Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Dior Fall 2013 Collection
The Château de Versailles, emblem of Dior’s tradition, hosts a new tale which brings to life the Dior Fall 2013 Collection.
You might remember Dior’s short film shot last year in Versailles well the sequel has just been released for Dior’s viral campaign for the 2013 fall collection. This spring’s “Secret Garden 2 – Versailles” is once again filed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin and is set in the forest outside the Petit Trianon. Inspired by Edouard Manet’s famous “Luncheon on the Grass” painting, it is more in one with nature as model Daria Stokous flees through the Versailles grounds and finds herself with models Melissa Stasiuk and Xiao Wen in the depth of Christian Dior’s secret garden
Monday, August 12, 2013
I Followed You To The Sun- Tracey Emin
With a somewhat brutal realness, artist (and YBA member) Tracey Emin confronts her viewers with work that is provocative, personal—and stakes claim to a sizeable piece of feminist-advised contemporary art landscape. She works in a variety of media, choosing to work in a combination of sculpture, painting and installation.
Her most recent body of work hinges on ideas of self-discovery, reflection and vulnerability. An installation of quiet, pleading text-based sculptures rest on tables surrounded by raw, harshly expressionist gouache drawings.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Sunday, July 21, 2013
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist (born November 29, 1933) is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.
"Living in the Plains, you'd see surreal things; you'd see mirages. I'm sitting on the front porch, as a little kid at sunset, and the sun is in back of me, and walking across the horizon is a Trojan horse four stories tall. I go "Uh oh—what's that?" So I run into the house and say, "Look! Look at the big horse!" It was the neighbor's white stallion, which had got loose, caught the light in the heat, and it looked four stories tall. These kinds of little things make, I think, the curiosity, or the inquisitiveness, that make and artist."
- Rosenquist
"Living in the Plains, you'd see surreal things; you'd see mirages. I'm sitting on the front porch, as a little kid at sunset, and the sun is in back of me, and walking across the horizon is a Trojan horse four stories tall. I go "Uh oh—what's that?" So I run into the house and say, "Look! Look at the big horse!" It was the neighbor's white stallion, which had got loose, caught the light in the heat, and it looked four stories tall. These kinds of little things make, I think, the curiosity, or the inquisitiveness, that make and artist."
- Rosenquist
Friday, June 21, 2013
AVENUE ROAD GALLERY, ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION
I am thrilled to be in AVENUE ROAD GALLERYS ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION
tomorrow!!! I am hoping to win myself a nice painting too. They will be running a fundraiser and are asking artists to donate work which will be raffled on the night. Tickets will be €10 each and ALL proceeds will go towards insurance, programming and running costs of the gallery.
LAUNCH SATURDAY 22ND JUNE @ 7PM EXHIBITION DURATION JUNE 23RD - JUNE 29TH 12-6PM DAILY
tomorrow!!! I am hoping to win myself a nice painting too. They will be running a fundraiser and are asking artists to donate work which will be raffled on the night. Tickets will be €10 each and ALL proceeds will go towards insurance, programming and running costs of the gallery.
LAUNCH SATURDAY 22ND JUNE @ 7PM EXHIBITION DURATION JUNE 23RD - JUNE 29TH 12-6PM DAILY
Friday, June 14, 2013
Thursday, June 6, 2013
My Dream House
This morning I was browsing through this amazing blog called The Design Files and I came across a feature they posted of artist Leah Frasers house. Wow what a house, I just had to post it, you can check out the full post here and Leahs work here!
Monday, June 3, 2013
Sergej Jensen
Sergej Jensen is the winner of this years Fred Thieler Prize.
Apart from conventional materials like linen and coarse cotton, Jensen paints on jute sacks and coloured fabric, which generate a distinctive flavour of their own. Traces of wear and even damage acquire as much importance as the painterly act. But Jensen is also keen to apply painting to new fields, as we can see from his home-made fan belts, some of them in idiosyncratic forms. This desire to transgress the boundaries of genre has also led the artist to work with the media of drawing, performance, installation and music.
Apart from conventional materials like linen and coarse cotton, Jensen paints on jute sacks and coloured fabric, which generate a distinctive flavour of their own. Traces of wear and even damage acquire as much importance as the painterly act. But Jensen is also keen to apply painting to new fields, as we can see from his home-made fan belts, some of them in idiosyncratic forms. This desire to transgress the boundaries of genre has also led the artist to work with the media of drawing, performance, installation and music.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Bad new Coco Chanel film
CHANEL aired its new Coco Chanel film, Once Upon A Time. The short stars Keira Knightley as the label's visionary founding designer and focuses on the opening of her debut store in 1913, situated in the French seaside town of Deauville. It is soooo terrible.Check it out!
Friday, May 24, 2013
Why? Anticon
Why? are always a band I will go back to. I found myself watching a few why? videos on you tube today. I know their albums/tunes so well it's strange to see the videos to them. Good though!
WHY? is a band—three Cincinnati-bred gentlemen who've shared a whole lotta past together. Two of them are brothers. Yoni Wolf, who founded the project by his lonesome in 1998 is one of those (see also: cLOUDDEAD, Greenthink, Reaching Quiet). The other is Josiah Wolf, who first started hitting the skins at their father's synagogue during worship service. WHY?'s third fella is Doug McDiarmid, a high school friend born to French teachers, discovered by the Wolfs whilst playing guitar in a Steve Miller cover band. These men are handsome and meticulous, especially when they do ugly and unwieldy things with words and music.
WHY? is a band—three Cincinnati-bred gentlemen who've shared a whole lotta past together. Two of them are brothers. Yoni Wolf, who founded the project by his lonesome in 1998 is one of those (see also: cLOUDDEAD, Greenthink, Reaching Quiet). The other is Josiah Wolf, who first started hitting the skins at their father's synagogue during worship service. WHY?'s third fella is Doug McDiarmid, a high school friend born to French teachers, discovered by the Wolfs whilst playing guitar in a Steve Miller cover band. These men are handsome and meticulous, especially when they do ugly and unwieldy things with words and music.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Top Of The Lake
I Just finished 'Top Of The Lake' a tv mini series filmed on location in New Zealand, the series follows a detective who investigates the disappearance of a 12-year-old pregnant daughter of a local drug lord. I enjoyed it, it looked amazing and it had that small town Twin Peaksy buzz off it :) Worth the watch.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Nigel Cooke at the Douglas Hyde
I cannot wait for the Douglas Hyde Gallerys forthcoming exhibition. I have always wanted to see a Nigel Cooke painting in the flesh and On the evening of the opening, Nigel Cooke will give a talk on the exhibition and his practice. Thursday, May 30, at 5pm. All are welcome, admission free.
Nigel Cooke 31 May - 17 July 2013
Tree Works by Nigel Cooke, April 2013
Paint is inert on a palette, but then you notice the colour of it and begin to make connections. If it's green or yellow or something like that, it begins a relationship with the natural world, the landscape, vegetation, etc. If you then push it into a shape or a line, it becomes a leaf, a blade of grass, a shoot of growth. And it has grown - information has been injected, and a journey has started from base matter to representation. Our perceptions hanker for representation, so it's common to detect and develop correspondences between painted forms and things in the world at large automatically. A green blob will effortlessly become a leaf if the colour and context are right, and my tree works manipulate this tendency, aiming to stretch the possibilities of the visual sense of a tree, using it as a point of departure for an experience in painting and the growth of an idea. The tree is both a hermetic shape and a nest of holes and spaces, a frame and a filter, a wicker basket and a dam. Its dualities are a paradigm for the painting of nature and the nature of painting.
As is well known, Mondrian's achievements in abstraction came from trees. Initial fascination with the configuration of an actual tree led to a rigorous cycle of reworkings of the tree form, until a conception of language supplanted that of vision, until the organic was interiorised as a highly personal system of grids and lines. What Mondrian saw as a search for 'the foundation of things' in his paintings of trees was a journey from Cartesian, perspectival vision to what it means to think about vision itself. I have felt a closeness to this movement of thought lately, and have sought to explore it in these works too.
Made over long periods of time and with a wide range of techniques, the paintings are layered with disparate and conflicting relationships, as I try to work themes together that have no direct natural fit. Over time, my conflicting impulses flesh out a kind of 'tree' - a clump of dualities and paradoxes that refuse to collaborate, yet sit in the same bordered shape (a canvas). Abstraction moves through the work as a force of change and a question, obliterating and revising the more pictorial aspects. It wipes away sense with an outlandish scale and velocity of mark that dwarfs the smaller components or consumes them altogether. The figurative aspect struggles against this assault until some sort of truce is arrived at, a kind of equalizing of values that feels artistically right, yet sort of broken and inconclusive. Although the large brushstrokes stand in for abstraction, they retain some value as figurative signs all the same. They can mimic the components of a giant orchid, a mimosa bush in high winds, an ocean wave smashing through a tree - either way, the giant 'abstract' brushstrokes hold the least 'reality' but the most authority, and stand in for my ambivalence and doubts, my suspicion of certainty in painting and the payoffs of coherence.
In this they also serve to complicate the point where the painting and the image meet. It is specifically at this point, this flashpoint between the image and the painting, that an imaginative rift also opens up, a place where my involvement with the image as a constant and reliable entity most abruptly changes gear. A host of pictorial non-sequiturs arise: A stroke of paint acting as a branch dwindles to a fork of lightning that terminates in a microscopic fried egg at a remote seashore. A fall of mimosa blossom streaks into the hair of a smoldering woman. A wave of paint is broken by a cabbage-like male head smoking a cigarette, sending up a cone of impasto smoke. The pistil and stamens of an orchid are calcified into the whorls and sockets of a deconstructed skull. In a way the tree is the framework on which the painting begins to grow on its own terms, allowing the objects and events to sprout from, hang on or become entangled in a generic energetic mass. Marks obey the needs of the painting over the needs of the image - abstraction takes hold, and the sense of tree-ness' is displaced, maybe maintained in silhouette, colour, symmetry or structure, but not necessarily in organization or pictorial likeness. There is something transcendental about all this for me; the painting has its own logic of growth whilst representing the image of a growing thing.
The tree is both close-up and remote - it is at once all around and far away, due to the scale range of marks operating within the framework. It is usually set by the sea - the frontier of elements, where the landscape not only ends, but where the water, minerals, air, vegetation and wind mix together. This is the beach setting of my tree works, where this elemental action renders the figures at their base not completely insignificant, but certainly idle, unemployed, stunned by leisure. To me there is an oddly misanthropic feeling around them - there can be more significance given to a missile of paint fossilized on the surface of the work than a reveller collapsed drunk in the background of the scene, a bather staring out to sea, or a writer stupefied amongst empty pages.
Trees and plants have always appeared in my work, as fronds of grass, twigs, trunks, morphological skull trees etc. Recently the tree or flower has combined with aspects of the earlier storm paintings to form a mini series of works within a larger developmental strand. This is the first show to focus on a selection of these tree works in isolation.
Nigel Cooke has exhibited in a wide range of public institutions, including The Goss-Michael Foundation, Texas; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; South London Gallery, London; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Tate Britain, London. He is represented by Modern Art, London, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.
Nigel Cooke 31 May - 17 July 2013
Tree Works by Nigel Cooke, April 2013
Paint is inert on a palette, but then you notice the colour of it and begin to make connections. If it's green or yellow or something like that, it begins a relationship with the natural world, the landscape, vegetation, etc. If you then push it into a shape or a line, it becomes a leaf, a blade of grass, a shoot of growth. And it has grown - information has been injected, and a journey has started from base matter to representation. Our perceptions hanker for representation, so it's common to detect and develop correspondences between painted forms and things in the world at large automatically. A green blob will effortlessly become a leaf if the colour and context are right, and my tree works manipulate this tendency, aiming to stretch the possibilities of the visual sense of a tree, using it as a point of departure for an experience in painting and the growth of an idea. The tree is both a hermetic shape and a nest of holes and spaces, a frame and a filter, a wicker basket and a dam. Its dualities are a paradigm for the painting of nature and the nature of painting.
As is well known, Mondrian's achievements in abstraction came from trees. Initial fascination with the configuration of an actual tree led to a rigorous cycle of reworkings of the tree form, until a conception of language supplanted that of vision, until the organic was interiorised as a highly personal system of grids and lines. What Mondrian saw as a search for 'the foundation of things' in his paintings of trees was a journey from Cartesian, perspectival vision to what it means to think about vision itself. I have felt a closeness to this movement of thought lately, and have sought to explore it in these works too.
Made over long periods of time and with a wide range of techniques, the paintings are layered with disparate and conflicting relationships, as I try to work themes together that have no direct natural fit. Over time, my conflicting impulses flesh out a kind of 'tree' - a clump of dualities and paradoxes that refuse to collaborate, yet sit in the same bordered shape (a canvas). Abstraction moves through the work as a force of change and a question, obliterating and revising the more pictorial aspects. It wipes away sense with an outlandish scale and velocity of mark that dwarfs the smaller components or consumes them altogether. The figurative aspect struggles against this assault until some sort of truce is arrived at, a kind of equalizing of values that feels artistically right, yet sort of broken and inconclusive. Although the large brushstrokes stand in for abstraction, they retain some value as figurative signs all the same. They can mimic the components of a giant orchid, a mimosa bush in high winds, an ocean wave smashing through a tree - either way, the giant 'abstract' brushstrokes hold the least 'reality' but the most authority, and stand in for my ambivalence and doubts, my suspicion of certainty in painting and the payoffs of coherence.
In this they also serve to complicate the point where the painting and the image meet. It is specifically at this point, this flashpoint between the image and the painting, that an imaginative rift also opens up, a place where my involvement with the image as a constant and reliable entity most abruptly changes gear. A host of pictorial non-sequiturs arise: A stroke of paint acting as a branch dwindles to a fork of lightning that terminates in a microscopic fried egg at a remote seashore. A fall of mimosa blossom streaks into the hair of a smoldering woman. A wave of paint is broken by a cabbage-like male head smoking a cigarette, sending up a cone of impasto smoke. The pistil and stamens of an orchid are calcified into the whorls and sockets of a deconstructed skull. In a way the tree is the framework on which the painting begins to grow on its own terms, allowing the objects and events to sprout from, hang on or become entangled in a generic energetic mass. Marks obey the needs of the painting over the needs of the image - abstraction takes hold, and the sense of tree-ness' is displaced, maybe maintained in silhouette, colour, symmetry or structure, but not necessarily in organization or pictorial likeness. There is something transcendental about all this for me; the painting has its own logic of growth whilst representing the image of a growing thing.
The tree is both close-up and remote - it is at once all around and far away, due to the scale range of marks operating within the framework. It is usually set by the sea - the frontier of elements, where the landscape not only ends, but where the water, minerals, air, vegetation and wind mix together. This is the beach setting of my tree works, where this elemental action renders the figures at their base not completely insignificant, but certainly idle, unemployed, stunned by leisure. To me there is an oddly misanthropic feeling around them - there can be more significance given to a missile of paint fossilized on the surface of the work than a reveller collapsed drunk in the background of the scene, a bather staring out to sea, or a writer stupefied amongst empty pages.
Trees and plants have always appeared in my work, as fronds of grass, twigs, trunks, morphological skull trees etc. Recently the tree or flower has combined with aspects of the earlier storm paintings to form a mini series of works within a larger developmental strand. This is the first show to focus on a selection of these tree works in isolation.
Nigel Cooke has exhibited in a wide range of public institutions, including The Goss-Michael Foundation, Texas; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; South London Gallery, London; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Tate Britain, London. He is represented by Modern Art, London, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
National Drawing Day
Looking forward to National Drawing Day on Saturday!
In the National Art Gallery, Drawing Day 2013 will be launched by Colin Davidson, PRUA.
Nationwide Drawing Day | Saturday 18 May 2013 | All welcome | Admission free.
Colin Davidson PRUA will launch Nationwide Drawing Day in the National Gallery of Ireland on Saturday, May 18th at 11am. Over 40 museums, galleries and art centres around the country will be taking part, providing drawing classes and demonstrations throughout the day for all age groups.
The programme in the National Gallery of Ireland will start at 11am with life drawing classes for adults, led by professional artists, Grainne Dowling and Fintan Mahon. It will include drawing demonstrations by Alan Daly and Sahoko Blake.
In the afternoon, there will be an hour of fun-filled family drawing workshops from 3pm to 4pm, on the theme, ‘The Circus Comes to the Gallery’.
In the National Art Gallery, Drawing Day 2013 will be launched by Colin Davidson, PRUA.
Nationwide Drawing Day | Saturday 18 May 2013 | All welcome | Admission free.
Colin Davidson PRUA will launch Nationwide Drawing Day in the National Gallery of Ireland on Saturday, May 18th at 11am. Over 40 museums, galleries and art centres around the country will be taking part, providing drawing classes and demonstrations throughout the day for all age groups.
The programme in the National Gallery of Ireland will start at 11am with life drawing classes for adults, led by professional artists, Grainne Dowling and Fintan Mahon. It will include drawing demonstrations by Alan Daly and Sahoko Blake.
In the afternoon, there will be an hour of fun-filled family drawing workshops from 3pm to 4pm, on the theme, ‘The Circus Comes to the Gallery’.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Katy Moran
The energetic small-scale canvasses by Katy Moran, painted in acrylic,
start with an image taken from a variety of sources – the internet, her
mobile phone camera, junk shop pictures and magazines. She turns the
picture upside down to avoid creating a literal description of the scene
and works intensely until the rich, sumptuous colours and thick
brushstrokes loosely indicate figurative images.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Miniature Portrait
I was commissioned to do a miniature portrait for a friend. It is a little oil painting of her beautiful daughter.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Beauty Is Embarrassing,Wayne White
A documentary on the life and current times of artist Wayne White. Really inspiring. Wayne White is an American artist, art director, illustrator, puppeteer, and much, much more. Born and raised in Chattanooga, Wayne has used his memories of the South to create inspired works for film, television, and the fine art world. After graduating from Middle Tennessee State University, Wayne traveled to New York City where he worked as an illustrator for the East Village Eye, New York Times, Raw Magazine, and the Village Voice. In 1986, Wayne became a designer for the hit television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and his work was awarded with three Emmys. After traveling to Los Angeles with his wife, Mimi Pond, Wayne continued to work in television and designed sets and characters for shows such as Shining Time Station, Beakman’s World, Riders In The Sky, and Bill & Willis. He also worked in the music video industry, winning Billboard and MTV Music Video Awards as an art director for seminal music videos including The Smashing Pumpkins' 'Tonight, Tonight' and Peter Gabriel's 'Big Time.'
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