Art and Photography Blog

Artist Liz Sweibel New Web Site Is Inviting

My artist friend Liz Sweibel has upgraded her Web site to show us some interesting works.   There is a variety of categories to explore.  I went first to Collage/Drawing.  Within this group I was first drawn to Interiors. Each of these tiny collages began with a "before" photo from Architectural Digest. There are ten of them. Each one of these small works (barely a few inches but framed in a larger box) is intriguing and priced very reasonably.   There is a means to purchase the works directly through the site.

The Interiors are sparse and have a sense of anticipation. They remind me a bit of the interior paintings by the Spanish artist Antonio Lopez Garcia that I saw at the MFA in Boston in 2008.  There is a stark realism that draws you in. As the MFA wrote about Garcia, “His masterful paintings of the prosaic, familiar places of his world …reveal an unusual sensitivity to his subject. Through uncompromising study of his subjects, he has imbued the commonplace with a haunting and extraordinary character…at once brilliant and subdued, ethereal and fleeting, and palpable.”  I think this also applies to Liz’s Interior collages.

Staying with Collage/Drawing I next went to Plans. As Liz wrote, “These later collages, also small, use drawings appropriated from a book on Italian architects as their starting point.” There is a nice juxtaposition of construction and drawing in each image. They are also small and small is a good size for these images. A number of them remind me of my last trip to Italy.

Still within Collage/Drawing, I was drawn to Stamps. They are a “labor-intensive series of sheets of stamps, each stamp a tiny collage. The stamps led to the more personal, meditative Interiors collages.”  The labor is evident but so is the thought that went into it. These are a bit larger but still under a foot on the side.

The Snapshot Series are described by Liz “as a quick, informal way to capture patterns in the physical world that embody ideas that interest me, then crop each image until it's reduced and elevated to something essential.” A group of images titled Property Lines shows the point of contact between neighbors.  There are some nice images here that have a sense of being at connection points and leave you to imagine what is being connected.  This is a good thing, as the point of connection stands on its own. There is much more to explore on this art site and I encourage you to take a look.  Check out her blog for more context. 

Artsetter's Online Gallery - Vote for Me to Join Thanks

I am asking you a favor in this post.  Artsetter is a Paris based online art gallery. I like their approach as they take the risk out for the buyer and the seller. When you purchase an art work, Art Setter holds the money through a French bank. Then the artist ships to the buyer. Once the buyer receives the art work, Artsetter release the money to the artist taking what is a very modest commission for the industry.  You are allowed to arrange your own gallery. They are also setting up a community as members can vote for and favorite other artists. Anyone can apply to join. 

I am trying to set up an online gallery for my art on the site. I have applied and now need 50 votes over the next 30 days. Can you vote for me? You have to first register at their site but it is quick and there is nice art by a number of artists. Here is the home page of the site.

My five paintings have been cropped by the site to fit a square format. They are actually all rectangles. However, once I set up my gallery I will be able to display the full painting. You can see the complete images of five I submitted below. You can click on any image to make it large.

Once you get to the site go to the candidates tab. Be patient it takes a few moments for the first one to appear. I have been coming up first as I was the last one when I last looked but someone may have come in after me.  In the case I do not come up first, scroll through the others to find my application.

There are quite a few excellent painters and photographers. I voted for a number of them myself.  This Is not a competition. You can vote for as many as you want.  Thanks for your consideration.  Let me know what you think.

         
 
 
 
 
 

Goollery Provides a Web Art Based on Google-related Projects

Goollery is an online gallery of Google-related projects from people around the world. There are a number of categories: Google Brand, Search, Maps, Earth, Image Search Chrome, SketchUp, Translate, Android, and YouTube. Within each category there is a variety of projects. For example, under search I found, a painting project that had the Google search page done in the styles of Miro and van Gogh, as well as several original themes by Valéry Grancher, France.

Under maps, there is Ohio Piano. There are 88 counties in Ohio and 88 keys on a keyboard. With Ohio Piano, the state map is turned into a piano that you can play with two pre-programmed melodies. It is by Andy Woodruff, Cambridge, Massachusetts. There is also British Art From the Tate that allows you to explore locations of paintings within the Tate with Street View depicted in a special selection of Tate artworks. You can discover how urban and rural environments have changed, and the views painted by artists such as Turner and Constable are now lost. It is by www.svmapplets.com.

In another Google maps project. Artist Bill Guffey from Kentucky painted scenes from around the world that he saw with Google Street View. Word Magazine UK created a project where iconic album cover photographs are mapped via Google Maps. I could go on but you get the idea. It contains some very creative work.

Liz Sweibel Provides Some Interesting Little Videos

I have written about Liz Sweibels’ art in past posts (most recently see Many Kinds of Nothing Creates a Nice Art Space and Liz Sweibel’s New Art Web Site and Blog). Now she has extended the exploration of small spaces displayed in the Many Kinds of Nothing exhibit with a series on videos on her web site. You can find them on her Liz Sweibel web site under the little videos.

I especially like the ones that shown movement within her small constructions. They fit the small video format and cause you to look more closely at the small things in life. I often see art works embedded in the visual experiences I encounter during the day. These small videos will prompt more of these experiences. I came away thinking about the visual world in an enriched way, which is the objective of most art.

Send Me Your Junk and I will Transform It

Here is a great idea. It is the ultimate recycle. The Pollocks art collective recently opened a temporary shop named Worthless. It plays with notions of consumerism and the perceived value of material objects. Participants brought in random objects to the London store that they considered junk, everything from old hard drives to tattered shoes. The Worthless team then transformed all the cast-off goods into unique pieces of art. Customers were then able to buy back their submitted items for whatever the felt they were worth.

You can see a video about the project at the PSFK post on the effort.

This idea might catch on. Instead of throwing stuff out, have an artist make into an art work. Many great art works have started from junk. Why not have this done for you?

Send me an email with a picture of your junk and I can give you an idea of what I might do.

Karen D'Amico - London Artist and Designer

I have written about my friend’s blog before – see Fluid Thinking – Karen D’Amico’s Artist Blog – but I have not covered her graphic design and art so here are some thoughts. She has a new site for her graphic design work, D’Amico Design. I think the entry page is a great example of focus as there is an interesting image that takes a minute to figure out and then a simple objective statement below that draws your eye after seeing the banner.

The “about section” covers her 18 years in the design and print industry including Karen’s technical and design capabilities, as well as her services. She also mentions that she is a practicing artist, and maintains a studio in Hackney. I certainly agree with Karen’s statement, “I like the fact that the boundaries between fine art and design are often blurred. I consider both professions to be innately creative, requiring lateral thinking and the ability to find unique solutions.” Too often fine art looks down on design work. I see them as peers and the ability to create just the right simplicity required to convey a message through good design is something I have great respect for.

In Karen’s portfolio I especially like the Glitter and Grime series in Portfolio One. It is design for an artist’s book with many street scenes. Karen said she had complete autonomy on the design effort. I think the text and the illustrations work as equals with neither fighting the other. I also like the design work in her own ezine, Tangent Projects, seen in Portfolio Three. Here you also see a balanced relationship between text and images. The art of occupation invitation makes a strong conceptual statement and then you notice the balanced design that drew your attention to the conceptual centerpiece.

Karen’s art site contains the statement that her “art practice focuses on the devising of various groupings and systems as agencies of connecting and interpreting notions surrounding identity/legacy, accumulated histories, and sense of place. By incorporating maps, text, assemblage and the photographic image in her work, she juxtaposes and manipulates objects and images in an attempt to order, contain and re-present them in various contexts.”

One project that conveys this message is the collaborative Travellers Secret Box 2005- 2007. It “sought to explore, locate, identify and perhaps dissolve some of the seemingly undetectable territories existent in terms of art and culture, social inclusion and the ever-shifting locality of identity as well as notions of home.” In 2008 this concept was extended to the Sandwich Box, another group effort that Karen is the co-curator. Karen often works at boundaries and her champagne army is another wonderful example I wrote about before. I find her work a nice balance of accessibility and complexity.

The images section presents a wide variety of work. I was struck by “Outpouring,” a mixed media work; “burnt offerings,” an assemblage; “time trap,” another assemblage; “no such place,” a digitally manipulated photograph that looks like an aerial image but is really a micro-world. There are many others but I will stop here and recommend that you take a look.

New Art Web Site and Blog by Liz Sweibel

I wrote about my friend Liz Sweibel’s work and recent exhibit on this blog, see - Many Kinds of Nothing Creates an Inviting Art Space. The site organizes her work into three galleries that show pieces that work together. I especially liked the interiors series in gallery two. They are collages of interiors with ink drawing added. I liked the simplicity and stark presentation. These interiors reminded me of some of the interior images of the contemporary Spanish painter, Antonio López García, who I greatly admire.

Liz also provides a play section that offers her more experimental work, as well as a statement and more background. The statement concludes, “My work uses modest materials, simple gestures, and its slight presence to cultivate space and slow time. I hope for it to be a quiet yet persistent call for attention, an invitation to stop and experience the nuances of the moment, and to realize that there is much to cherish and much we can do better.” I think she achieves this goal with her work.

On the site you can click on an image to get a bigger view and then click again to get an even bigger view. She also links to her Flickr photo stream for some nice images. You can also join her email list.

Liz has also started a blog that seems mostly devoted to her art. I especially liked the post, "But the Visual Is Not Reducible to the Verbal." This is an issue I have been had a life long interest in as both an artist and a cognitive psychologist. Liz starts with her efforts to categorize her work, a task that requires using words to describe the visual, a cross-media task. She concludes the post, “As someone who's made a living from words for 30 years, this dilemma is actually exhilarating. It's always been my need to make work that exceeds (if not precedes) words, to get at something beyond (if not before) our brains' capacity to reduce it to the verbal.”

A Voltron Emerges from the Canvas

Nicko Margolies over at Marktd brings us the time lapse photography of Robert Burden creating “Defensor Mundi” (Defender of the Earth in Latin) on YouTube as he depicts a triumphant Voltron, standing 11 by 7 feet tall. Burden spent a year working on it. If you like this painting go to Robert Burden's Toy Box for more. Enjoy.

Where‘s Wally on Google Earth? - Melanie Coles

Here is a really creative art idea. Canadian artist Melanie Coles has painted a 55ft Wally on top of a building that can be seen by Google Earth satellites and put up a contest on her website to find it. You cannot see it from the ground. There is a great description of the project on her site, whereonearthiswaldo. Thanks to the IF team for bringing this to my attention.

Comic Book Sounds on Flickr

Thanks to the IF team for this great link to Comic Book Sounds on Flickr.  Enjoy.