Michaela

[michaelamccann]

colour

[michaelamccann]

Loretta Lux

Loretta Lux is a contemporary German photographer. Known for her hauntingly surreal, dream-like portraits, Lux’s photographs feature young children digitally altered to resemble the aristocratic stiffness and formality of Old Master paintings. Rendered in low contrast against uncanny, pastel backdrops, her works also reference commercial photography tropes and the kitsch imagery of advertising. “My work isn't about these children,” the artist explains. “You can recognize them, but they are alienated from their real appearance—I use them as a metaphor for innocence and a lost paradise.”

Loretta Lux's works seem to emit a vague but tangible distance between the audience and the often self-aware subjects of her portraits. Not signifying a certain time nor space, the photographs do suggest a kind of narrative. This intented ambiguousness is enhanced by the pale complexions of the children and their simple backgrounds. She portrays them like in a daydream, awkward, unengaged and very remote.

Loretta Lux

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Asagi Natsume

ASAGI NATSUME was born in 1971 in Tokyo, Japan. In 1998, she completed the masters program at Tama Art University and currently lives and works in Tokyo. This artist was discovered by our gallery owner who was fascinated by her work.

Her paintings often depict imaginary solitary women. They have a great depth as she delicately layers many colors leaving the viewer with a sense of atmospheric forms which change in the light. Her drawings hover between the outer and inner　vision of the world, like ghosts, and the viewer might feel something special.

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Xie Lei

In Xie Lei’s paintings, animals and plants are personified and seem to acquire a personality of their own, while human characters are intimately incorporated in their environment, forming one with nature. While these environments are depicted by conventional signs, Xie Lei often eschews delineating ground from sky, proximity from depth and foreground from background, thereby deliberately confusing the viewer’s sense of time and space and disseminating a sense of ethereality into paintings that look no more like windows into a new world but as symbolist talismans facing the viewer.

Xie Lei

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Edwin Dickenson

Edwin Dickinson was an American painter known for his somber-toned portraits, interiors, and landscapes. Employing a largely neutral palette of lilac whites and cool grays, Dickinson conveyed forms and light by laying on broad swathes of paint with a palette knife. “Don’t let the brush wander into the pieces done with the palette knife and vice versa,” he once explained to his students. “We all know that in one and the same painting the characteristics of each of the knife and the brush can be shown clearly, this regarding the descriptive quality of the thing one paints.”

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Hieronymus Bosch

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Zdzisław Beksiński

Zdzislaw Beksinski was a Polish artist best known for his surreal dystopian imagery. His paintings, photographs, and prints depicted macabre otherworldly spaces and figures. “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams,” he once reflected.

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Adrian Ghenie

Adrian Ghenie surveys and subverts historical and artistic narratives through his paintings, which aim to unearth feelings of vulnerability, frustration, or desire, and often draw on human experience and ideas of the collective unconscious.

Ghenie includes themes of history, memory, and the legacy of villainous historical figures, particularly of his native Romania. These figures, largely derived from mid-twentieth-century historical sources, appear in haunting interiors as dreamlike or cinematic vignettes. Ghenie also began to appropriate tropes from slapstick film, manifesting in his Pie Fight paintings that, in a confluence of figuration and abstraction, depict historical or cinematic figures whose faces are freshly slathered with a custard pie per the comedy of the Three Stooges.

His recent work is driven by historical conflict between the irrational and rational, particularly in key ideas or moments that have incited social tumult. These tensions manifest in Ghenie’s paintings through a confluence of abstraction and representation and extend to collage, assemblage and installation. With Dada Room (2010), he draws from an historical event in The First International Dada Fair. The custom-built room, lit by a single fluorescent light, is an amalgam of imagery, color, and objects that form a three-dimensional manifestation of Ghenie’s painting style. Dark and gritty, Dada Room becomes a revelatory symbolic gesture of the collective unconscious and the inner workings of the artist’s own mind and process.

https://www.instagram.com/adrian.ghenie/?hl=en

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Mark Acetelli

Mark’s paintings exist to awaken your sense of exploration and adventure demand a new discovery. A chemistry of complexity and spontaneity, lyrical abstraction of frenzied marks, many of which previously lay hidden, buried beneath strong layers of self-taught - expression. Those truths, first obscured and then obvious, aim to engage the viewer, allowing them to explore their own interpretation.

Mark’s paintings are inspired by the intensely personal introspective journey of life, from the ever-changing complexities of love, loss, birth and death. The context of his work he describes as, "Absence and Presence” pertaining to how someone or something can be physically gone, but the essence still remains. Capturing the physical mixed with spirituality on canvas. His application of paint is an extension of that thought process. Continuously building up and tearing down, layer upon layer, adding and subtracting.; a visceral dance between the conscious and the unconscious until the emotion is expressed.

Mark’s paintings may be going through multiple incarnations with the past lying just beneath the surface, adding to its overall dimension and depth. In his work Mark seeks to evoke a feeling rather than depict a defined image. He uses primarily oils and encaustics to create thickly layered canvases with emotive bursts of color. Creating a world where imagination and reality come together.

Mark Acetelli

Mark Acetelli home page

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Antonine Cordet

French painter Antoine Cordet explores the correlation between portraiture and abstraction; gestural streaks of fluid color meet faces that are frozen in time. The artist paints with a highly skilled touch, a kind or post-realism, juxtaposed with the appearance of deliberately unfinished, wet and stained identities. In Cordet’s world, he has shaped a wonderful language, a contemporary golden age, where paintings hold ghostly hints of a romantic past, exquisitely repackaged and visually anew. Contemplative faces, of dark & light, breathing sentimental thoughts, hints of self reflection offer a peak in the minds of the painted subject, and surmise a kind of expression, a stillness, which reverberates exactly how it is to feel, human.

https://artmarketmag.com/antoine-cordet-exclusive-interview/

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH ANTOINE CORDET A keen observer, the French artist Antoine Cordet leads us to discover a world of his own,

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Natalie Frank

In her oil-on-canvas and mixed-media paintings, Natalie Frank plumbs human nature, seeking to convey, through her roiling, lush, and visceral compositions, the complexity and mutability of identity. As she describes: “The narrative—the stories that people tell and use to construct their lives, whether it be religious, humanistic, mythical, social, was and is my entry point in painting and the figure.” Frank, who has been called a “painter’s painter”, draws inspiration from literature and art history, and cites the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, Italian Renaissance painting, the German and Austrian Expressionists, and R.B. Kitaj as influences. Her works—ranging from small-scale portraits to large narrative scenes—are centered on the human figure, rendered semi-abstract and in heighted physical and emotional states. Frank is a storyteller. Through her bold, dramatic handling of paint, she reveals the struggle of being human.

Natalie Frank

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book on liminal space between states of human conciousness

At the Borders of Sleep investigates a liminal or threshold state between two fundamental modes of human consciousness, the waking state and the sleeping one–which are not as distinct from one another as is commonly thought. Perhaps only at the borders of sleep can we get a sense of their connection. During true sleep we are unconscious; and while dreaming we uncritically accept what is happening to us, which we will later translate into untrustworthy waking narratives. As we are poised on the threshold of sleep, however, we can consciously observe what our preoccupied consciousness doesn’t usually admit during the day. Liminal states are so subtle and evanescent that only literary depictions can do them justice; and so literature, along with philosophy and some science, has generated this book’s argument. That argument is then turned back upon literature to show how both reading and writing are liminal experiences, taking place at the edges of conscious thought. The book has sections dealing with drowsiness, insomnia, and the moment of waking; it ends with a section titled “Sleepwaking,” which is devoted to literature–particularly “experimental” literature - that blurs dream and waking life. The authors considered in this study are a varied lot: among others, Marcel Proust, Stephen King, Paul Valéry, Fernando Pessoa, Franz Kafka, Giorgio de Chirico, Virginia Woolf, Philippe Sollers, and Robert Irwin.

[k00280184]

Holly Warburton

Because of the limited palettes we've been using in our life painting classes, I was interested in finding artists who use limited or specific colour palettes in their work. An artist I love is Holly Warburton, who I always think of for her blue-orange and purple-yellow contrasts. She says that her colours are inspired by the Impressionists and how they use colour to influence mood, which I think is clear in her work.

Holly Warburton

I'm an illustrator and 2D animator, most inspired by the people I see around me everyday.

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the uncanny

https://kar.kent.ac.uk/73541/1/What%20is%20the%20Uncanny%2C%20accepted%20manuscript.pdf

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the uncanny valley

The Uncanny Valley [From the Field]

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Jeremy Enecio

Jeremy Enecio

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a video about liminal space/ dream space