Beautiful Mess

Creativity needs to flow -and if it doesn't, you will have to get it moving.
The book: Mess, The Manual of Accidents and Mistakes from Kari Smith was for me the urge to get something going. And trying to loose my sense of perfectionism. The title really says it all!

On this page an old German vintage picture of a  beach was meant to be altered. Just a tiny bit. The assignment was to erase something. Boy, did I erase something! I erased almost everything. The picture was full of people in the sea, little houses on the beach, big buildings in the sea. Not a beach that I would like to be. So I started to erase. And kept erasing. The only things left are the beach, sea, sky, dunes and those two figures in the foreground. A little bit of gesso and watercolor crayons did the magic.

One of my favorite assignments was on this page. Take a lot of little paper strips, add glue to the page, drop the paper strips in the wet glue from a distance.
Simple and messy. Just what I needed.

First I did one side of the spread with cut paper strips. Then I used the little circles from my puncher for the other side of the spread.
This simple act brings back childhood feelings of pleasure, fun and wonder. And the more mess you create, the better you will feel. Well, that is the way it works for me... :-)

This book is a relief to work in. You can do a scribble for 10 seconds, or take some more time for other assignments. Don't want to play with paints? Choose another spread and just find an assignment that you like. No need to start at page 1 and advance to the next page!

Want to get rid of a creativity block too? You can find the book here:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781846144479/Mess
This is my favorite online bookstore because I don't have to worry about the shipping costs and/or order costs. Simple because you only pay for the books that you order - they have worldwide free shipping and no order costs.
Do you also like to play this way? 

Appreciate the Little Things: Contemporaries - Idea to Masterpiece

Light and shadow painting by Rashad Alakbarov.

"Bipolar Disorder" by Sishir Bommakanti.

"The Hand of God" by François-Auguste-René Rodin.

"Mountain Vista" pushpin art by Magdalena Bors.

Bronze sculpture of river-god Tyne by David Wynne.

Polished stainless steel portal by David Harber.

"Dancer" charcoal and black conté pencil drawing by Henrik Moses.

Optimus Prime made from real car parts by Primitive Designs. Photography courtesy of Andrew Finlay.

Sigmar Polke and Richard Dadd

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke grew up in East Germany. After moving with his family to West Germany, settling in Wittich, he studied glass painting from 1959 to 1960 at Dusseldorf Kaiserwerth and then transferred to the Academy of Art. With fellow student Gerhard Richter he formulated a Pop inspired "Capital Realist" anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertising. The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional painting techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary. Paganini, an expression of "the difficulty of purging the demons of Nazism" - witness the "hidden" swastikas - is typical of Polke's tendency to accumulate a range of different mediums within one canvas. It is not unusual for Polke to combine household materials and paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in one piece. A complicated "narrative" is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils. 

My reasons why I came to be so interested in his work was because I found out that he used techniques that allowed him to portray an image over an image; which was my intention throughout this commission. Most of his pieces of work aren't as quite as good as compared to his expression works like the referral to Nazism. However, the thing that interested me the most whilst looking at his work was the fact that he used a larger scale in his work and how he interpreted three multiple pieces together but still made them flow through each one more effectively.

Richard Dadd:

Richard Dadd
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke 1855-64
Oil on canvas
support: 540 x 394 mm frame: 670 x 525 x 65 mm
Presented by Siegfried Sassoon in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, a great-nephew of the artist, and of his two brothers who gave their lives in the First World War 1963

Richard Dadd was not only extremely well educated, he was on his way to becoming a full-blooded representative of Victorian painting before killing his father in a fit of psychosis and being subsequently confined to an institution. He painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke for the director of the hospital. Did he perhaps want to present it as proof of his sanity? Sigmar Polke delves into Dadd’s enduring dialogue with the figures he created.

I’ve known Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke 1855–64. When I look at it again today, it’s as if I were looking into a tapestry and losing my way. Its composition is quite unlike any other Victorian fairy painting. The point of view is not clearly defined. Instead, the individual elements appear to be linked by almost invisible forces.
The texture of the picture is all-embracing, in the ‘all-over’ style of Jackson Pollock. There is no horizon; we seem to be looking into a kind of shallow box, a diorama of scenes from nature – with one fabulous trick. Only the bright patch of earth at the bottom of the picture generates a bit of distance, the necessary breathing space.
Actually, it’s like lying in the grass and observing nature, like picking up a stone and gazing into a singular universe. It reminds me of the ‘Little World by the Wayside’, a popular series of postcards issued in the former East Germany. It is Richard Dadd’s other world. The artist devoted a full nine years – from 1855 to 1864 – to painting the picture while locked away in the isolation of the insane asylum, Bethlem Hospital. And he painted from memory, as is so often pointed out. He spent those nine years getting every detail right, working as concisely as Albrecht Dürer did on his The Great Piece of Turf of 1503. However, Richard Dadd (1817–1886) directs the precision of his gaze at the fantastical, his hallucinating mind carrying him into increasingly elaborate, intense levels of invention.
It is the grass that holds everything together optically, lending the picture its gently magical drive, while the petaled radiance of the daisies produces large bright highlights. The composition is, in fact, dotted with round shapes, as in the large spiral movement of the vines, or the curiously curled stems. Spherical forms, distributed throughout, take the shape of hazelnuts or prickly fruits or white ruffles on a shirt. Dadd uses them, gently playing with the picture space, as he does the daisies, tipped over or seen from the side, or the puffed-up skirts of the women. The daisies also set the stage for the artist’s curious treatment of scale. The composition obeys the formal principle of dots spreading out across the picture plane – a principle that is, of course, not alien to me.
Dadd’s skillful interweaving of a powerful, depth less frontal and sensually emphasized shapes is highly sophisticated. A rich materiality prevails in this painting, an iridescence that ranges from the vegetable forms of nature to the fabrics worn by the cast of fairy characters. In view of the structures, one sometimes wonders whether the artist has depicted rock or leaf, plant or wing, body or blossom.
The idea of covering a surface with figures goes way back to Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) and Pieter Bruegel (1525–1569). But in Dadd’s case, there is always this special lighting, a luminosity that comes from within, a kind of fluorescent effect. White dots appear on every single tiny pebble, on the buttons of the minuscule costumes, on every little leaf – until we realize, at some point, that this is dew. Almost physically, we can follow the path of a parallel reality slowly emerging in the process of looking hard and wanting to be precise. What a difference from, say, Hercules Seghers (1589–1638) or the Impressionists, who break down what they see into generously airy, abstract patches and structures.
Richard Dadd was not only extremely well educated, he was on his way to becoming a full-blooded representative of Victorian painting before killing his father in a fit of psychosis and being subsequently confined to an institution. At that time, the fantasy life of fairies – from Grimm to Shakespeare – enjoyed widespread popularity as an imaginary world fully integrated into reality. Dadd’s appropriation of this world is, however, neither kitsch, nor facile, nor garrulous, because it does not obey the then current pictorial conventions. Nor does his vision echo the spirited confections of popular draughtsman J.J. Grandville’s fantastic book Un Autre Monde 1844. Instead, one senses the extraordinary intensity of an enduring dialogue between the artist and the universe of figures that he created. Isolated from the outside world, he painted the picture for the director of the hospital. Did he perhaps want to present it as proof of his sanity?
And his vision has nothing to do with the hallucinations caused by drugs, for nothing is distorted, there are no exaggerated metamorphoses. But the displacement, the ‘pink elephants’ of alcoholism, the experience of states such as those induced by drugs today, were then more generally accepted as constituents of life and culture. (Besides, people ate poorly, for instance, rotten meat…) If one wants to find a sign for his pathology, one could interpret the obsessive regularity of the dewdrops as symbolizing a kind of self-fertilizing machine.
This painting interests me with its concept of time as a self-contained sphere. There is obviously something going on in the picture plane. It does not merely depict a snarled tangle of events. It has momentum. This comes from the Fairy Feller in the foreground, his axe poised on high, ready to chop a giant hazelnut in half. The figures are in a trance, the action is suspended. This delayed, arrested act corresponds to the suspended act of painting. Just take a closer look and you will see: the artist has not finished painting his picture. The axe and the bright patch of earth still show raw, unpainted canvas. Why? Because on closer inspection, an almost divine power becomes visible that seems to rule the composition after all: the bearded figure in the center with his huge, three-tiered crown, the Patriarch, who will give the signal for the axe to fall. He has already stretched out his hand. It is as if that moment were being delayed for all eternity by never allowing the picture to be completed. We are faced with the yawning psychological abyss of patricide.
Formally, however, the painting is anything but static or stiff; Dadd has succeeded in lending simple blades of grass an incredible energy and sense of motion. If I were asked what links this painting with my art, I would say I am reminded in particular of the Schleifenbilder of 1986, a series of whorls after Dürer’s woodcut Large Triumphal Carriage of Emperor Maximilian I 1522, where the delicate curlicues are assigned to the virtues of Providencia, Acrimonia, Virilitas, Experientia, Solertia and Audacia. These ornamental loops are exactly like the tendrils of grass in Dadd’s work. They are not natural, there are no such plants – the closest they come are to our sweet peas, but then they would have blossoms.
Richard Dadd is said to have suffered sunstroke on a journey to Egypt and Palestine, causing the outbreak of his mental illness. More likely he was overwhelmed by the intensity of his impressions in this encounter with the world. Perhaps figures in the painting are not transformed people, but rather animals – beings from a middle world in a middle time. One more curlicue, a whorl, my coda follows in the form of an ancient Celtic saying:

A city lasts three years,
A dog outlives three cities,
A horse outlasts three dogs,
A person outlives three horses,
A donkey outlives three people,
A wild goose outlives three donkeys,
A crow outlives three wild geese,
A hart outlives three crows,
A raven outlives three harts,
And the Phoenix outlives three ravens.

In the Garden with Sandy Dooley

Bright Autumn

In an age dominated by conceptualism and abstraction, Sandy Dooley’s beautiful landscapes come as a welcome respite. Painting out-of-doors to capture the interplay of light and shadow, Dooley is spearheading an Impressionist renaissance. But this isn't just Impressionism churned out 150 years later – Dooley revitalizes the once-radical style with a contemporary twist, expertly capturing the tension between figuration and abstraction.

Still contemplating my techniques and ideas to complete my final project piece, I came across Sandy Dooley and love how she portrays a countryside character by using a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric blotches of paint to form the wonders outside.

Landscape artist living and working in the beautiful Weald of Kent in the UK, Sandy is known for paintings that transport the viewer to the in-the-moment experience of being out in the countryside surrounded by the colors and visual richness of the natural world.

Her work captivated me as I am deciding whether to produce something similar in terms of vibrant colors, I love using color and texture in my work and I’m always attempting to use these elements to create a harmonious balance.

Spring Greener

Winter Blue

Given that her studio is in her garden and she works outside as much possible, Sandy exquisitely captures the moods of each season in her paintings – from the verdant greens of spring and warm tones of an Indian summer, to the deep rich hues of fall and the cool blues of winter.  Her work feels as spontaneous and lush as any garden with her vibrant colors.  

Its also like she uses the same scene in every piece of work but in different seasonal times which is what I have been looking into doing throughout my experiments though I have used watercolor because for me the unpredictability and uncontrollable nature of watercolor make it the most exciting and expressive medium to use even if its just to use as a block color or to add some minor detail.

Indian Summer

Coastal

Artists in 60 Seconds: Jesús-Rafael Soto

Spiral 1955

Movement, Style, School or Type of Art:

Though most frequently associated with Op Art, Soto was, more precisely, a Kinetic artist. His works were meant to display not only the implied movement of Op, but also the actual movement Kinetic Art provides by allowing the viewer to participate, or "move through" the piece.
This was especially notable in his Penetrables series of the 1960s, where spectators were invited to walk through lots of hanging nylon filament line.

Soto is also rightly linked with the Geometric movement in Venezuela.

Date and Place of Birth:

July 5, 1923, Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela

Life:

Trained in his native Venezuela, Soto's early influences were Cubism, Cézanne and Mondrian. It wasn't until he moved to Paris, in the 1950's, that he found his true calling in geometric art. (It probably helped that he also met kindred spirits - Victor Vasarely, for one - in Paris.) Besides his Kinetic works, Soto is best known for his use of modern materials such as nylon filament thread, metal rods, steel, aluminum, perspex (transparent acrylic resin) and industrial-grade paint.

Important Works:

• Spiral, 1955
• Penetrables (sculpture series), 1960s
• Suspended Apparent Volume, 1976
• Ambivalences (series), 1980s
• Nylon Cube, 1983

Date and Place of Death:

January 19, 2005, Paris

Penetrables (sculpture series), 1960s

LACMA

What is Op Art?

A closer look at the 1960s art style known to trick the eye

Flashback to 1964. In the United States, they were still reeling from the assassination of our President, escalating the Civil Rights movement, being "invaded" by British pop/rock music and, in general, pretty much done with notions of achieving idyllic lifestyles (despite that which was touted in the 1950s). Given the circumstances, it was a perfect time for a new artistic movement to burst on the scene.In October of 1964, in an article describing this new style of art, Time Magazine coined the phrase "Optical Art" (or "Op Art", as it's more commonly known). The term referenced the fact that Op Art is comprised of illusion, and often appears - to the human eye - to be moving or breathing due to its precise, mathematically-based composition.

After (and because of) a major 1965 exhibition of Op Art entitled The Responsive Eye, the public became enraptured with the movement. As a result, one began to see Op Art showing up everywhere: in print and television advertising, as LP album art and as a fashion motif in clothing and interior decoration.
Although the term was coined and the exhibition held in the mid-1960's, most people who've studied these things agree that Victor Vasarely pioneered the movement with his 1938 painting Zebra. M. C. Escher - whose style has sometimes caused him to be listed as an Op artist - created works with amazing perspectives and use of tessellations that certainly helped point the way for others. And it can be argued that none of Op Art would've been possible - let alone embraced by the public - without the prior Abstract and Expressionist movements that de-emphasized (or, in many cases, eliminated) representational subject matter.

As an "official" movement, Op Art has been given a life-span of around three years. This doesn't mean, though, that every artist ceased employing Op Art as their style by 1969. Bridget Riley is one noteworthy artist who has moved from achromatic to chromatic pieces, but has steadfastly created Op Art from its beginning to the present day. Additionally, anyone who has gone through a post-secondary fine arts program probably has a tale or two of Op-ish projects created during color theory studies.

It's also worth mentioning that, in the digital age, Op Art is sometimes viewed with bemusement. Perhaps you, too, have heard the (rather snide, in my opinion) comment: "A child with the proper graphic design software could produce this stuff." Quite true, of a gifted child, with a computer and the proper software at his or her disposal, in the 21st century. This certainly wasn't the case in the early 1960s, and the 1938 date of Vasarely's Zebra speaks for itself in this regard. Op Art represents a great deal of math, planning and technical skill, as none of it came freshly-inked out of a computer peripheral. Original, hand-created Op Art deserves respect, at the very least.

What are the key characteristics of Op Art?

• First and foremost, Op Art exists to fool the eye. Op compositions create a sort of visual tension, in the viewer's mind, that gives works the illusion of movement. For example, concentrate on Bridget Riley's Dominance Portfolio, Blue (1977) - for even a few seconds - and it begins to dance and wave in front of one's eyes. Realistically, you know any Op Art piece is flat, static and two-dimensional. Your eye, however, begins sending your brain the message that what it's seeing has begun to oscillate, flicker, throb and any other verb one can employ to mean: "Yikes! This painting is moving!"
• Because of its geometrically-based nature, Op Art is, almost without exception, non-representational.
• The elements employed (color, line and shape) are carefully chosen to achieve maximum effect.
• The critical techniques used in Op Art are perspective and careful juxtaposition of color (whether chromatic [identifiable hues] or achromatic [black, white or gray]).
• In Op Art, as in perhaps no other artistic school, positive and negative spaces in a composition are of equal importance. Op Art could not be created without both.

Gretchen Bender Exhibition

Total Recall 1987

09.01.15

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHVwG6Sn-yQ

LIVERPOOL.- Tate Liverpool presents the work of American artist Gretchen Bender (1951–2004). Bringing together a focused selection of works including Total Recall 1987, a monumental 24-monitor multi-projection screen installation, the exhibition is the first solo exhibition of Bender’s work in the UK. 

Bender came to prominence during the 1980s and was closely associated with the ‘Pictures Generation’ of artists whose work appropriated mass media imagery and its clichés for critical ends. In response to an increase of political and corporate ideologies being embedded into mass media, Bender developed a coherent and critically acclaimed body of work becoming especially renowned and celebrated for her large-scale video theatre installations and screen prints on tin signs.

 Her practice extended further to include works for commercial broadcast including music videos, often made in collaboration with the American artist Robert Longo (b. 1953), for bands including New Order, Megadeth, and Babes in Toyland. A major highlight of the exhibition is Total Recall 1987, a seminal work first shown at The Kitchen in New York, it critiques the accelerated image-flow of television and the violence of images in a society now shaped by their commodification. Total Recall’s stacked monitors each present multiplied fragments of television imagery with aggressive barrage editing and sound. The work seeks to overload the viewer’s perception by montaging imagery of Cold War-era military hardware, animated corporate logos and Hollywood film iconography, alongside commercials for consumer recording devices such as video cameras and recorders. 



If Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) is less recognized than some artists of her generation, "Tracking the Thrill" should initiate a remedy. Organized by artist Philip Vanderhyden and the Poor Farm (an experimental venue in the countryside of Wisconsin run by artists Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam, now in its fourth year), this exhibition presented a survey of Bender's video work for broadcast television, as well as two monumental, monitor-based pieces of what she called electronic theater.

Bender began exhibiting at Nature Morte in the East Village in 1983. Close with Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman and others associated with the critical strategies of appropriation, she set out to infiltrate the corporate domain of mass-media representation-and the flattening image-flow of television in particular, where politics and entertainment are conflated-so as to highlight the insidious qualities of big business's ideological operations. Her approaches for doing so, as seen here, were abstraction, acceleration and multiplication.

On the main floor were two multi-monitor videos, Wild Dead (1984) and Total Recall (1987), which have not been seen by an audience in over 20 years. Total Recall (22 minutes) was the most compelling work on view. Screened at set times in a theatrical environment, as if it were a performance with the TV sets on stage as actors, the work features quasi-narrative movements of imagery orchestrated across eight channels on 24 monitors and two projection screens. It includes a soundtrack composed by Stuart Argabright (of the electronic band Ike Yard) and animation sequences designed on a flight simulator by artist Amber Denker. In effect, it is nearly overwhelming. 

On the one hand, slowed down and multiplied fragments of commercials populate the monitors: a happy factory worker at GE who "brings good things to life," high-tech weaponry promoted in military videos, and razzle-dazzle, animated corporate logos. On the other hand, we see commercials for consumer recording technologies (cameras and camcorders) and footage from then-topical Hollywood films such asSalvador (1986) and Under Fire (1983) about photographers on assignment in places where the U.S. was supporting repressive regimes. 

As an implicit portrait of the military-industrial-media complex, Total Recall confronts the spectator with a mesmerizing critique of the violence of images in a society now predicated on their modification. In a media culture saturated by corporate self-representation, it is, Bender argued, images themselves that prevent us from seeing the reality of the world we've constructed.