Contemporary Drawing Practices ART 304
Friday, August 28, 2015
Rebecca Horn, Artist
But her early body modification pieces were possibly inspired by a year spent in a sanatorium during her youth, not too long after her lungs became diseased, infected by what she terms poisonous materials. Whether such experiences really were the starting point for a career saturated with work focused on body modification is one not worth speculating; but her subsequent bandages, prosthetics and masks have their root somewhere, be it in Germany’s collective post-war experience, or in her own individual psychological makeup. Above image and text source is notey.com
 |
| Cocoon |
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
The Academy of Linceans
The Eye of the Lynx
GALILEO, HIS FRIENDS, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN NATURAL HISTORY
Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly colored, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Coming upon thousands more drawings like them across Europe, Freedberg finally traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from seventeenth-century Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes).Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses especially on their unprecedented use of drawings based on microscopic observation and other new techniques of visualization.
Where previous thinkers had classified objects based mainly on similarities of external appearance, the Linceans instead turned increasingly to sectioning, dissection, and observation of internal structures. They applied their new research techniques to an incredible variety of subjects, from the objects in the heavens studied by their most famous (and infamous) member Galileo Galilei—whom they supported at the most critical moments of his career—to the flora and fauna of Mexico, bees, fossils, and the reproduction of plants and fungi. But by demonstrating the inadequacy of surface structures for ordering the world, the Linceans unwittingly planted the seeds for the demise of their own favorite method—visual description-as a mode of scientific classification.
Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, Eye of the Lynx uncovers a crucial episode in the development of visual representation and natural history. And perhaps as important, it offers readers a dazzling array of early modern drawings, from magnificently depicted birds and flowers to frogs in amber, monstrously misshapen citrus fruits, and more.
Robert Shields, Author
Between 1972 and 1996, Robert Shields, a former minister and English teacher based in Spokane, Washington, kept a typewritten diary of every minute of his life. “The entire day is accounted for,” according to Shields—and it is, including visits to the bathroom, the weight of the daily newspaper, and every piece of junk mail. Detritus like meat labels, grocery store receipts, and nose hairs, are also included. Sleeping no more than two hours at a time so that he could record his dreams, Shields spent an average of four hours a day at his typewriter. When he gave the diary to the Manuscript Archive of Washington State University for preservation in 1999-2000, it was 37.5 million words stored in 81 cardboard boxes.
Text and image source Cabinet Magazine.
Tim Knowles, Artist
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
The works presented on the following pages are part of a wider practice in which I utilize apparatuses, mechanisms, or systems beyond my control to introduce chance into the production of my art. The pieces here are from a series produced by trees, most of which are located in the Borrowdale and Buttermere areas of England’s Lake District. I attach artists’ sketching pens to their branches and then place sheets of paper in such a way that the trees’ natural motions—as well as their moments of stillness—are recorded. Like signatures, each drawing reveals something about the different qualities and characteristics of the various trees as they sway in the breeze: the relaxed, fluid line of an oak; the delicate, tentative touch of a larch; a hawthorn’s stiff, slightly neurotic scratches. Process is key to my work, so each Tree Drawing is accompanied by a photograph or video documenting the location and manner of its creation.
Images and text from Cabinet Magazine, Issue 28.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Monday, August 17, 2015
Tracey Williams, Artist
 |
| A Short History of Some Other Things, 2006 |
“It’s about storytelling and trying to engage people. It’s a narrative that defies closure – it opens up questions – ie it doesn’t tell you what to think,” she says.
“You are put in a place where you have a different relation to things that you may already know [Disney characters, cowboys, pukeko]. When things are really familiar you never question them. Images that you have grown up with background your psyche.”
Williams says her work is an antidote to the “grand narratives” people define themselves by. She is interested in the way people pick and choose from their life experience to define themselves.
It’s part of the adopt-a-culture trend in modern life, she says.
“People look outside themselves to find meaning. It’s a collaging of images. US culture seems to have taken its contemporary rules off TV and we are kind of doing that here. I find that really sad. People are desperate to find an identity but they don’t stand still long enough.
“We have become such a commodified culture. I buy that car, I am that car. I buy those clothes, I am those clothes. There’s a sad lack of ethics underneath it.”
In identifying ourselves or our race as possessing certain traits, we risk overlooking shared humanity, she says.
Image and text source from ARTZONE.
Kara Walker, Artist
 |
| Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart |
Kara Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Beginning with Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), she became known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery. Gone includes a tree bough that suggests a typical novelistic setting for a lovers’ meeting, yet all manner of surreal activity takes place: the woman of a white couple that is about to kiss has four legs; the man seems to touch the bottom of a nearby black boy with his sword; this boy is holding a swan that has emerged from a black woman, who floats on the water (a set of metaphors for miscegenation).
Above text from Guggenheim.org
Watch on YouTube. Kara Walker talks about her work.
Link here.
More work by Kara Walker below.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Robin Ward, Artist
The Elephants in the Room(s), found paint box with mixed media, 14 x 14 x 17," 2010
Source link here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)