Graffiti, Graffiti

It’s another early morning here and while flipping through Google’s endless lists of modern and contemporary artists, what should I come across but the ad for Obama’s election. And guess who did it? He goes by the name of Shepard Fairey, a wheat print artist who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a B.F.A. in illustration and chose to take his talents to the street. Fairey is credited for creating the Obey sign that features Andre the Giant before a popular wrestling match in the 1990s. A friend asked him how his wheat process worked so Fairey grabbed the nearest newspaper, demonstrated with Andre’s face, and, seemingly, a new style was born.


(1992)

Wheat printing is the process by which art is plastered onto city walls using a water and wheat mixture, similar to wall-paper paste. Fairey’s works were plastered around city walls and gave him something of a street artist reputation. His official criminal record is ornamented with many arrests for graffiti, little to his enjoyment. Fairey’s most recent work is HOPE, the 2008 ad campaign which was adopted by Obama.  

(2008)

The Japanese Walt Disney

Well, it’s early in the morning and I’m still trying to wake up as I recall the four years of Japanese I took in high school. This guy, Hayao Miyazaki, has been one of my all-time favorite artists since I was a little kid. He’s produced numerous animated films such as

·         Future Boy Conan (1978)

·         Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)

·         Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

·         Princess Mononoke (1997)

·         My Neighbor Totoro  (1988)

·         Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989, and my personal favorite)

·         Spirited Away (2001)

·         Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

to name a few. Miyazaki also draws and writes manga (Japanese comic books) on the side.

He began his film career in 1965 at the age of twenty three. Miyazaki worked at the Toei Douga Studio until his partnership with Isao Takahata which moved him to the Pro A Studio. Little time was spent there as he moved on to Nippon Animation, where he recorded his first film.

Miyazaki’s incredible art drew the eyes of many fans. His movies became more popular and he was eventually forced to open his own studio for convenience. Studio Ghibli has now become the most famous Japanese filming studio throughout the world. At the end of many films, Miyazaki has said that this has been his last, but he keeps making more. I hope for the sake of Japanese-nerds like me that he will continue his film career till the last days of his life. 

                   

A scene from My Neighbor Totoro.



Kiki's Delivery Service.

A Jack of All Trades

Tony Cragg is a British sculptor who has been on the art scene since the early 1970s. He was born in 1949 in Liverpool where he worked in a rubber lab until his mid-twenties. Cragg went to college in three places, all prestigious British art schools. He began sculpting abstract pieces out of ordinary objects he found. Cragg is very well known for using just about any material known to man.
His 1970s sculptures are built out of everyday items and usually do not resemble anything identifiable. His employment of numerous materials has led him to test their limits as pieces and made him appear as not one man, but many different sculptors at once.  His early works take shape with items like garbage bin findings and toothbrushes, plastic containers and cups. Most are married together with a rainbow-like color scheme.

His more recent creations are large scale abstracts created from bronze, resin, and steel. Each piece is larger-than-life and some are displayed outside. In 1994, Cragg was elected Royal Academian and had his work displayed in the Burlington House in England. 

An earlier sculpture.

(Mixed Feelings)

(Tounge in Cheek)

Unidentified.

Identity unknown. A pseudonymous man called Bansky is running around Bristol in the United Kingdom and spray-painting the walls of buildings and underground railroads. His “works of art” are snubs to the British government and have been termed as vandalism. They are to be gotten rid of as soon as spotted. Who is this man, great hoodlum creator, vandal, mystery, who is he?

There have been paintings showing up on the sides of buildings since the 1980s. Police don’t know what’s going on but they have some clues. In the late 80s, a town in England by the name of Bristol became home to a group of young adults who liked their music punky and their government anarchistic. This became known as the Bristol Underground Scene. Aside from punk-Brit and post -modern grunge rock, the Scene is famous for producing many hot-minded and sly graffiti artists out to reveal the truth about British government. Out of this came a young man whom the public has termed Bansky. His real identity is not known and, to the amazement of civilians, he has managed to keep himself out of the public’s eye for nearly twenty years.

It is said that Bansky mainly works at night so as not to get arrested. His art centers on themes of nihilism, existentialism, anarchy, and anti-capitalism. His subject matter ranges from rats, policemen, children, the elderly, slogans, to death. Bansky recently released a film entitled Exit Through the Gift Shop in 2010. He uses stencils to fill in his works as it assures the process of creating to be quick.  

Look Me in the Eye

Born and educated in Minnesota, Duane Hansen began his career as an artist in the early 1960s. His sculpting skills have taken art to an entirely new level with a technique he practiced called hyperrealism. Hyperrealism is a form of sculpture or art in any medium that mirrors an object (usually a person) just as it appears in the real world. This type of scary-accuracy is called “trompe l’ oeil”, French for “fools the eye.”


(Flea Market Vendor, 1990)

Hansen’s first pieces were focused around violent themes. With titles like Vietnam Scene, Abortion, and Race Riot (all completed in the 60s), it’s easy to see which time period he worked in and what affected him the most. He began sculpting his materials out of fiberglass, then painting over the works with realistic skin tones and clothing them with second-hand department store finds. Hansen’s sculptures are cast from real people.

His work took a dramatic turn in the late 70s and 80s. By then the tumultuous decade of hippies and war had come to a close and Hansen’s work became more realistic and definitely more innocent. It seems as though his entire focus in art was on everyday life—particularly tourist scenes. His kitschyness really hits home with the imperfect (sometimes obese) bodies he sculpts in the unmistakable era of loud colors and big hair. Hansen died in 1996 at his home in Boca Raton, Florida. His art can still be seen in the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

(Traveller, 1988)




(Accident, 1960s) One of Hansen's earlier works.

Help! I'm Drowning!

After training in Venice, Italy and San Francisco, emerging artist Benjamin Anderson has been creating monumental oil paintings since about 2001. His painting style is famous for “just adding water,” a concept he developed himself as he focuses on subjects like cars, women, and mechanics—they’re just all under water!

Anderson struck a deal with the Converse shoe company as their All Star artist and his work for them was subject to viewing on London’s Channel 4 TV. His debut exhibition took place in 2001 in the De Morgan Museum of Fine Arts where he entered in the “emerging artists” category. His paintings are very large in scale and rather realistic. He has shown work in San Francisco, New York, Europe, and almost everywhere in California. Anderson is also the co-owner and co-curator of Anderson ART Collective.

(Plastic World, 2004)



(Spitfire, 2008)





















































(Liquidation, 2007)


(Britian)

5 in 1: Artists of the Body

Rebecca Horn

Currently working and living in Germany, Horn has been working as an artist experimenting with kinetics, light, and energy since the 1970s. Her early works explore extensions of the body, such as her Finger Gloves, which bridge the gap between the space between body and world. She has also been making movies which feature many of her works such as The Peacock Machine. Each of Horn’s works leads the one created after it. She takes ideas from her first work, transfers it into her second, and so forth. Her current work explores special installation and flirts intimately with the boundaries of time and space.

   (Finger Gloves, 1972)

Jana Sterbak

Some call her a feminist and it’s not hard to understand why, considering her sculptures. Sterbak is mainly a sculptor who incorporates power, control, and seduction into her works. She also plays with sexuality as a source of control within the technological world. Her works often take the form of garment-like constructions. Perhaps her most interesting piece is Remote Control, a hoop skirt designed much too big for a normal female so, when she gets into it, she must be suspended like a child and use the remote control to wheel the skirt where she wants to go. Audiences also have partial control, as they have a remote that controls the wheels, so the artist is only in control half the time. Many of her works are like this; seductive, controlling, and, at times, eerily meticulous.

  (Remote Control, 1989)

 

(Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Anorectic, 1987)

Tim Hawkinson

Obsessed with the body, Tim Hawkinson has spent the better part of his adult life creating replicas of himself in various different forms. His interests in death, life, and the passage of time can be seen with clarity in each of the pieces he crafts. In the early 1990s he created a piece called Uberorgan, a giant, stadium-sized bagpipe made out of miles of stretched plastic and bits of stray wire. His fascination with the large and unprecedented has become something of a new concept, even for the artist himself. As previously stated, Hawkinson likes to incorporate the re-imaging of his own body into his works. In Pentecost, he forms a large, 3-dimensional tree out of cardboard and suspends twelve life-size electronic replicas of himself on the branches. The “Tims” are designed to beat out hymn music at whimsical intervals. Hawkinson currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife.

 (Uberorgan, 2000)

Janine Antoni

Antoni is also one of those artists who focus on her own body. All of her works are either made from her bodily material (such as fingernails) or they are somehow connected to her body through mechanical use. A good example of her body’s mechanically generated art is Gnaw, where Antoni displays two 600 pound blocks, one made of chocolate, the other, lard, and takes bites out of them each day. She chews and spits the chocolate and lard into separate molds to create a chocolate praline tray and manufactured lipstick. Her works also play with idea of animalness versus humanness. She has created numerous works involving cattle and the meat packing industry.

   

(Gnaw, 1992) The lard and chocolate turns into lipstick and a praline tray.

Ann Hamilton

Although she received an MFA in sculpture, Hamilton diversifies her work in the form of painting, installation, and film as well as her traditional schooling media. She is, perhaps, most well-known for taking small, everyday objects and transforming them into extraordinary items. Hamilton created Toothpick Suit by gluing thousands of toothpicks “porcupine style” onto a suit which she then wore in public. Many of her works exchange body organs. For example, Hamilton spent time with a pinhole camera in her mouth as she talked to people. Each time her mouth opened, she got a shot of what it saw. Her interest in sensory organs and exchangeable parts won her the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1993.

(Toothpick Suit, 1985)

 

What her mouth sees.    

"Get in Touch with Your Feminist Side..."

As a primary sculptor, Kiki Smith makes her focus in the art world with reoccurring themes of femininity, but not in traditional ways. Her first works were screen prints on dresses, skirts, and scarves and many of her creations spawned from images of the human body. Many of her screen prints depict human body parts, limbs with the flesh flayed off, or reproductive organs.

Smith is primarily known for her sculptures: perhaps her most famous is Mary Magdalene, a naked woman shown flayed and exposed to judgment. Most of Smith’s works, as previously stated, center on the idea of feminist thought. She plays with the phenomenons of birth, spirituality, and recreation. She has claimed to be very spiritual and her father, the renowned artist Tony Smith, was raised by Jesuits, further exemplifying Kiki Smith’s interest and devotion.

                            (Mary Magdelene, 1994)

Since the 1980s, she had developed a myriad of works in print, sculpture, installations, and other media. In her Blue Prints series during the 90s, she created a number of works using the aquatint process. Aquatinting is a way of simulating different tones of color on an etching plate. Once finished, the area around the drawing takes on a glowing hue. Smith’s Virgin with Dove was achieved using this process and is considered a prime example of contemporary Marian art, art designed to give praise to the Virgin Mary.

 (Virgin with Dove, 1999)

Smith has also created a plethora of self-portraits and nature works. She stated that her art is traditional, further elaborating;

I miss radically—in my own work and in the art world. The art world seems very product-dominated, and I’m a product maker. But it’s not as interesting an art world now. It’s not as determined by artists themselves. When I first came to New York you really had to work at it. It wasn’t given to you. I miss that a little bit. I would like to be more outside of things, but it’s just not my personality at all.

Down Home Beauty

While introducing my next artist, I’m proud to say that he is a product of my home town. As a former graphic designer, Ward Hooper shares the beauty of Boise, Idaho through his art. Hooper attended Boise State University and pursued art throughout his college career. Since his graduation, he has become an incredibly popular artist.

In the past years, Hooper has worked as a graphic designer and illustrator in advertising for such companies as Albertson’s, Hewlett Packard, Micron, and many small Boise companies. His most recent works feature Boise at its best:

·         Big Blue- Boise State football seems to be a reoccurring image in Hooper’s art. Many of his depictions of our team idolize and “romanticize” the Broncos. Most of his color schemes for Bronco art are blue and orange. He has contributed many pieces to the University itself, which I am lucky enough to walk by on a daily basis.

·         Eagle Arts- Hooper is well known for his works depicting Boise, but what about the rest of Idaho? Now Eagle is actually my real hometown and I enjoy frequenting the downtown gazebo. Hooper uses a form of painting to create such straight-lined, clean works of art.

·         Treasure Valley- Hooper’s art ranges from landscapes to people to a large collection of dogs. Here he focuses on what some call “the nest” of Boise, Eagle, Nampa, and Caldwell.

 

The Pop Icon

Born Andrew Warhola, Andy Warhol is best known for his wild, wacky contributions to the beginnings of the Avante Garde movement in New York. He showed promise as a young artist and attended the college for the School of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. What was then known as his “humble beginnings,” Warhol came a long way from classical art.

In the 1950’s he moved to New York and became an illustrator for many magazines. People were especially taken with his whimsical drawings in shoe ads. As the music industry grew, Warhol was hired along with one other artist to design album covers for many different upcoming bands.

He began his iconic work in the 60’s. Warhol produced many famous and distinct images of celebrities and common American food items. Among the most well-known are the Campbell’s Soup Cans and the Coca-Cola bottles. He said this of Coca Cola:

 What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

(Campbell's Soup Can)

Warhol’s success in the art world never waned; he created iconic pieces and founded the Avante Garde rock group The Velvet Underground. Towards the 1980’s though, Warhol began to take an entrepreneurial view of his art. He aided many young and up-and-coming New York artists and, though he became older, his passion for art never ceased to exist. Warhol died in 1987.  

(Coca-Cola)



 (Self Portrait)