Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine
With "Shine," painter Ken Flewellyn further explores the golden age of hip-hop and intersecting cultures. The show, currently running at Thinkspace Projects in Culver City, offers a set of new works, including a collaboration with artist Brian Viveros. Flewellyn was recently featured in print with Hi-Fructose Vol. 47.
Natalie Featherston’s realistic oil paintings deceptively appear as mixed-media collages, as she faithfully renders the textures of each element of her source. She builds each of the collages that serve as a basis for her paintings, and she says the former part of the process is just as a fun as the latter.
In Kevin Peterson’s new show at Thinkspace Projects, child subjects are paired with sentient animals, unlikely castaways against desolate urban backdrops. "Wild," collecting new vivid paintings from the artist, show these subjects “interchangeably as beacons of hope and symbols of dispossession.” The show runs March 2 through March 23. (Peterson was last featured on cctvta.com here.)
Stephanie Buer’s paintings and drawings capture structures in varying states of decay, yet at times carrying a hidden elegance. In “Wild Abandon” at Thinkspace Projects, she continues a body of work with roots in her time living in Detroit. Buer was last featured on cctvta.com here.
Leon Keer’s realistic paintings toy with depth, each a startling, larger-than-life recreation. In recent gallery work, the artist’s pieces take a nostalgic, and at times, playful turn. Yet, within the oversized Matchbox car and playful Gummy bear-packed Vicodin box, there are deeper perspectives being shared. The artist's practice includes both street work and more traditional settings.
Stephen Fox says he’s always had a fascination with “light within the nighttime landscape,” and with series like "The Drive-Ins," the painter explores a place where luminosity has a particular role to play. Nostalgia comes through not only in the setting, but the classic films he chooses to portray. The artist has spent decades playing with light in oil paintings.
Figurative painter Carl Dobsky creates oil paintings that acknowledge both the history of the form and the contemporary. The narrative work, in particular, reveals just flashes of magic hidden in his dramatic, realistic scenes. The butterflies in "Ship of Fools" is one example of this, as the periled occupants of a small vessel attempt to survive. The enormous piece took a year to complete.
Swiss artist Till Rabus crafts realistic oil paintings that exhibit both a whimsical and darker side to nostalgia. His version of a “Transformer” may consist of household objects, and his combined Disney dolls hint at the toll time takes on the icons of youth. The artist’s striking style may make viewers mistake the works for manipulated photographs, at first glance.
Paul White focuses on a single medium in creating his hyper-detailed works: colored pencil on paper. In particular, the artist is focused on the concepts of decay and objects becoming obsolete. In terms of source material, much of his work is derived from photographs taken of desertscapes and other scenes across the West Coast.
Chilean artist Alonsa Guevara’s upcoming solo exhibition at Anna Zorina Gallery in New York City, titled Ceremonies, honors life’s varying stages with renderings of “imaginary rites.” Humans, harvests, and lands are among those celebrated in the exhibition, as a collection of oil paintings on canvas. The show runs Sept. 1 through Oct. 1.
Armando Veve, a Philadelphia-based artist, creates drawings of surreal scenes and constructions, though each element is rendered in realism. His eye for detail works on granular level, with Veve’s slow and meticulous process producing countless dots and lines for one cohesive image. The style recalls both pointillism and vintage illustrations in reference books. And its striking results have garnered commissions from high-profile publications. Veve was last featured on Hi-Fructose here.
Based in Charleston, South Carolina, painter Karen Ann Myers uses the bedroom as the backdrop to each of her works, both idealizing the space and offering vulnerability and strength with each subject. Specifically, the bed used as reference in each piece belongs to Myers, while the rooms are retrofitted with new styles, adored objects, and context. The result is a singular personality, with her own elegance and character.
Stephanie Buer has been exploring the decay and evolution of cityscapes since studying at College for Creative Studies in Detroit in the mid-2000s, where she began to pursue a career in painting and drawing. In her charcoal works, these urban scenes garner a sense of desolation, stripped of even fading hues or sunlight. Buer was last featured on Hi-Fructose here.
David Rice fuses the natural and the man-made in his paintings, representing the possibility of a peaceful balance between the two. Featured here on our blog, and in our current issue of Hi-Fructose Vol. 39, his wildlife-filled works address themes like cohabitation, where people and animals are combined to create hybrid beings, often wrapped in colorful textiles. The Portland based painter is about to debut a new series, entitled "High Alpine", his largest body of work to date.
Maria Kreyn is a Russian born, New York based artist often described as a realist, and while she has a command of painting the human figure, her exquisitely rendered oil paintings are more concerned with what we can't see. To borrow a quote from Aristotle, one of her favorite philosophers, "The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance." Kreyn carries this notion with her as she works, seeking to depict people in a realistic light, while capturing their essence and soul. "I make work that looks to infinity- that’s spiritually driven," she says.
"I believe that artists should speak about the most desperate and desirable issues for humanity," says Korean painter Kwon Kyung-Yup. Though known for her realistic portraits of melancholy subjects, first featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 24, Kwon describes herself as a happy person whose paintings are about recalling memories. Her works find an emotional balance between her artistic inspirations, citing the beauty in Klimt's paintings which she pairs with tragedy, as found in the works of Caravaggio.
After getting his start by mural painting in and around Brisbane, artist Fintan Magee has since grown on an international scale, and his figurative murals and fine art can now be found around the world. Featured here on our blog, his art draws influences from his childhood, where he links his personal experiences and nostalgia to broader social issues like climate change or class struggle. "In some works, I feel like I am telling stories that I don’t fully understand, there is definitely an element of chaos or the subliminal in my work as well," Magee says.
To Brooklyn, New York based artist Dan Witz, the mosh pit is a place of savage beauty. Featured here on our blog, the longtime street artist, who was in his own punk band, combines his passion for art and the energy of the hardcore music scene in his "Mosh Pit" series. He slows down the chaos of the nightclub from the musician's perspective into paintings that are strangely primal, focused on both the private and collective experience.
Realism is more than a painting technique for some. When we look at Jeremy Lipking's realist oil paintings, we are looking at a faithful representation of life that has earned him comparisons to his art heroes like John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn, but we are also looking at the artist himself: "I feel like throughout the duration of a painting, I can go through all the human emotions from start to finish," he says.
"All people- and nature itself- have distinctive layers," says Pittsburgh based painter Mara Light. Teetering between a classical sense of realism and abstraction, her textured oil paintings aim to explore the layers of ourselves that we show and the others we hide within. Her subject matter is almost always women, whose emotions permeate the surface of her work's repetitive layering, scrapes, tears and drips of turpentine over certain areas, a process she enjoys for its unpredictable nature. For her current series, titled "Beneath the Surface," she sees her artistic explorations as more than a way to add visual interest to her work, but also as a metaphor for her personal experiences.
Though New York based artist Casey Baugh's oil paintings are generally described as realistic, there is a wonderous quality about them as well that does not exist in real life. First featured on our blog here, Baugh once compared his unique sense of reality in his paintings to one his first passions, photography, an art form that portrays a parallel universe or a version of reality that is "slightly off." As seen in his instructional videos at his website, he works like a photographer does in a dark room when it comes to painting, building from values and highly saturated colors until his subjects start to take form. The result is a vivid reality that takes realism to a higher, almost unsettling level with a narrative that taps into our complexities and insecurities.
Daniel Adel has a particular fascination with drapery that he expresses in his dynamic oil paintings of sculptures wrapped in cloth. Working out of his studio in the village of Lourmarin in Provence, France, Adel creates his fantastical visions of drapery, where the folds of cloth seem to defy gravity as they wrap around classical-shaped busts. The depiction of drapery throughout history has been used to emphasize the contours of the human figure, especially in Greek Art, where it suggested lines of force and indicated the past and future actions of the figures it clings to.
Sexy and subversive, Lui Liu's paintings reveal complex worlds in which women oscillate between positions of power and submission. Lui Liu began his career painting posters during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Though he has lived in Canada since 1991, Lui Liu's political influences are inseparable from the thematic foci of his artworks, which are largely wrought with political, sexual and social tensions. For example, Cat's Cradle (2006) features two young girls playing the string game of the same name. A brick wall divides them. They nevertheless, reach across to one another through an opening in the shape of China, while a hawk, a symbol for authority, flies overhead.
For his most recent exhibition, Those Bloody Colours, presented at Galerie Eigen + Art in Berlin, Martin Eder featured lifelike paintings of women in a medieval time warp. Eder's artworks are scaled true to life and rendered in vivid tones, imbuing them with a tactile and emotive quality with which one immediately connects. Gazing at the eyes of the women, cast downward as if in humble contemplation after battle, one desires the warriors to look up and out.
The vivid paintings and drawings of Henk Pander reflect on a lifetime of experiences - memories of Nazi-occupied Europe, the Vietnam war, and 1960s counterculture all make their way into his dramatic imagery set against the backdrop of Oregon. Pander first moved to Portland from the Netherlands in the 1960s, and continued to work as a stage set designer through the 70s and 80s, owing to his theatrical style. There is a surrealism in his realism. That is to say, his works capture the nightmare of real life disasters, death, disease and pollution. With the technique of European masters like Holbein and Dutch landscape painters, many images find the quiet moments before and after death, in spite of their horrifying circumstances.
Currently living in Colombia, John Barrios (previously covered here) portrays a surreal world rich with color and detail in his oil paintings. He strips down this world in his haunting black and white mixed media drawings. Barrios' drawings, a combination of Graph Gear 500 mechanical pencil and watercolor, look similar to the under layers of his painted works. Their soft shading and light values reflect on his fascination with the subtleties of light. See more after the jump.
San Francisco based artist Joel Daniel Phillips examines the characters living in his neighborhood in larger than life-sized drawings. His subjects include street vendors and the homeless, each with a unique personality that Phillips captures in hyper-realistic detail. His ongoing series explores themes like how these individuals use objects to retain a sense of home, and promotes social justice.
Born in Canada and based in Manhattan, Karel Funk discovered the meaning of personal space while riding the New York subway for the first time. His subjects are the every day men and women he observes there at a close range. As Funk closes in past the comfort zone, he's met with a certain rejection. Their clothing, hair or headphones act like a modern day armor that shields the viewer from any possibility to engage. Some paintings show only a jacket, a hood, or the back of a girl's ponytail. What is left for us to speculate are things like folds in fabric, which Funk renders to a hyper-realistic point, and we become a voyeur to these details.
Quebec native Alexandra Bastien (first posted in 2014) can spend over 40 hours on just one of her near hyper-realistic colored pencil drawings. She is currently working on an ongoing series of girls in a state of Metempsychosis, especially reincarnation. In other words, we are witnessing the moment after death where their souls move from one form to another. In Bastien's work, this is usually an animal skull or remains. Take a look at some of her recent drawings, after the jump!
Dynamic and skillfully executed, there is more than meets the eye in the figurative work of Chinese artist Mohan (默涵). His subjects are usually women, cast as little girls, brides and patriots, placed in idealized settings. We find them at home, cheering their comrades, or quietly contemplating their futures in moody landscapes of China. In recent works, they also venture to foreign cities like Paris. They are lit with the softness of Romanticism, with an attention to detail that borders hyperrealism.