools

Images found on Jennifer Coyne Qudeen's blog.  Link here.

Brice Marden, Artist

Calligraphy

Shotei Ibata

Kotaro "Hatch" Hachinohe

Source Unknown

Source Unknown

Geoffrey Ricardo, Artist

Artist's Website

Lisa Kokin, Artist

Artist's Website

Heather Smith Jones, Artist

From the artist's website.  Link here.

The pinhole method is one I have been employing since around 2000 and one I use on it's own or combined with other media. While researching Australian Aboriginal art during graduate school I was inspired by their use of dots. By poking holes through paper, I translated those dots and understood I had found a new way to communicate, in my voice. There is an austere and delicate beauty in making a pattern, image, or text with a subtractive process. It has been said my "works marry fierce and fragile through the exquisite and obsessive technique of pin-pricked imagery."

Pinhole relates to drawing and also fiber work. The repetitive process of poking one hole after another is like the accumulative gestures found in sewing, stitching or weaving. A friend of mine one remarked that he found my work to be "like sewing without thread". My mother was a weaver for many years and my grandmother embroidered. My pinhole process recalls those traditions.

Sarah Louise Matthews, Artist

Artist's Website