Kirsi Mikkola, Artist, Finnish

Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, b. 1925, d. 2008, USA

Scrape (Hoarfrost Editions)

1974 
76 x 36 inches 
Offset lithograph transferred to 
collage of paper bags and fabric 
Edition of 32

Robert Rauschenberg worked in a wide range of mediums including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, and performance, over the span of six decades. He emerged on the American art scene at the time that Abstract Expressionism was dominant, and through the course of his practice he challenged the gestural abstract painting and the model of the heroic, self-expressive artist championed by that movement.

In his landmark series of Combines (1954–64) he mixed the materials of artmaking with ordinary things, writing, “I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.”1 In  Bed (1955), for example, he covered a large wall-mounted board with a pillow and patchwork quilt which he then marked with graphite scrawls and exuberant lashings of paint, the latter perhaps an ironic nod to Abstract Expressionism.

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg studied at a variety of art schools including the experimental Black Mountain College outside of Asheville, North Carolina, where the artist and former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers was his teacher. There, his mentors and collaborators included the composer John Cage, the artist Cy Twombly, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham, with whom he would collaborate on more than twenty dance compositions. Rauschenberg’s engagement with performance was enduring and a defining influence in his work. As his career began to gather steam in New York in the mid-1950s, he also began a crucial dialogue with the artist Jasper Johns that shaped the work of both: together the two artists pushed each other away from defined models of practice towards new modes that integrated the signs, images, and materials of the everyday world.

Photography and printmaking were two of Rauschenberg’s abiding interests. In the 1958–60 seriesbased on the thirty-four Cantos of Dante’s Inferno(346.1963.1-34), he used a solvent to transfer photographs from contemporary magazines and newspapers onto drawing paper. The series is emblematic of a lifetime of experimentation with the ways the deluge of images in modern media culture could be transmitted and transformed.

Text source Museum of Modern Art

Valentina Formosan, Artist

Valentina Formisano is an young artist hailing from Macerata, Italy.

Source is streetanataomy.com

Diana Cooper, Artist

Link here to artist's website. 

Jaga Jarosiewicz, Artist

Jaga Jorosiewicz's body of work has explored, piooneered and incorporated the history of language in her text based paintings. Layered handwritten language, symbols, and marks are a central motifs for this work which transforms a column into a work of art. The content exceeds the limits of the literal meaning and is integrated into a massive pattern-subtext-texture. The building up of layers of writing is a metaphor for language as the structure of culture and communication.

Jaga Jorosiewicz is a graduate from the University of Torun, Poland, received her Master's Degree in Painting and Art Education in 1976. In 1978 she completed a two year apprenticeship program in Tapestry at the Academy of Fine Art in Poznab. Jaga began her early history in Poland as a contemporary master of fiber and textile art, resulting in the purchase of 6 of her major works for the permanent collections of the Central Museum of Textiles in Lodz and Poznan's National Museum of Art. Jaga's carreer now spans 22 years. She has participated in 14 solo exhibitions and over 30 group exhibitions in cities such as Stockholm, Budapest, Munich, London, Melbourne, Glasgow, Mexico, Chicago, and Toronto. She lives and works in Toronto.

Above image and text from Cafka Contemporary Art Forum. Link here. 

Artist website link here. 

Rogan Brown, Artist

Artist's website link here. 

Sian Bowen, Artist

Sian Bowen, from “Gaze” series, 2007,
 palladium, silver and pigment on laser cut and pin pricked paper mounted in lightboxes.“Dust has implications about time, about something that can both cover and be removed from a surface. It can transform our understanding an object or a space – and how it is located in time.”

Sîan Bowen – extract from interview with Tony Godfrey, August 2010

Dust on the Mirror is the title of a current international group exhibition in which I am taking part at Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham and which has been curated by Tony Godfrey and Neil Walker. Taking its title from the Bhagavad-Gita in which Krishna uses the metaphor of dust on the mirror to explain levels of spiritual consciousness, this exhibition brings together five artists from the eastern and western hemispheres.

Given the central role that the ephemeral is plays in my current project at the Rijksmuseum, the opportunity to participate in the exhibition and gain insight into how themes of transience have been explored by the other exhibiting artists, Donna Ong, Chris Cook, Susan Derges and Charwei Tsai, was very revealing.  Further information on the exhibition can be found at:www.lakesidearts.org.uk/exhibitions.html  

Image and text source is Suspending the Ephemeral.  Link here. 

Holly Naylor, Artist

"I began pin-pricking old postcards I had found in Kazimierz market in Krakow and started to pin-prick according to tonality within the images. I however quickly progressed to the film photographs I had taken of light blurs by the Quayside in Newcastle in January before I had arrived in Krakow. I became interested in the layering of drawings, and how I considered my film photographic pieces as drawings in themselves, and so to pin-prick over the photograph was to draw over an existing drawing. The pin-pricks look as if I have almost graffitied or scribbled over the photographic drawing, with the background lighting illuminating/ highlighting certain details of the drawing tonally as if you would with the intensity of pencil tonality."

Image and text source from Holly's blog.  Link here. 

Jasna Guy, Artist

"Working with stamps and linocuts is very addictive – repetition, the basis of the process, allows for large areas to be produced within a relatively (that’s relatively) short space of time (compared to hand drawing, of course). I’m up to 9,000 bees to date and counting!

At the same time, I can cut new stamps as the muse strikes me, thus maintaining some of the individuality inherent in hand drawing. The repetition involved in creating the patterns contributes to the unity of the total piece, but further, each act of stamping or printing produces a unique imprint – the pressure applied to the paper, the amount of ink on the stamp and even accidental movements and slips of the hand create a variation in each print.  From clear impressions to strange blobs, I never quite know what I’m going to get!"

"I’m experimenting with a new way of adding the blue to the image -brushing the powdered soft pastel directly onto the surface of the scanner, and then also adding it to the petal before scanning.  Prior to this, modifications (scribbles, etc.) other than the tattooing or scribing of text with a stylus never really touched the actual petals since additions and annotations were added after-the-fact in Photoshop, or to the surface of images printed and then rescanned."

Images and text source Jasna Guy.  Link here. 

Timothy Hawkesworth, Artist

More to see on artist's website.  Link here. 

Laura Jacobs, Artist

Source link here. 

John Sarra, Artist

Source link here. 

John Sarra, Artist

Source link here. 

Olivia Wendel, Artist

Artist's website link here.

David A. Reeves, Artist

Paper cut silhouettes.
Source is Feel Desain.  Link here. 

Maggie Taylor

“Using 19th century tin-types, photographs, and images, she scanned them on a flatbed scanner. She then combines them with some other images that she photographed, acquired, or other objects that she scanned. These images are then composed, combined, and colorized by using the Adobe Photoshop program. In a typical image composed by Taylor, there can be as many as 40-60+ layers." Article by Douglas Eby. Link here to read more.

A lot more to see on the website. Link here.

Hiroyuki Doi, Artist

This artist offers inspiration for the Layers Quick Challenge - layered mark making. 

“Obsessive Drawing” highlights contemporary interpretations of line by five emerging self-taught artists. This is the first museum exhibition in New York to showcase this international group: Eugene Andolsek (USA), Charles Benefiel (USA), Hiroyuki Doi (Japan), Chris Hipkiss (England and France), and Martin Thompson (New Zealand). The immediacy of the art masks painstaking processes, and the act of drawing becomes a surprising necessity. The artists’ motivations for making art are married to their self-taught survival skills to help them cope with illness, loss, loneliness, fear, and regret. Inevitably, though, the process of drawing eventually dominated this motivation, and making marks on a page became captivating, so that it is now an obsession for each man. The lust for line trumps everything. Each artist thus discovers what John Ruskin (1819–1900) said about drawing years ago, that one purpose of drawing was to record things that could not be described in words.
Brooke Davis Anderson, Curator, American Folk Art Museum

Link here.