Matthew Richie

I first heard about Mathew Richie last year from a friend of mine and although I admired his work I never really did extensive research until. As I was painting the final for this class, Lia had recommended me to look up Mathew Richie for inspiration. I instantly connected to his pieces because he was able to create so much depth and manipulate space in his work through his composition. 

Mathew Richie was born in London, England in 1964 but currently lives in New York. He received his BFA from Camberwell School of Art in London and later attended Boston University. Ritchie is such a diverse artist and is not just a painter but also creates works on paper, prints, light-box drawings, floor-to-wall installations, freestanding sculpture, websites, and short stories.

 His works mainly pertain to outer space, quantum mechanics and the vastness of the universe. In his works he tests the boundaries of representation through his abstracted lines. He first started his investigation of the cosmos in the 90’s and while his works started off as a 2-dimensional piece, they slowly evolved into 3-dimensional paintings. He began doing wall murals that would seem to carry on endlessly and incorporate sculpture with his paintings. The sculptural aspect of his installations mimics the line work of his paintings and allowed the painting to come off the wall. It invites you into his work and allows you to feel like the painting is almost coming out at you. His pieces are so powerful not only because of its size but also because he is able to express a concept that is not tangible. Quantum physics is a theory of things not visible to the eye and a concept that many people do not understand but Richie is able to bring it to life and interact with his viewers. Richie's goal is not to explain how light travels, or how wave particles work, but also to show his viewers what the world is. He wants to slow things down so people can see how the world would look if you could see wave particles, etc. In one of his interviews he says, "It is not about traditional modes of representation. For me, making art is a way to examine the limits of perception."

Takashi Murakami

Murakami is known to blur the line between high and low arts because his work is considered kitschy and commercial yet his process and designs have roots in traditional Japanese fine arts. Also, the complexity and uniqueness of his work earns him the labels of “influential” and “genius”. His art could be found on shoes, luxury bags and clothes, yet at the same time people can see his paintings, installations and sculptures in museums.
The first time I saw Murakami’s work in person was at the Broad. Before this, I hadn't thought much of Murakami’s work. I have always been interested in Japanese anime and manga so his work has caught my eye several times, but eventually I thought that his work was very commercialized, uniform and popular just for the sake of being popular. When I saw his paintings in person however, I was in awe at the complexity, the physicality and the painstakingly perfect flatness of each patch of color, which reminded me of traditional Japanese printmaking because it looks very simplified, flat and graphic, yet the process requires a lot of skill and craftsmanship. Murakami has coined the term “superflat”, where forms are flattened in Japanese graphic art, animation and fine arts. The term became a movement that is very influential in Japan but it also reflected Japanese post war culture, which was considered “flat”. I found it interesting that Murakami also studied traditional Japanese painting, Nihonga, and got a PhD in it. His art not only reflects traditional Japanese art but also Japanese post-war culture, something that Murakami pioneered during the 1900s.
I now admire Murakami incorporating his own culture of art into contemporary work. Initially, his art may seem only colorful, cute, and graphic, but I've also come to admire the level of detail and skill he puts into making his art. What really amazed me about Murakami’s work was that each and every piece of his paintings was colorful, complex and immersive. For my final project for this class, I also want to create a similar colorful, complex and immersive world.

Wayne White

I’ve always been interested in text in paintings because of its simplicity but also complexity. It's about much more than just the meaning of the words, it is also about the image that accompanies it, the context and also the type of font that the words are presented in. Font intrigues me because it conveys so much with so little. This is why I had always been interested in Ed Ruscha’s text paintings. What drew me to his paintings are its graphicness, dry wit and minimalism. So, when I saw Wayne White’s work, which is also text based, I was a bit inspired.
White’s paintings are funny to me because they consist of large 3D text painted painstakingly into old-fashioned landscape paintings that he found in old antique shops. The text would be painted with perfect perspective and lighting so that it looks like it is actually part of the world of the original painting.  As we look at White’s paintings, we are transported into a different world, where words are built into the landscape. They would be ironic and vulgar phrases like “Art is supposed to hypnotize you or something”, “Turd”, “Fanfuckintastic” and much more. It was fun to go through all his paintings, to read all of the strange, inappropriate but utterly familiar phrases that we might use in daily life, written in grand, other-worldly font. The artist is presenting language, colloquialism, something intangible, invisible and sometimes underestimated, as something that is mountainous, otherworldly, and grandly important.
Being someone who is not very good at expressing my own thoughts through words without using visuals, Wayne White’s work is very refreshing and exciting to me. I would like to make more text based work in the future.

Hernan Bas

Hernan Bas was born in Miami, Florida and currently lives and works in Detroit. His work is characterized by vibrant colors, and expressionism. He is heavily influenced by the aestheticism and decadence periods which began in the late 1800s and focus on the combination of art and literature and the interaction between art and life. This period challenged victorian thinking through the exploration of a new relationship between sex, art, life and normal ideas of beauty. Bas' work is influenced by novels and essays from this period as well as his own internal experiences as an adolescent.

In much of his work, Bas depicts boys in abstract, dark and colorful landscapes with lonely expressions. His work began when he was an adolescent figuring out his identity. Bas is a gay artist but did not feel as though he fit the explicitly flamboyant gay stereotype nor the masculine jock stereotype and felt somewhere in the middle. He depicts his feelings of confusion and transience through his paintings. Bas portrays stories through his work and thinks of his series as chapters. This approach references Bas' influence from literature.

One thing that draws me into his work is the vast array of materials and methods he uses. He makes oil paintings, mixed media collages, prints, and pencil drawings, often using a combination of these different methods in one piece. Bas uses different surfaces as well such as cotton, canvas, paper and wood panels and as his work progresses his pieces are becoming larger.

The work of Hernan Bas has been very influential in the direction I am taking on my final series. His work is relevant in its form and content but also its message. He creates a vast amount of space in his landscapes and distorts reality and perception. The paintings have a dark and nearly sinister feeling but are balanced by his use of vibrant colors. His landscapes make the viewer feel as though they are in a distant and surreal place. The spaces appear as though they could be from a fantasy novel or story and convey sensual and homoerotic undertones.

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.