Apr 25, 2013 | art history, Art Institute in Chicago, painting
“The Eventuality of Destiny” shows what could be the Three Graces, or just three random goddesses who are trapped on all sides by gray walls and ceiling. The architecture creates a sense of confinement that’s relieved only under the arm of the featured goddess – a little patch of blue sky that holds three tiny clouds.
This featured goddess stands tall with her arm gracefully draped over her head, and her whole body seems to glow from within with bright fiery colors. The greens, blues and oranges nearly burst out of her assumed human form, and the only sitting goddess looks like she holds whole universes within her. The women overtake the manmade architecture behind them, three maidens in elegant postures and only one reveals her face, bright blue shadows cast across her cheek with the tops and bottoms of her eyes lined in bold streaks of white.
An Italian artist born in Greece, Giorgio de Chirico imagines the Greek goddesses as colossal creatures, perfect in form and covered in color. This painting gives a glorious hopeful portrayal of the supernatural beings in charge of our universe, and yet they’re still confined within the boundaries we created for them.
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Photographs taken at the Art Institute in Chicago. For more photos from this museum, see my Flickr set.
And for more information about this painting or de Chirico, check out this JAMA article.
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Apr 24, 2013 | design
California artist Jayson Fann creates these spirit nests as part of the Big Sur Spirit Garden, an International Arts and Cultural Center in California’s Big Sur valley, between the Santa Lucia Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Each nest is big enough for at least one person, and they range in scale from love seat size all the way to a 20 person nest that is wider than a highway and has a second story inside it.
Each nest is made with tree branches from local forests, each limb carefully cut and chosen to ensure that the tree itself isn’t damaged in the process. Jayson most often uses the wood from Eucalyptus trees because it’s strongest and lasts longer than most others, cutting away their leaves with a machete and transporting the harvested wood to the new nest’s building site.
To begin building the nest, Jayson first separates the wood by size.
“The process consists of fitting the puzzle of branches into a flowing form that integrates structural integrity with artistic flow,” he said, “I use tension by bending the wood and counter sunk screws that are virtually invisible to ensure a strong structure.”
Each nest creates a delicate new relationship between human and nature, one that was lost long ago when we first went indoors to shield ourselves from the elements. In these nests, we’re granted a place among the elements instead of being pitted against them, connecting us for an instant to the all the beauty that’s out there in this miracle of a world.
That’s the perfect image these pictures create. The nests are set in elegant forests and waterfronts, with the sun shining and the sky glowing, and all of these ingredients are amplified in each tree branch that’s been harmoniously joined with its brother to create a pattern of protection.
Image source: Cuded
For more information, check out Big Sur Spirit Garden’s website.
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Feb 28, 2013 | illustration, interviews, painting
From his series, “Where the crows fly on their backs.”
We see her through smoke, the black outlines only revealing what’s necessary and letting the rest of her float away. Her skin is luminescent in white chalk that’s used to cast shadows across her body, left side glowing and right side faded, but her high cheekbones pick up light on both sides. Her head tilts back, and even though there’s no way to know for sure if her eyes are open, it somehow still feels like she’s looking at you because she knows you’re looking. After all, someone this beautiful must always have eyes on them.
Guy Denning’s impulsive sketching masterfully reveals something beautiful, usually a person, which is probably the most beautiful thing there is. The faces he draws use heavy shadow and sometimes a filled in background to emerge from the lines and paper, but they always come to life with the movements of the sketch, made so obvious that you’re able to imagine the process of each drawing coming to life.
“And the other heads FIST
Since they’ve lost the desire to even try
And instead look ahead.”
conte and chalk on paper
30 x 40 cm
12th February 2013
What usually inspires the creation of a new image?
Ideas come from all over the place. Usually it arrives to a canvas after it’s sat in my head for a couple of months, and I’ve drawn it a couple of times. I’ve got more ideas in my head than time left to do ’em.
How would you define neomodernism?
No more than what’s defined here. In fact there’s a lot on my blog about methods, ideas and inspiration.
From Guy’s blog: “The Post-modern is useful only in terms of further defining Modernism from its origins and is essentially only a continuity of modernism – sometimes termed hyper-modernism. These are all useful, to a greater or lesser degree, in terms of avoiding the ideas of the ‘end of (Art) history’ but with regards to the actual creation of artworks they are invalid. People do not set out to create a work of ‘Post-modern Art’. If we must have a new label, let it be a New Modernism – a return to the critical aesthetic giving the artist the opportunity to create work that has some relevance to the new modern audience – an audience already familiar with ‘modern art’, where validation of quality is not founded on post-modern hyper-obsession with language and semiology and the artist is not ground into politically correct subservience. I do not see this as a retrograde step – it can be the only way forward – to let the artist communicate without the bonds of corporate and state art politics.
To those claims of ‘Art is Dead – long live Art’ –
Post-modernism is dead – long live Neo-modernism.”
“AIM, the second battle of Wounded Knee (February 1973)”
conte and pastel on paper
66 x 55 cm
28th February 2013
What do you hope your pieces accomplish?
The most I can hope for is to emotionally move a viewer. Everyone brings their own lives and history to anything they look at, listen to or read. Consuming culture is as specific to the individual as making it.
When did you first begin painting and why?
I was drawing from childhood and I think that’s where my competency came from. I did little but draw and read – I certainly didn’t mix with other kids. First oil paintings were done at age 10 or 11 after my dad gave me a set of oil paints that he’d got bored with (a passing hobby in his 30s). I was hooked from the start.
Guy Denning is an English artist who’s been creating since the early 90s, and his work has been featured in exhibitions all over the UK as well as in Germany, Italy, France, and the US. You can see more of Guy’s work on his website, and all of these images come from his Facebook, which is filled with more things worth describing than I could ever filter into one post.
From the Purgatorio show, 2011 “dì, dì se questo è vero a tanta accusa tua confession conviene esser congiunta”
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