Skip to main content

Jim Dine

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kathe Kollwitz

Kathe Kollwitz, although born in the 1800's was a very progressive German artist. She worked in many mediums including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Her work is heartrending. She was creating work that was well before it's time. She began to study art at a young age because her father recognized her abilities. She wasn't able to go to the better art schools because girls weren't allowed in them at the time. She attended an art school for women in Berlin. She began working in the arts - more in the commercial aspects- when she was just 12 years old. She was engaged by the time she was 17. Her husband was a doctor and he helped care for the poor. I think because they lived so near his practice and saw so much of the deprivation and sickness, that that was a huge influence on her troubling and tragic artwork. She was a socialist and very much felt the disparate nature of the class system that was creating such extreme poverty. the violence and tragedy that surrou...
Post a Comment
Read more

Henry Darger

Henry Darger just may be the most interesting and disturbing story about an undiscovered artist. He lived from 1892-1973 mostly in Chicago, IL. His posthumously discovered artwork consisted of painting, drawing, and  collage. I can't imagine what this man had going on in his head, the children in his drawings come from such a sad and lonely place. They make me feel uncomfortable. The images are so alike in many ways, but still they each seem to be a real child. I wonder if he based them on real children that he met in life or if he based them on himself. I guess it could be both. His mom died of a fever when he was only a few years old and them his father died when he was 13. He was put in an institution when he was about 7 years old and he was labeled as a disturbed child  ("his heart isn't in the right place") because he hurt himself. He was punished harshly in the institution and he was bullied by the other students, it was a very sad and cruel place for him. He...
Post a Comment
Read more

Laylah Ali

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...
Post a Comment
Read more