None of us can escape the habit of projecting thoughts and concepts onto reality itself— what Buddhists would call “pure perception”. But if we can access awareness of our inner, deeply ingrained conceptual biases, we can open new windows onto our mind. By contrast, when mind is immersed in uncontrolled emotions and mistaken, often self-preserving beliefs, we’re unable to see … [Read more...]
Visual poetry by Richard Biddle aka (bid)
Mixed-media pieces by Cynthia Yachtman
I work primarily with acrylic and latex paints, inks, papers and charcoal. My images contain many diverse layers of meaning from the universal to the specific and personal. My works are often abstract. I am frequently interested in pattern and/or creating a rich sensual surface by making layer upon layer of marks. There is often an unseen history within these layers as images … [Read more...]
Rhed Fawell: Collage and Embroidery
My collages explore the deconstruction and reconstruction of images. The process allows me to play conceptually with a theme or thought. By deconstructing the original reality of an image, I can begin to let it tell a different story. Once I find my visual starting point, I will start a process of deconstruction/reconstruction, combining the use of ripping, cutting, layering, … [Read more...]
Utterance: Paintings by Samia Soubra
Calcutta: Photographs by Buku Sarkar
After seventeen years away, I've done something most Indians of my generation don't do---return back home. When people ask me where I'm from, I always stumble. I say, I was born in Calcutta but I grew up in New York. When you are young, your awareness of the larger city is limited. I have to admit, I know New York much more intimately than I feel I know Calcutta. Calcutta … [Read more...]
12 collages by Bill Wolak
I make collages out of all kinds of materials. Most are made out of paper engravings. Many collages are digitally generated or enhanced. To begin a piece, I select some sources—either color or black and white. If I’m using magazines or prints or old books, I cut out some images or parts of images that interest me. Then I start working on a background or some other sort of … [Read more...]
my little girls dreams she is a spider: collages by Tim Stuemke
My collage is about how disparate images create their own stories. We cannot help but connect the visual dots that only exist in our own minds. … [Read more...]
Swimming in the river of bits: The digital meditation of Ryoji Ikeda’s Continuum
There is currently an exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that I was fortunate enough to visit last week by Japanese composer and artist Ryoji Ikeda. The installation, called “Continuum” seamlessly blends sound, digital projection, and space into an immersive wonder. Ikeda’s work with sound is difficult to describe. Some writers have referred to it as “cyberpunk,” with … [Read more...]
Screenpaintings by Shih Yun Yeo
The artist calls these paintings, created by a combined procedure of screen printing and painting, Screenpaintings. Silk screening technique, as it is used here, is not treating the silkscreen as a machine in Andy Warhol's days but as another type of artist's brush. Positive films are created when the artist paints on them using large Chinese brushes and ink. During the … [Read more...]
A Carving Process: Ripple by Dan Havel and Dean Ruck
I first saw Ripple on its opening night. Formally a residence in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston, Ripple is a sculpture created on site by Dan Havel and Dean Ruck who carved designs into the six-room, mid-century bungalow over seven months. Ripple was commissioned after the decision to not renovate the bungalow was made. I sat in a patio chair in the backyard for a half … [Read more...]
The cholla garden at Joshua Tree: paintings by William Clarkson
An appreciation of the Cholla bush representing survival in a harsh environment. … [Read more...]
The place where someone’s waiting for me: visual poetry by hiromi suzuki
These collages have been made on screen prints which I printed several years ago. When I found the prints, just as if I read the old letters from the old friends, I felt a nostalgia. ― I miss you. ― Mom's stew is the best. ― Now I'm on a homeward-bound ship. So I will write the first line to meet them again. … [Read more...]
Visual poetry from The City of Dreadful Night by Andre Bagoo
For life is but a dream whose shapes return — James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night These pieces are excerpted from Andre Bagoo's The City of Dreadful Night, a sequence of visual poems published by Prote(s)xt, Bristol, in May 2018. They are inspired by James Thomson's poem of the same name, first published in … [Read more...]
Divine Decay by Kon Markogiannis
Divine Decay is a series of photographic/mixed media constructions informed and inspired by holy texts, illuminated manuscripts, death memorials, sacred geometry, religious icons, and Renaissance panel paintings. The work deals with memory, remembrance, and decay and tackles issues such as spirituality which is often neglected but also essential for the well-being and inner … [Read more...]
Cy Twombly’s Lepanto Green
Someone has razed the house and hung its walls vandalized by a tormented resident. Standing back affronted, but scrutinizing the display nevertheless, twelve panels come into view as if roof, hallways, furniture, and floors of this dwelling has been shunted. These are walls, scrawled upon and dirtied by a frenzied hand. These are projections, gargantuan biographical Rorschach … [Read more...]
Visual poetry by Cam Scott: Spools/Burrs (for Clark Coolidge)
Influenced by copy art and zine making, my work uses the copier or scanner as a means of drawing, often adapting, or 'quoting,' a source of conceptual significance. In this, a nostalgic practice of the hand is allied to the borrowed rhythms of an all-but-outmoded means of mechanical reproduction. Excerpted here are two suites of elaboration and compression respectively, … [Read more...]
3 visual poems by József Bíró
Joy of Water: visual poetry by hiromi suzuki
There is Tamagawa Aqueduct under the Daitabashi Station near the town where I live. The name of the place “Daitabashi” comes from "Daidarabotchi” as a giant in Japanese folklore. Daidarabotchi's huge footprints are said to have created lakes and ponds. I searched for historical materials of underground water in Tokyo, walked by side of the springwater and creeks. When I … [Read more...]
Memory of Place: 8 paintings by Nathalie Tierce
I start with ripping apart issues of Architectural Digest and create dozens of collages very quickly that I make to capture a certain mood. From these compositions, I select the few that I’ll develop into paintings. These are the paintings that make up “Memory of Place”. My emotional connection to an event or place is tied to the space where it happened. A room’s ceiling as … [Read more...]
Passing Through: Paintings by Sky Pape
My abstractions, hybrids of drawing and painting, are made with familiar materials like ink, water, and paper, and often unexpected, improvised tools like palm fronds. My idiosyncratic methods move back and forth between exactitude and intuition, entwining them. These days, I wander looping paths, wondering about connectedness, disruption, and perception. Time, space, scale … [Read more...]
The Roman Arch: paintings by Anna Carina Sinocchi
The Roman arch is the central theme and subject matter of the following works. Historically the arch is the foundation of Roman architecture and is hailed as a triumph of antiquity. It persisted in Italy and proceeds to be embraced by its utilization in today’s world. The Roman arch continues to circulate its meaning and grandeur. The works both on paper and muslin are a … [Read more...]
13 poetic watercolors by Jesse M. Bell
Inspiration for my work comes from many unassuming place—an errant line, a whirl of handwriting, the prickly thatch of cross-hatched marks, a splatter of ink—each element contributing in its own unique way to the formation of my images. The interaction and visual interplay of these symbols and graphical forms is an ever-evolving process of discovery and modification, and … [Read more...]
Portals: Paintings by Silas Plum
Portals is a series that captures events and people at pivotal moments. Man's introduction to Death. A great battle. The decision to analyze or to act. Each of these influence the future. And the band played on. … [Read more...]
9 mixed-media pieces by Mardi de Veuve Alexis
Mardi’s current body of work is inspired by an evolving local urban environment, urbanization as a condition, and contemporary culture. Working for several years from her Venice, CA studio, she was viscerally impacted by the changing neighborhood and demographics, including the noise and energy of new construction- space-saving new buildings, now vertically constructed to … [Read more...]
10 Digital Collages by David Hickman
I am interested in the slow fragmentation of Western values and culture, and how that might be represented visually. … [Read more...]
7 mixed-media works by Fierce Sonia
Mernet Larsen: Getting Measured, 1957-2017
Mernet Larsen: Getting Measured, 1957-2017. The Tampa Museum of Art, 120 W Gasparilla Plaza, Tampa. On view through 18 February 2018. Curated by Joanna Robotham, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Tampa Museum of Art. There is no dedicated catalog for this exhibition but Mernet Larsen by John Yau (Damiani, 2013) is a monograph focusing on Larsen’s work since … [Read more...]
Mashups: Canvases from 2013-2017 by Gregg Simpson
My work is on the border between abstraction and surrealism, formal design and automatism. I begin a work very spontaneously, often with the canvas lying on the ground and soaked with water to make the colors flow. Then I proceed to re-draw and mold the shapes, alternately adding and removing layers of paint to reveal the implicit imagery. Ultimately, the painting tells me … [Read more...]
The Drift of Desire: An Interview with Yongshin Cho
Yongshin Cho is a media artist who has been working in Paris and Seoul. After receiving his BA in painting from Hongik University, Seoul, in 1985, Mr. Cho went on to earn his BA and Master of Fine Arts degree from Université Paris-VIII in 1991 and 1997 respectively. In 1995, Cho was invited as one of the seven media artists, together with Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, to the … [Read more...]
5 paintings by Ishay Rossano
Art is the reflection of the artist in the Well of Wishes A good art grasps the spirit of the times (time and place) with its fingernails, and the spirit of the creative artist, and rises up into the realm of nothingness, leaving the viewer, who looks far below, looking up in amazement. 1. Every artist has his own way of experiencing art. Art is one of the great … [Read more...]
Traveling Home: watercolors by Mattina Blue
"Traveling Home" is a series of floating, totem-like forms, which emerged in the process of painting as if excavated from deep in my subconscious. They're moving with the waves, currents and tides, perpetually shifting, accommodating, adding and subtracting to create inner and outer balance. The paintings represent a private journey to discover/rediscover Home. … [Read more...]
All These Sensations: 11 artworks by Lita Kenyon
Painting With abstract painting I'm interested in a process which operates within a personal narrative in concert with the unexpected. I paint, remove paint and repaint striving to bring forward forms, strokes and colors that singularly are incomplete but adjoined constitute a truth about their incongruity. Each painting has its own individualism. Mixed Media/Collage My … [Read more...]
toriot: text art by paul hawkins
"Sometimes people say: 'What the fuck do you think you're doing? That's not art.' I say: 'Fuck off, assholes!'" -- Martin Creed … [Read more...]
The Tempest and the Savages: Franz Marc, Hugo Ball, and a Decisive Moment in Dada-Expressionist Theater With a Special Appearance by August Macke
Introduction This article discusses Franz Marc’s 1914 essay “Das abstrakte Theater”1 (Fig. 01), and the events surrounding an “Expressionist” production of Shakespeare’s Der Sturm planned by Marc and Hugo Ball the same year. Marc’s position in this detour from painting and writing can be understood in terms of his embrace of “die ‘Wilden’” – “the ‘Savages’” – an idea Marc … [Read more...]
4 paintings by Moses Hawk
On the Road Stripped down bare. Art is an expression of the artist’s personality which could be a representation of their emotions, motivations, and intentions. Channeling the void, opening the whorl, cleaning out the id, funneling the spirit—it is an unworldly grasp at the creative bite. It can happen in an instant or be taken over by utter frustration. Doing is the … [Read more...]
All-art issue: in memory of Eileen Enck
This special all-art issue is dedicated to the memory of my late mother-in-law, Eileen Enck. Born in January, she owned the Eileen Enck Gallery in Bellevue, Washington where she featured the work of many Pacific Northwest artists. While the style of artworks in this issue are quite different than those which Eileen exhibited in her gallery, they share the spirit of joy and … [Read more...]
Death to the Rebirth!
A couple of years ago, Leslie and I finally had our first chance to visit Rome. A friend of ours knew somebody down there who was nice enough to let us house-sit for nine days while she was out of town. It wasn’t a lot of time for a city so rich in art and history, so we spent every hour of the day exploring it. We planned routes from site to site, museum to museum, making sure … [Read more...]
Burger Burglar: visual poetry by hiromi suzuki
They were just hungry. They didn't want diamonds, naturally, they didn't hope glittering money in their pocket. They ran through the town and ordered chicken burgers at the counter of diner. Burger with plenty of mayonnaise. “I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.” ― Richard Brautigan … [Read more...]
Three Literary-Themed Paintings by Warren J. Cox
Warren J. Cox paints mainly in an objective abstract vein. His pieces frequently imply the presence of system and strong synergy, and sometimes surrealist elements or pareidolia. As with these works, he loves to pay homage to literary figures and their work in unexpected and vivid ways. … [Read more...]
