Artistculture 2008-2010

This is my final post on Artistculture.com, I want to thank all the people who have visited this blog. This blog was started to document and share my art making progress and thoughts about art and art making. If you are interested in purchasing the domain please contact me @ kevin.blogs@gmail Cheers!

www.k-c-m-c.com

OP influence

Cheyt M

When I was a teenager Agam and Vasarely were huge. I think the color and geometric compositions can be credited with the accessibility of their work to a mass audience. I remember seeing prints by both artists in mall galleries and originals in some Michigan Avenue galleries in downtown Chicago.

Gestalt - MC

I appreciate this stuff more today, both artists work had a sense of the future, I was a Star Wars kid and I was all about the future in the 70′s.

Yaacov Agam

I enjoy these images for what they do to my brain, my eye seems to activate the paintings into a state of animation.

Yaacov Agam

I am also attracted to this work because it is not explicitly built on the pile of art history that is constantly attributed as influence by painters. The artists that we worship today became our art idols by burning down convention not conforming to it.

Influenced / Calder

A Facebook meme of fifteen artist in fifteen minutes made me think of Calder again. I wonder how many riffs of his I have internalized and made my own? I never tire of seeing his stuff and really enjoy when I stumble upon a piece or graphic of his I have never seen before.

I am Smitten: The artwork of Vincent Hawkins

Social networking may keep you up all night, it may take a bite out of your perceived productivity but occasionally it opens a window into another part of the world you had never known of and in this case into an artist studio my eyes have never known of.

I discovered Vincent’s artwork through a secondary network. Brian Cypher via Tim McFarlane.  Brian made a East coast trip and visited Tim, thus I was exposed to Tim’s FB and blog / website. Tim posted some of Vincent’s work which I instantly felt a kinship with. I have begun a friendly correspondence through social networks with Vincent, I think he will be a little shocked that I am blogging about him, we have never met, he lives in London and we have only had a few correspondences.

When I first saw Vincent’s painting the words “yes” gushed from my mouth.  I had until recently been painting in a similar manner, but much less successfully than Vincent in my estimation.

‘’ I Changed My Mind ‘’ 55 x 45 cm . Acrylic on canvas . 2009

It posed a interesting question to me:  What do you do when you see someone’s work and you kinda wish you had painted it? Or at least paint like it? What do you do when see someone OWN what you have been trying to accomplish? I think it is a very interesting question for artists.

Are artist explorers or we practitioners? Are there territories and cultural ownership? Has the dawn of remix culture and mass-appropriation given license to artists to cut and paste at the cost of personal originality? Is the level of connectivity not know before in history going to homogenize art as we know it? The meme that “it all has been done” is a powerful and pervasive idea, it has given some a licence to borrow or to create new genres of like works. In biology physical distance has given species the space to evolve uniquely in response to the habitat. My hope is that somehow that process of evolution can be transposed into the habitat of artists.

Ben Cameron at TED.

Karen Rudd @ OK Hotel

What does 3 miles of cut cardboard look like?

Installation shot @ OK Hotel / Photo credit Eric Swangstu

Karen’s show is up through October. Check it out!

http://www.karenrudd.com/

http://theokhotel.blogspot.com/

From the ground up.

From the ground up. 18” X 24” light, acrylic and pencil on paper.

This piece was created for the http://www.kirklandartscenter.org/ Redux event. The theme of the Redux challenge is “Architecture”

Tim Hawkinson / Images and Links

Tim Hawkinson, Scout, 2006-2007, Cardboard, box strapping and urethane foam, 72 x 100 x 58 inches

How Man is Knit / Pace

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk

Tim Hawkinson / ACE

"Cell" Tim Hawkinson 81" x 11'

James Kalm video / Tim Hawkinson

Art Seen Soho

Robert Lostutter / Imagelinks

RIBBON-TAILED BIRD OF PARADISE II, Watercolor on Paper, 9 3/8 x 8

The Color of Waterlilies II (Purple), 1999 Graphite on paper, 4 1/2 x 5 1/2 in.

Robert Lostutter, Red Throated Bee-Eater, 1978

ORCHIDLIP, Pencil on Paper, 18 x 18"

The Sixth Space

Henry David Thoreau’s Cabin

The Art of Manliness has a page up with 14 famous man rooms. Thoreau’s cabin reminded me very much of Van Gogh’s painting Vincent’s bedroom. It is interesting that they both occupied their respective mancaves around the same time.

In a lecture I watched recently,  Siva Vaidhyanathan talked about the classroom as a fifth space (3 min YT clip), he contends that the classroom is a sacred space where the societal norms do not apply and the social rules change. Building on Siva’s construct I believe the artist studio is a sixth space, a place where the artist occupies both physical space but also an invisible space. This space has been compared to a mediative place or a state of mind. My studio is a socially decompressed place where my unconscious can manifest its bounty, where I can be vulnerable, sentimental or cynical without outside judgement.

Vincent's Bedroom