KH Artist Research Journal

Born in Italy in 1900, Rico Lebrun emigrated to the United States in 1924. He moved back to Italy in 1930 and back to the US in 1936. Throughout these years he worked as an artist, both personally and commercially. He died in 1964. "Occasionally, I like to select a mentor, a master, and let him guide me through a revision of one of my paintings... I try to move into his terrain, bringing my own ammunition... I do not believe... that this belittles my own personality."  -Rico Lebrun Three Tormented Shades

Part of the Greenheads Series Laylah Ali's art is ambiguous. The forms take on a gender neutral and race-less form. She doesn't give much in the way of clues about what they are suppose to be about (Although since 2015 she has been working on a project named Acephalous where it's the exact opposite- very sexualized and gender conscious and racial). She wants the viewer to decide for themselves what the meanings are. She is meticulous in her work. She plans and plans before she even begins to execute. She tends to use gauche and she also like to put her narratives in the form of a comic strip. Her work is neat and precise, but her figures are not true to life, they are more illustrative and cartoon-like. She will often take a current event or picture from current event and create some changes and draw her figures into the scenes - with the new figures not being exactly like the real life counterparts the viewers is able to see the event in a different light. In the begi...

Kerry James Marshall, Detail of Souvenir IV, 1998 Kerry James Marshall grew up at the exact time and places that is took to create himself as an artist. He was born in Birmingham, AL in 1955 and grew up in Watts- the projects outside of LA. He now lives and works in Chicago. He is the voice of confrontation. He confronts us with the ideas that maybe we don't think about or possible don't want to think about. His work looks at slavery, marginalization, misconception, and discrimination in the black community. He makes no apologies that his work is meant to be “unequivocally, emphatically black.” His art is also very reminiscent of folk art - with a contemporary edge. In 1978 he graduated from Otis College of Art and Design and he has taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His style is unique and his figures are essentially the color black - which is a signature of his work. His art takes you somewhere, a place where you are forced t...

Gustav Klimt, born in Austria in 1862, grew up relatively poor. He enrolled in a public art school in Vienna at 14 years old and apparently had natural talent because he was asked to do commissions while he was studying there. Klimt was known to be a bit of a playboy and because of his success, he was able to have a willing model available whenever he needed them. A lot of his work was considered erotic for the day, and in my opinion, it still is. I find it really interesting that he has so much pattern and abstraction surrounding his figures, but the figures themselves are almost true to life in coloring  and shading. The two techniques seem to contradict each other, but the contrast works. His figures draw me in because of their likeness to real life. The bodies are a bit elongated and skinny or even contorted- but for some reason it doesn't seem off-  just fascinating. The gold that he would often use in some of his works made the figures stand out. I read that the pa...

Jim Dine is a pop artist that seems to get stuck on a certain form and then make iterations of it until he tires of that object and moves on to the next. He was a big part of the pop culture movement and his work was included in a curated to be part of the show New Painting of Common Objects with artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. One of my favorite stories about him is that his work was being shown in London in 1966 - in the Fraser Gallery - and the police raided the place, seized 20 pieces of his work in the name of the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, and then fined Frasers 20 guineas - because the work was just indecent, but not obscene. LOL! I couldn't find much of his work that showed the human form. The closest I saw were his bathrobe series. I guess that's a really interesting way to draw the figure- disembodied.

Capacitor Antony Gormley is a sculpture and artist who thinks about and explores the relationship between the human body and the space we occupy or the space around us. Gormley was born in London in 1950. His sculptures are almost exclusively are of the human form- usually metal castes of his own body. He wants his work to make people look around and asses their place in the world. He likes to think about the human body as a place not a thing. Like our body is an event that occurred in a space at a certain time. His sculptures are like a place marker for a time that a body inhabited that space.  One thing I really like about him is that he is modest and sincere about his work. He has a real line of inquiry that he explores over and over again. Also, his wife, Vicken Parsons, also an artist, often works with him and he lives her and values her as a person and an artist. Exposure