Kurt Kauper

The artist I chose to look into further for this blog is Kurt Kauper. Kauper was born in Indianapolis in 1966, and now lives and works in New York. He works with oil paint on a variety of surfaces, most commonly linen and panel, and his works tend to be in photorealism. He is known for painting incredible, larger than life figures ranging from famous actors and women in gowns to young men in sports uniforms. While his work is all incredibly beautiful and vibrant in color, there is always some aspect of the each piece that is “off” in some way. He generally works on a larger scale, and the size, mixed with bright colors and virtual perfection in the rendering, gives an initial jolt to the viewer upon the reveal.

What is most interesting about his work, however, is what happens after that initial shock. There is a certain quality about his work that forces you to stop and take the time to keep looking. You’re instantly drawn in by the peculiarity, unable to pinpoint straight away what is so off about the work. Whether it be the fact that Michelle Obama is standing in the middle of a parking lot, or that a nicely kept man is lying almost corpse-like on the ground, there is always one aspect of the piece that should not be. One thing I found particularly funny in our discussion in class as well is the controversy over the hands in his paintings, specifically those of the series of regal women in gowns. They are all such beautiful, powerful women, but when you look closely they really do seem to have particularly masculine hands. This is something I probably would never have noticed outright, but once it was pointed out, I couldn’t un-see it. And honestly I think it adds interest to the work. Just like in his other paintings, it acts as an aspect that makes the end result just slightly not right.

As is very apparent from my last posts, I have a sort of obsession with photorealism and a great admiration for artists that are able to achieve that level of mastery. But from my previous posts to now I have also noticed another theme in the work that stands out to me. All three of the photorealistic painters I chose to look into follow the same general idea: use photorealism to draw the viewer in and get their unique idea across. I think that that is what I need to find for myself in my work. The technical aspect is very important, but once that is mastered it is equally as important to use that technique to get your voice across.

An artist that I have continuously come back to throughout the year is Rebecca Campbell for her large-scale fantasy-like depictions of people. Initially, I was drawn to her work because of the use of color. Campbell’s streaky brush strokes render kaleidoscopic, vibrant images that flow with color, whether she is depicting a landscape or a portrait. She uses vibrant colors, using warm colors in the light, contrasting them with cool colors as darker tones. By doing so, her work not only gives the viewer a sense of space and depth, but also a sense of temperature. The world in which her subjects exist seemingly comes to life because it gives a sense of warmth or coldness. The images are captivating in that sense, welcoming the viewer into a completely different world through the use of color and form.

For example, in her work Glow (2013) the variation in the brush strokes and the background make it seem as though the landscape does on beyond the horizon, even beyond the canvas. The portrait of the woman appears to be floating in this chilly land enfolded by the warmth of the lights around her. This warmth is reflected on her face and her arms.  

After having done more research on her work, I learned that her work reflects the themes of nostalgia, the sentimental, and the emotional, often tying in imagery and memories from her past, her family, cultural history, and her own feelings of nostalgia. She presents the images so that nostalgia may be seen under the light of feminine sublime. About nostalgia she says:

“When a person acutely experiences nostalgia, time collapses and the past, the present, and the future become one. . . Time becomes nonlinear in a space that is both sad and sweet at the same time. Nostalgia somehow enables us to sing along to the tune of our own deaths.”

Although her work is visually appealing, knowing the meaning behind her work makes it so much more powerful. She paints the feminine figure with such grace and forceful streaks that they depict beautiful images women while highlighting their strength and power, fighting against the ideas of female frailty and male supremacy. 

Her more recent work is different than her older work in that it draws on cubism as she draws the female figure, veiled by blocky moments of opacity achieved by juxtaposing blocks of color over the image. This work explores the paradoxical relationship between patriarchal images of beauty and desire, showing the woman, yet concealing her body with a “teasing veil”.

Rebecca Campbell ties in personal experiences and her own desires into her work, allowing for beautifully honest depictions of the workings of her mind.

Joseph Mallord William Turner

A recent artist I have re-discovered in class is Joseph Mallord William Turner. He has captured my attention for his landscape paintings and many layers of oil paint. 

A lot of his paintings revolve around the concept of beauty and danger. The true sublime definition fits this central theme. When Turner was making paintings, he was a very controversial painter. What is interesting, though, is he still painted grand landscaped but portrayed them in a way to include a controversial aspect combined with the harshness of the sea. Turner liked to portray the grandness of God through the brutality of nature and contrast it with glimmers of humanity to better depict hope.

Turner’s style heavily plays into romanticism. His landscapes are not exceptionally realistic but rather the general spirituality in nature and the world as a whole. The fact that spirituality can be represented in a landscape painting is phenomenal but also supports how great Turner was at personifying nature into an individual being. Even though very little humanity is visually represented, his work is classically man vs nature situations. 

When it comes to Turner’s style, his painting involves very washed layers with oil rather than watercolor. The vibrancy of oils and the wash of the style of watercolor makes a very dynamic landscape while also abstracting it as a whole. Blurred boundaries provide and support the uneasiness and beauty nature provides while really supporting how nature is so much larger and more powerful than humans. Later into his career, he uses even more transparent layers to the point where his figures are hardly recognizable but the actual light is more of a central focus. That's another aspect of Turner that I really admire. His personification of light not only supports nature as a being and force but plays into the spirituality that his style basically is. 

Personally, since this class started, I have been struggling with layers of paint and visualizing the color I want as an end product vs the colors I have to put together to achieve that. Seeing Turner’s work has helped me conceptualize that the more transparent the layers are, the more dynamic the colors will be as a well as controllable. In my final project, I really want to work on that concept and marry it with the personification of nature.

In my exploration research for my final project, I came to the conclusion that I wanted my central theme to revolve around choices. I know I want to paint landscapes but possible subtract them in a minimal way. By looking at Turner’s work, I have come to realize that the majority of his work is abstracted nature. As a viewer, I still recognize what he has painted, but the actual strokes and colors, especially up close, are so far from realism. With this coming project I plan to work on a greater scale, better forcing me out of my comfort zone of detailed work and, rather, push me towards having bigger choices and trusting that my message will still come across to the viewer.

Matt Lipps

I discovered Matt Lipps in my senior show research, but feel as though I can bring inspiration from his practice into my painting studio. Lipps is a photographer who works in in-camera manipulation, collage, and extreme lighting techniques. A lot of Lipps’ work is developed through collage of the female form - something I am looking to experiment with a lot more in my painting practice. As his work lies in mostly collage, Lipps plays back and forth with abstraction and realism. This balance is something I want to bring into my paintings - a combination of both ambiguity and clear imagery. He also uses a combination of busy, collaged, and layers of colors contrasted with small important moments of negative space. Taken from Lipps’ website in the artist statement of his series Home, the website states, “Lipps’ complex visual spaces explore the medium’s relationship to memory and nostalgia, while speaking to the shifting nature of the photographic. Uncovering subtle but legible cultural and class markers, these works also weave together questions of identity construction, the familial archive, and the legacy of analog technology.” These are concepts that I find myself leaning more and more closer to in all of my artwork, and will be rounding up in my senior show. In working towards my thesis, I want to ensure I am incorporating the same conceptual ideas. In all areas of art, the medium plays a large role in its conceptual choice. Photography in general is about capturing memories, moments, and at its core, incites a feeling of nostalgia. Aware of the concepts intrinsically linked to his medium, Lipps uses that to his advantage in his conceptual work. Home uses transparency film, colored paper, and collages pieces of the photography by the infamous Ansel Adams. Through his mixed media approach and his use of collage, Lipps’ work pushes way past the realm of photography.

Although Lipps isn’t a painter, I feel I can use him as painting reference because of his painterly styles in his final images. Unlike typical photography his images are made up of several images rather than one. Focusing on color, art historical references, reproductions, and graphic elements.

Matt Lipps’ photography really excites me and I definitely want to incorporate his style and conceptual ideas for my final project and future work.

Will Cotton

I think something went wrong with my original post but here it is anyway

Recently in class I have discovered the work of Will Cotton. I first came across his work in our assigned reading but on further inspection, I am more familiar with his look than previously thought. Having to work on a large scale painting in class, I chose to do very child-like pink and purple clouds. Will Cotton seems to have this same fascination in much of his work.

In general, I love the colors he uses. Because his paintings are of sweets and candies, they basically are made up of pinks, reds, yellows, purples, and very small hints of vibrant cooler colors. Everything he paints is very lush and realistic but has a hint of haziness. I attribute that to being almost like a dream or a distant memory. Though his work is mainly made up of the same color palette, they are all different when it comes to the layers of paints he uses as well as taking advantage of using paint right out of the tube.

In class, layering paints was something that I really was having trouble with. However, after researching Cotton and looking at his work, I realized that layering can be done with not only translucent colors. I had the misconception that oil painting has to almost be exclusively layers of translucent paints but Cotton perfectly displays the advantages to using opaque colors and layers.

One thing that I really appreciate is his close attention to the landscape and the world he is creating. Even in his portraiture work, the landscape is still given a great amount of attention, almost more than the human subject. His process involves getting the actual food that he is painting and starting from working with life. After he photographs the set up and finishes the paintings from those. This makes me want to experiment with painting from life, and even more so a life that I created. Cotton is literally creating a self-controlled world and taking inspiration from there. There is so much control that fascinates me and pulls me in to take that on in my own paintings.

Another aspect of his work that I appreciate is the light-heartedness. I was beginning to get the preconception that art and paintings had to be either super abstract or hyper-realistic, but Cotton’s has this delicate balance between the two that attracted me so much. Feeling a bit discouraged about the possibility of “doing something wrong” in my paintings mixed with the pure frustration that is oil painting, I found a confront in Cotton’s work. I saw that he was literally working with the same materials as me, but I could see he loved what he did through his pieces. I want to have fun. So I did. With painting these luscious clouds, yes, it caused me a lot of anxiety and frustration but I loved doing it because I loved what I was painting. I had more confidence because there was an anchor with painting clouds mixed with the freedom of the pallet I chose. 

Sara Pope

I randomly came across Sara Pope's work on the internet when I was searching for work that had to do with addiction. She comes from the fashion and magazine industry. She was also a shoe designer as as well as an art director but never actually had any formal art training. In 2009 she finally quit her other jobs and became a painter. She sells most of her work through galleries as well as her website. Most of her prints are around $200 and she only makes 100 copies of each. She freely expresses herself and does not allow herself to be stuck into any box. She has so much control over her brush and medium. Her style ranges from these grotesque abstractions to these very realistic lips and beauty supplies. Most of her work deals with how society deems women and the addiction women have to being pretty. She has a series called "Violent Femmes", and its about how women are never satisfied with their looks and they are constantly addicted to putting on makeup. And in today's society women even cake on their makeup because it is never enough. It is to the point that sometimes you can't actually tell what they really look like anymore.
I love how after being so immersed into the fashion industry she came out of it being very unhappy with its culture. Some people get too deep into it and get brain washed into believing everything the fashion industry says. When you start to live that life style you start to really believe in it, but Pope's reaction towards the industry is truly inspiring. I enjoy how she expresses her distrust with these beautifully drawn grotesque figures. They look as those they have makeup smears all across their face. Even though their expressions look unhappy or dazed, the colors she uses are so bright and beautiful its contrasts so perfectly.

Ross Bleckner

I first heard about Ross Bleckner through Lia's lectures and was instantly captivated by the high contrast in his bold work. I loved the repetition and the way he's still able to create a focus and allow the viewer's gaze to slowly work around the paintings. I decided I wanted to do some research on his work because I wanted to understand his concepts and why he was so interested in repetition and how he was able to create so much life in each individual stroke or subject but when looked at as a whole you just see the repeated pattern.
Bleckner is a New York based artist and in the 1980s was heavily into optical art but later in the 1990s he slowly shifted his subject matter and started painting magnified cellular structures of autoimmune diseases. These works are what really started interesting me since I love painting cellular structures as well as veins and brains. He even had an exhibition called "Birds, Brains, and Flower." which was a truly captivating collection of work.
Most of these works about cells pertain to his homosexual journey and they big boom of AIDS. So he painted the virus as well as cancer cells to investigate what is really going on under the surface/skin. He believes that once something is done on the outside it must be investigated on the inside just like the skin on your body or the paint on a canvas. An X-ray is needed to see what if everything is working internally. He doesn't want his paintings to just be pretty and decorative but rather have something more purposeful within the painting.
But what I really enjoyed reading about were his "flower paintings". And I put quotations around them because he does not actually consider them to be flower paintings but rather the trace of a flower. In his process, he spends a lot of time rendering flowers and painting them with great detail and then once he is finished he scrapes them all off with a palette knife. Because a flower's life is so short lived. It blooms majestically and then withers away. These series of paintings became a study for Bleckner to see what something looks like after the subject is removed. And after the subject is removed does that image still read and resemble as a flower or a trace?