Kirstine Roepstorff

'With newspaper cuttings, fabric, photographs, embroidery, glitter, and yarn glued layer-on-layer, Kirstine Roepstorff’s images are every restorer’s nightmare. But the visual universes created by using materials from very different contexts are unusually challenging to explore, as you will find hidden existential discussions in between the many material layers. “Appropria-arrangements” Roepstorff’s preferred media are painting and collage, which she explores in a both innovative and original way. She calls her collages ‘appropria-arrangements’, the works consist of visual materials such as newspapers, books and magazines which the artist puts together in new ways.' (taken from e-flux)

Victor Castillo

Victor Castillo is a Chilean painter currently residing in Los Angeles, California. He was born in Santiago in 1973, the year of Chile’s military coup.

He began drawing obsessively at the age of five, inspired by the animations he saw on television, science fiction movies, and the illustrations on his family’s record covers such as Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. Following a disillusive experience with art school that ended with his being expelled, Victor participated in an independent experimental art collective in Santiago, creating mixed media sculpture and video installations.

Victor moved to Barcelona, Spain in 2004, where he established his painting style with references to comics. After seeing the Prado Museum in Madrid, particularly Goya’s Black Paintings, he adopted aspects of classical painting in his work. Working with the legendary Igaupop Gallery until its closing in 2010, Victor began to show his work internationally.

He also has a blog here!

Musette, Drape me in velvet

What an album!......by Musette 'Drape me in velvet',I think I have listened to it about six times already today!

Check out this beautiful tune called Little Elvis,



I read this on Boomkat ......'Musette is a very dapper looking gent called Joel Danell who makes utterly enchanting exotica and records onto time-worn and overused tape. 'Drape Me In Velvet' is his first vinyl release and first record for the lovely Swedish label, Häpna. It's also one of the most endearing albums to cross our paths from the label so far, braiding hand-played strands of wheezy organ music with rippling easy listening rhythms in a gloriously spacey and tantalisingly out-of-reach sound world. We're a bit partial to good use of tape-recorded techniques around these parts, but this fella's got something really special going on, apparently using half-century-old reel-to-reels and cassettes inherited from his family and dating to the '50s and '60s to achieve his uncannily warm and anachronistic aesthetic. There's obviously a playful sense of irony at work, to be able to craft such archaic work in an age of futuristic possibilities. And like, say, The Caretaker, it's matched and masked with a sincerity that's loveably demented and always accessible and reality-stifling when you need it - as though providing a glimpse into the whiskey and prescription smudged memory recess of a character from Mad Men. Like we say, it's one of the years first real gems, a record we'll all surely be getting better acquainted with.'

Folkert de Jong

I love Folkert de Jong’s creepy sculptures.... like something from a nightmare!!

'Folkert de Jong’s figurative installations combine a touch of ironic Old Master tableaux vivant-style composition with a strong dose of the macabre. His polyurethane foam mannequins have an arresting life-like quality, which makes their dirty and broken down facture all the more affecting. Frozen in permanent gestures like ventriloquist’s dummies (The Peckhamian Mimic, 2007), sometimes quasi-drunkenly gurning or grinning, as in Asalto de la Diligencia (2008) or expressionlessly looking on, these posturing figures have an eerie charge, like carnivalesque puppet grim reapers rising from the detritus of post-industrial culture, poignantly made out of a material that will not last.'

Jessie Willcox Smith

Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935), American artist and illustrator, was called a “painter of children” by periodicals of the early 1900s. She became one of the highest-paid women illustrators of all time. It was said of the ideal children that populated her illustrations, “they are clean, they are pretty, they don't look noisy, they are unusually rosy and wholesome, yet not too chubby to be graceful; they are a bit old-fashioned, both in their manners and their comfortable clothing, and it is easy to see that they are only sufficiently naughty to be entertaining.”

Couple of new portraits

My mates Gary and Gemma were so good to let me paint them.....Thanks guys! :)

oil on wood
35x45cm

oil on wood
35x45cm

Gerhard Richter Painting

I am really looking forward to seeing this new Documentary about artist Gerhard Richter....

The German artist Gerhard Richter has spent over half a century experimenting with a tremendous range of techniques and ideas, addressing historical crises and mass media representation alongside explorations of chance procedures. Infamously media-shy, he agreed to appear on camera for the first time in 15 years for a 2007 short by filmmaker Corinna Belz called Gerhard Richter’s Window. Her follow-up, Gerhard Richter Painting, is exactly that: a thrilling document of Richter’s creative process, juxtaposed with intimate conversations (with his critics, his collaborators, and his American gallerist Marian Goodman) and rare archive material. From our fly-on-the-wall perspective, we watch the 79-year-old create a series of large-scale abstract canvasses, using fat brushes and a massive squeegee to apply (and then scrape off) layer after layer of brightly colored paint. This mesmerizing footage, of a highly charged process of creation and destruction, turns Belz’s portrait of an artist into a work of art itself.

Gerhard Richter Painting trailer from Kino Lorber on Vimeo.

Halsey Hathaway

I came across artist Halsey Hathaway through this great Art Blog by artist Paul Behnke called Structure and Imagery.

Halsey Hathaway was born in Buffalo, NY in 1980. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, his MFA from Hunter College in New York, NY, and was awarded the Tony Smith Award from Hunter College. Halsey Hathaway is a 2010 fellow in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has exhibited throughout the New York City area.

Sean Mahan

This series of paintings by Sean Mahan is part of a larger series of figurative paintings on wood. The paintings are social-realist graphite renderings on oak and birch, colored with thin washes of acrylic. They depict a sense of wonder at the simple inherent sweetness of the human character and its conflict with structures of power and control. In this series, the symbol of the “shadow person” is repeatedly used to pose questions about those “in the shadow of power,” and to pose questions about our insulated view of the impact popular consumer culture has on others.

How awesome are these!.......

Daniel Arsham

I am excited about this artist... he seems to try his hand at many things. "Arsham’s work blurs the lines between art, architecture and performance, and explores issues of natural versus manufactured or intention versus happenstance." " Through sculpture, drawing, painting and performance, Arsham challenges our perceptions of physical space in order to make architecture perform the improbable. The surfaces of walls appear to melt, erode and ripple. Animals contemplate the emergence of floating shapes in nature. Sculptures from antiquity are infused with rigid, geometric forms.

Damien Hirst

Im not a huge fan of Damien Hirst, he's either a genius or a complete chancer...maybe both ha! but I found this interview pretty interesting.

Damien Hirst's "Spot Paintings" that are being exhibited at the 11 Gagosian Galieries worldwide have created significant buzz in the art world. Some love the paintings, others have an aversion to what they may imply about the art market itself. EIther way, Hirst's work is a topic of conversation and must be regarded as an influential force in the world of contemporary art. Despite the varying opinions that may surround the shows, the spot paintings are beautiful. Their simplicity and refinement yields a very pleasurable experience. In moments of such controversy, its always nice to hear from the artist himself and Matt Black offers us this video to give us some perspective from the man behind the spots.

via: http://www.nowness.com/

Damien Hirst: On the Spotfrom Matt Black on Nowness.com.

kristin Baker

' Kristin Baker is bending painting’s seeming limitations. By emphasizing the materiality of paint through her built up layers of troweled acrylic, Baker’s paintings approach other two-dimensional practices such as printmaking, photography and paper assemblage. While upholding the power and dynamism of painting, Baker seeks to create a third dimension in between many genres and hindered by none. Her compositions combine illusionistic and pictorial space as well as blatantly artificial forms and surfaces. Each mark and shape is created not by a brush but by an outline of torn tape. The final silhouette is filled in with paint, and when the tape is ripped away, a free-floating “gesture” or “mark” is added to the piece. These shapes are layered together to make forms and landscapes or scraped away to reveal the colors underneath. Layers of these joints create tufts, grooves and corrugated surfaces that approximate collage or even the planar aggregation of 3D digital imaging techniques. Using scraping tools Baker rubs, abrades and smoothes until the surface is like an x-ray of the past'. by Deitch