Can I have my "A" yet?

Artist. Boisean. Inventor. My teacher. As I pondered this last entry of my blog, besides thinking of how soon the semester was going to be over, I thought about who should be my final artist. Maybe a classicist, I thought, or an impressionist. Nay! I think the best artist I could choose to finish off this semester is my very own Boise State Art Foundations 108 teacher, Erin Cunningham.



Having done some research, I discovered an interview of Cunningham in our local paper, The Boise Weekly. Granted this interview was taken in 2007, I still found some interesting things about my teacher and discovered some of her artwork that struck me as "something Erin would draw." Her world of "sniglets" came to life as she described for the interviewer little turtle-necked creatures in sometimes violent scenes. My particular favorite was described as a lone "sniglet" skating across an ice rink while surrounded by bodies of others. Of this Cunningham said, "I think that a lot of people are like that. You just skate on because, you know, what can you do?"

Though she teaches my mixed media sculpture class, she has mentioned numerous times that she works best in paint. Many have commented on her work as being deeply in touch with the human condition. Her ideas are original and smart in an age where the internet makes us question which ideas are really unique and which are stolen. Cunningham won first place for Idaho's Best Visual Artist and she continues her work today.

 

THE END.

Faces in the Crowd

Joy Thomas is the portrait girl who captures not only the features of her sitters, but also does an exquisite job of conveying their mood and psychology. In the past two decades, she has won first place for portrait painting from the American Society of Portrait Artists and her work has been on display in many galleries and magazines including American Artist and The Artist's Magazine. She has also written and illustrated how-to books for beginners.

America's Photographer

The stunning natural images that made themselves the center of Ansel Adams's life decorate the walls of many American homes today. His famous shots of Half Dome, Yosemite, and San Francisco contend with, and almost mirror, the thoughts of naturalist John Muir. It's as if John Muir's ideals became alive in Adams' photographs. As a young boy at the turn of the century, Adams lived with his elderly parents and live-in aunt who patiently schooled him through many grades as he wasnt a proper fit for public school. His older-than-usual parents and home schooling paved a very conservative path for Adams. He was said to be a particularly shy child and always found solace in the long walks he took in the then-nature of San Francisco.

As Adams grew and the family fortune was lost, his young mind began to concern itself with monetary matters. At the age of twelve, he began playing the piano and pursued it well into his twenties. Adams thought he could make a good living as a concert pianist but soon discovered that more money lied in taking photographs.

(Half Dome)

The Sierra Club was a huge factor in Adams' success. The cover of their 1922 ad displayed a shot that Adams took of Yosemite. The club also held yearly summer hikes called High Trips that lasted about a month. Hikers were followed by a steady contingent of packers, horses, cooks, and Adams as their personal photographer. His first full shot was his famous Half Dome, taken in Yosemite. Adams' work grew into fame as he took more High Trips and sold more of his photos. He is still known as an American landmark for conservation and protection of our country's national forests. His beautifully captured photographs have preserved some of the most magnificent natural features our country has to offer.

(White Branches, Mono Lake)


(Tetons and the Snake River)

A Dark and Strange Master

Ok, so Tim Burton is a lot of things: an actor, director, animator, and writer. He's also an artist who's dark and whimsical sketches have paved way for many a movie that's tickled the dark minds of horror film lovers everywhere. Burton started out with a dark mind as a kid, making short films in his backyard in Burbank, California. His first successful short film was a stop motion called The Island of Doctor Agor he filmed at age thirteen.

Burton graduated from a California university in the late seventies and became part of the animation staff at Walt Disney studios. Though he proved a valuable employee, he was eventually fired because of a short film called Frankenweenie, released on Halloween in 1984. Disney studios thought the film depicting a little boy trying to revive his dog who was run over by a car was too dark and morbid for children and didnt want their image tainted. This transition worked well for Burton who so longed to create solo projects. Through the years, he has created numerous successful films and befriended many famous actors such as Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Wynona Rider.

Tim Burton currently maintains a romantic relationship with Helena Bonham Carter and has dubbed Johnny Depp as the godfather of both his children.


(A sketch from the 1990 movie Edward Scissorhands)


(Sleepy Hollow)


(Sweeney Todd)

Winter Wonderland

Just as GoDevilDante, Humon is an internet-based artist known only (to most of the public, at least) by her screen name. Residing in Denmark, she is a comic artist currently working on three different strips. Her comics are funny, sometimes a little vulgar, and widely popular among young internet browsers and ComicCon goers. She recently held a booth at a London comic exhibition and does maintainence and upkeep of a few different websites which house her comic strips.

Her two most famous comics are the Neils series and Scandinavia and the World. Love and Tentacles, the oldest of her strips but not as popular as the others, depicts Scandinavian folklore characters paired with humans and illustrates the humorous diffuculties involved in being a lover to someone of a different species. The Neils series illustates the life of fictitous character Agent 250, an older secret agent divorcee turned gay. His love interest so happens to be the younger Agent 300. Each of them is faced with the challenges of living as agents and dealing with their enemy, a towheaded criminal named Neils.

Scandinavia and the World comics are simply depictions of each country of the world in a stereotypical human form which pokes fun at the depicted country's points of interest, motivations, political humor, ec... Each country-personification is clad in the flag of their origins. Humon generally works with pencil-based sketches and computer media.


(Humon's depiction of herself)


(Just a Hug, art from "Love and Tentacles")


(Matter of Perspective, comic strip from "Scandinavia and the World)


(The Oresund Song, more art from "Scandinavia and the World")


(Relaxed, art from "Neils")


(Different Degrees of Scottish, more from "Neils")

The Brussels Boy

I first stumbled upon the art of Ben Heine on the internationally acclaimed website of DeviantArt. His images struck me as surreal and very creative but that comes as no surprise seeing as he was raised in Brussels; one of the many heavily saturated artistic venues in Europe. Heine grew up attending public school, which he soon grew to dislike in the stages of his rebellious youth. This behavior forced his parents to place him in a boarding school for six years where he grew as a person and an artist. It was after his tumultuous period of adolescence that he began to focus more on his graphic abilities, creating new works of art, and discovering three trademark styles which he currently displays on internet websites and famous art galleries.

Pencil VS. Camera
Heine has been developing this style for the past few years, perfecting it which each photograph and drawing he creates. His hand appears in each of his photos which, as he says, represents the close connection between the viewer, the artist, and the art work. His ideas and subject matter stem from nature and human emotions.



Digital Circlism
This concept, though not something new to the world of art, combines the American pop art of Andy Worhal and other such artists with the geometic organization of Chuck Close. Heine chooses to call his works under this category "digital circlism," recreating computerized images of famous figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. These images are created by carefully placed flat circles on a solid black background.



Flesh and Acrylic
Lastly, Heine has taken on a new project as of early 2011 titled "Flesh and Acrylic." He works with many different models, covering all or part of their bodies in paint and arranging them on a Jackson Pollock-esque background. The body and canvas merge as one to create an image of whimsicality and blended camoflauge. Heine admits to using non-cadmium based paint, as it irritates the skin and contains toxic materials.

The Picasso of Sculpture

Perhaps one of the most famous abstract sculptors, Henry Moore put his mark on the art world with his unique feminine pieces of metal designed to take up an entire corner of a yard. His sculpting began in the early 1920s after World War I ended. English by decent, he attended the Leeds School of Art and quickly became one of the top students. After college, Moore moved on to greater things. His academics earned him a six month scholarship which he chose to take in Italy and Paris. There, he took advantage of the timed drawing classes offered at the Academie Colarossi and studied paintings by Michelangelo and other masters.

His daughter was born in 1948 and his mother also passed on in the same year. Moore then, with family on the brain, began to sculpt abstract families out of metal. He took a trip to America and displayed some of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Throughout the years, Moore’s sculptures began to take on more of a feminine form. He was particularly fond of reclining positions and sculpted most of his figures this way. The largest public collection of his sculptures can be found in the Gallery of Art in Ontario, Canada.

  (West Wind, 1928-29)

 (Family Group, 1950)

 (Reclining Figure, 1951)

The Painter of Dancers

Many know Edgar Degas as the famous “painter of dancers.” Toward his later life he became just that, but he also held a high status in the art world from a very early age. Degas was born to a prosperous family whose influence in his young life led him to an appreciation of music and the opera. He had many artistic friends and composers including Berthe Morisot and Emmanuel Chabrier but he seemed to identify the best with longtime friend Edouard Manet, a young artist coming from a very similar background as Degas himself. The two men joined the National Guard together at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war but Degas was badly affected by the cold and resigned, taking time to show some of his works in London.

(The Little Dancer, 1878-80)

Degas spent much of his time dedicating his talents to art and trying to find new ways to perfect his style. It is known that, aside from Picasso, Degas was probably the most successful at maintaining and creating new art forms in his old age. When Japan opened up trade in 1853 he became fascinated with the eastern style of painting. Later, Degas moved toward the performing arts and spent countless hours sketching, sculpting, and painting ballerinas from the Corps de Ballet. His appreciation for dance and music finished off his life as he worked well into his eighties on these dancers. He is known and appreciated worldwide as an artist and sculptor able to capture intimate, private moments between the dancers and articulate performances they implement.  

(The Rehearsal, 1879)

(Le Viol, 1868)

Boise's First Thursday

Last night I was lucky enough to attend one of Boise’s Avant Garde celebrations that we like to call First Thursday. First Thursday occurs (you guessed it) on the first Thursday of every month. It’s a chance for local artists to display and show their work in our local coffee house, the Boise Art Museum, the Idaho Historical Museum, and a few other buildings. These buildings are located all around downtown Boise and feature different artists each month.

Since the first Thursday in November fell so close to Halloween, the Mexican and Spanish portions of our town made special altar displays honoring their ancestors at the Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead celebration. Since the weather is getting colder and I’m getting lazier, I decided to attend two of the displays; the Boise Art Museum—lovingly known to us Boiseans as the BAM—and the Idaho Historical Museum. 

The BAM featured a few new exhibits that I was excited about. Unfortunately, out of respect and copyright issues we weren’t allowed to take pictures, so I have no original photographs for examples of the works. The most popular section featured was Comics at the Crossroads, a display of forty Northwestern comic and graphic artists. The comic books ranged in size, shape, design, and color. Some were spreadsheets meant to show the process of making a comic book and others were simple drawings removed from actual issues. One wall even featured a comic painting of a man with a tree growing out of him—way bigger than life size.  There was another exhibit by Mike Rathbun—The Situation He Found Himself In—in which an enormously crafted piece of wood is wrapped in a crescent around the BAM’s eighty foot sculpture court.

The Dia de los Muertos altars were celebrated in the Idaho Historical Museum with interactive print making and detailed explanations of each family’s altar. The altars ranged in size; one was composed of a giant stack of trolls with their faces painted white and black like skeletons, another was a mountain crafted from hundreds of colorful paper flowers, and the largest (and my personal favorite) was a gigantic skull shaped from mounds of corn, black beans, and rice. Each brought their own unique and honoring qualities and I can only imagine the dedication to these elaborate altars.

Art Worth a Thousand Words

None of that “how to draw manga” crap here. Ros Rixon is relatively new to the art scene; therefore, there isn’t that much information on her or her work. She graduated from the University of West of England in 2006 and spends her time creating art out of books. She says that she often feels “creativity is challenged.” Her work is mainly conceptual and her book sculptures started out as a fun project meant to bring light to the piles of art books that “teach people how to be an artist.”

Many of her sculptures employ sharp knives which she uses to carefully snip out each necessary word in a book.