KH Artist Research Journal

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...

Hunter's cabin The People and Things of Onomatopoeia Charles Avery's most intriguing project is his ongoing project, "The Islanders" is a project he has been working on since 2004. He pretty much uses every artistic medium imaginable to create the people, places, and things of the imaginary islanders. Charles Avery was born in the UK in 1974, specifically Scotland. Currently, he works in London. From what I've seen, a lot of his figurative work is done in pencil. There isn't a lot I can find about him as a person, just lots of articles about his Islander project. I love that he has lost himself in the world of make believe. I guess if I'm going to take something from his practice it would be to not take myself so seriously, to loosen up, and allow my imagination to do some of the work. I get so caught up in researching and facts, in realistically portraying something, or in being accurate in shape, size, color, etc... A project like this can pretty...

 Tim Okamura, “The Fight Club”, 2012 , oil, mixed media on canvas, 112 x 130 inches I can't remember exactly how I found Tim Okamura. But I looked him up and started following him on Instagram because I was so obsessed with his paintings. He paints in oils, layers and layers of oils. If you see his pictures from the side, they have so much texture and depth. I love that he portraits strong women. The beauty of who they are is palpable. On one of his posts he showed how he works. He starts by making a sketch of his model with vine charcoal on his canvas. Then, he works from undertones forward, correcting and overpainting again and again. Occasionally, you'll get a glimpse of his paint palette - it's a gigantic mound of oil paints, I love it. The backgrounds in his paintings are often collaged and spray painted, very urban and super alive. He was born, grew up, and went to school in Canada. He moved to the states to get his M.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts in New York...

Marcel Dzama is another example of an artist whose work I was already familiar with, without knowing it (I love They Might Be Giants and Beck). I love how they look like vintage drawings from books like Dick and Jane. Primers that my parents read when they were little. They vintage quality is so lovely and appealing, yet interestingly his work is sort of grim and shocking. He was born and raised in Canada, but like so many artist, he moved to New York to live and work as an artist. He works in many different mediums; film, collage, watercolor, pen and ink, and sculpture. I've created a piece that reminds me a lot of the way he works. It's a retro looking picture of perfection, a woman serving her friends a luncheon, but if you really look at it, there are so many things wrong or off about the picture that make you want to understand what is going on in the scene and also wha tis going on in the artist's brain. That is how I feel about his work- I want to know wher...

Visnja Mihatov Baric is a freelance illustrator  from Zagreb, Croatia. I follow her work on Instagram, her profile name is teetonka_illustrations. I think of her more as a fine artist. She occasionally does full figure drawings, but her main gig is portraits. Her portraits start as pencil drawings. She scans them and then uses digital media to manipulate them. Often she works in black and white and then add minimal color to her portraits using digital means. For the past year a lot of her work has included the head being split or opened in some way. I find her work subtle and beautiful.

Andrea Bowers is well-known as a feminist and social activist. Her art tackles hard and uncomfortable subjects: political, historical, and personal. She was born in 1965 in Ohio into a rather conservative home that was Republican but didn't really participate in politics. Through her liberal art education and her view of issues effecting women, minorities, and the marginalized, she has taken on her very powerful stance on these issues. Bowers makes contemporary issues personal through her work. She takes these large and politically heated issues and narrows them down to the individuals who are actually effected. This makes it personal and real and allows a different point of view on the issue that one might not normally think about if they themselves aren't affected by it.She has followed a path that other social activist artist tend to follow- she was an observer, became a passive commentator through her work, and is now a devoted activist. She is very thoughtful in the wa...

Elizabeth Peyton was born in 1965 in Connecticut. She began drawing at an early age. She studied art in the 80's and then rose in fame in the mid-90's. She is a portrait artist. She dabbles in many mediums and like to experiment with processes and papers. Often, her small-scale portraits are in oil and have glazes and washes applied to them. She has worked in most types of prints. She currently lives and works in New York City. She likes to paint friends, lovers, and celebrities. Her popularity has grown steadily in the last 20 years and her paintings can sell well above .5 million dollars at auction. Her portraits aren't photorealistic likenesses, but because of the features and mannerisms that she chooses to emphasize, they are extremely successful in being a likeness of someone.

Georges Seurat Was born in Paris in 1859 and died in 1891 at the age of 31. Best known for his painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, he was also known for developing the techniques of chromoluminarism and pointillism. The movements that he was involved in were Post-Impressionism, neo-impressionism, and Pointillism - he was a very influential player in the impressionist movement. There are 60 sketched studies that Seurat did for the 10 foot wide Sunday Afternoon painting. He spent countless hours preparing for his work before he would start. He loved detail and was very mathematically minded. He died at such a young age of an unknown disease and his young son died only a short while later of the same disease. His pregnant was later gave birth to their second child who only lived for a short time before passing away as well. A very tragic story. What I learn from him is a good work ethic. He put in the time and study in order to produce masterpieces. In his sho...

Ida Applebroog is an American artist that works out of New York. Her works uses lots of line and contour drawings. She is talented in many creative mediums including jewelry making, sculpture, film, painting, and artists' books. She was born in 1929. The era that she grew up in wasn't so open or friendly to women designers and artists, so she forged her own way. Perhaps from her experiences in the industry, she tends to explore themes about gender and sexual identity. She is a feminist and a social activist- even so, she moved around the country to support her husband's career and schooling. This led to many different opportunities to explore art in different ways. Her art is very distinct and has a very graphic design quality about it- which was her major in college. She has 4 children, which amazes me when I read how prolific she was with creating art during their formative years. I guess I'm in school right now and producing art, but the things she did seem so over...

family self-portrait Claire Meldrum is an illustrator that does cartoon portraits. She has a unique style that is different from any other amorphic cartoon like version of a portrait. Her style is edgy and yet super approachable. She comes off as a bad-a, but I think that she is really sweet and tenderhearted under all the roughness she likes to put out there. She is a stay at home mom (mum) who lives off the coast of NSW, Australia. She labels herself as a ghetto queen. She is tatted up and has super short bleach blond hair, and she does illustration as a part-time gig to bring in extra cash. But honestly she does it because she loves it. I love her work.

Julian Opie is a representational artist. His portraits are seem to be understood more by symbol than by actual mimetic desire to get to the essence of the thing. Or maybe I'm wrong, by stripping down his drawings to the bare minimum he is getting to the very core of the essence of the thing. he is very famous and is known throughout the world. I find his work simplistic but intriguing. He reduces things down to their most basic form that is still recognizable without having to think about what it is that is being represented. Julian was born in London and continues to work there. His work reminds me of Andy Warhol in the way that he takes the form and makes it highly stylized in a way that is easily recognizable as his work. His work makes me think of avatars, traffic signs, and symbols. he uses shapes and symbols that are so prevalent in our daily lives that even though they are far from the actual image, they are easily recognized as the form or figure that the artist wants u...

Grandpa Chan (Lee Chan-jae, 76) is a Korean water color artist whose practice includes making water colors of the world around him in order to communicate with his grandchildren who live half a world away. He learned Instagram just so he could draw for them. On his account "Drawings for my grandchildren" he posts his images on Instagram along with a story or memory to go along with them. Although he has begun to use his fame to sell prints of his work- all the money he earns goes to a project called  The Unloneliness Project, and initiative from The Foundation for Art & Healing , and to his grandkids' college funds.  When I first started following him on Instagram, he lived in Brazil, but he has since moved back to Korea. His images are moving. Sometimes they tell stories about what is happening in his life at the moment, sometimes the stories are more about what is going on in the world - especially when large world events happen (good or bad). He is poignant and...

Barry McGee is one of those artist that you know about before you even know about him. I've seen his work so many times, but never knew who the artist was. I had actually heard of him as Ray Fong and only knew of him as more of a graphic artist- I had seen some of o\his work on buildings (graffiti type work) and one shirts. Dan Barney talked about him ART226. He talked about how he was very much against the institution, but becaause of his popularity and his artistic point of view that the institution adopted him whether he wanted it or not. His wife, Margaret Kilgallen, was also an artist. She died of cancer in 2001. Her work was also very graphic and anti-establishment. Even though Barry doesn't like the institution, he found that it was as voice for his work. He still does graffiti on the streets, but his work tends to get stolen or scavenged so he doesn't do much outside of museums anymore. I think he still tends to poke fun or mock the institution, though.

Lu Cong is a portrait artist. I'd describe his work as ethereal and unsettling. It's something in the eyes. I would also describe them as romantic and haunting. His portraits somehow seem to capture a secret or disturbing past in the eyes of the subjects. They also seem to remind me of a ghost. I also noticed that most of his work is of girls, young girls - they seem to me to be around 16 or 17 years old. When I googled images, most of the work was of the face and matched the description given above, but if you visit his personal web page, the work is very different. It's line drawings that are gestural and seem a bit more narrative in nature and there are many nude studies. Although I think his use of line is brilliant, I don't like that most of the drawings are nudes of young girls. Some seem to be at the beginning of puberty and I'm disturbed to think of him drawing girls at this age - something seems off about that to me. That aside, his work is meticulous. I...

I'm thoroughly and utterly creeped out by Elly Strik's work. She is a dutch artist that lives and works in Brussels. I couldn't find much about her in English, but from what I could find it seems as though her artwork is very large in scale, made on fairly transparent paper - that she has displayed in front of light, and that she uses muted tones and her own features as the form for her figures. Her work seems to have a macabre undertone and I wish I could find more information on it.

Self Portrait, 1996 George Tooker was talented from a young age and was privileged enough to be able to start taking art lessons from a famous artist,  Malcolm Fraser, at the age of 7. He was born on Long Island in 1920. Twenty two years later he had graduated from Harvard with a graduate degree in English literature. His studies into the renaissance and medieval painting seems to have deeply influenced his artwork. He served for a short period of time in the Marines and when he came home after an injury, he delved back into the world of art, meeting many people who would be influential in the path of the rest of his life. Particularly, Jared and Margaret French and Paul Cadmus who mentored him and helped him to find his style that he was known for, which can be termed as magic realism (he never really liked this term). He had other friends who encouraged him to travel. He spent 6 months traveling Europe, visiting museums, historical sites, and churches. Once again, these frie...

Frida Kahlo's given name is Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (I included that because I think it's super awesome). She was born  July 6, 1907 and died at the young age of 47 on July 13, 1954. She is obviously known as an icon and often painted her own portrait and the portraits of others. She worked in a style that I'm very interested in exploring, folk art. I would love to explore what folk art works with my own heritage and how I can incorporate it into my work. I like the term magical realist for her work. She often painted real life or people surrounded by made up imagery. Her dad was German and her mother was Native American and European decent. She married a muralist, Diego Rivera and during a time where they traveled for his comissions, she found her own way as an artist. She became well-known in America, Mexico, and Europe. Kahlo had a hard childhood, she had polio that effected her health for the rest of her life, had a hard time in school, was bullied,...

Paul Fenniak's work is a fresh take on drawing the human form. His paintings are definitely based on the figure, but they seem to be telling a story about real life. He isn't afraid of portraying what might normally seem like an uncomfortable situation or a private moment. He paints these scenes in a way that makes them seem strangely beautiful and intimate. He was born in Toronto, Canada in 1965, has an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, has won many awards and been shown in prominent Canadian museums.

Study - East Village Looking East - July 4, 2016 , 2016 Acrylic and cut paper on canvas 60 × 36 in Hope Gangloff lives in the East Village in New York City. She is married to a painter, Benjamin Degen - whose work I really like. He also draws the figure, but his don't seem to be portraiture like his wife's work. Hope's studio is in Queens, she loves her studio. I think that is such an important aspect of being an artist, having a space that inspires you. Having a studio space that makes her happy to go to work seems to allow her to create amazing work. She tends to do portraits of people she knows well, people that she loves. An article a read says that she tends to paint the same people over and over- like her close friends or her husband. I really enjoy when artist do multiple iterations of specifics works, in this case she paints people over and over again, another reason why her portraits are so successful. Her colors are super vibrant and her palettes are ...

Euan Uglow, a british painter, born in 1932 and died in 2000, is mostly know for his nudes. His use of color is breathtaking. The skin tones and subtly of light and dark show his skill and set him apart. Although some of his nudes are, in my opinion, overtly sexual, I do really appreciate his attention to detail, as the proportions are amazing in his figure drawings and paintings. He would spend long periods of time on each painting, making sure every detail was to his exact standards. Another identifying aspect to his work is the use of planes. There are many geometric shapes, lines, planes, and marks in his paintings. Many of them are not taken out after the desired measurements were realized. They are probably the single most apparent technique on his drawings and paintings that make them easily recognizable as his work. They make his work almost seem sculptural to me.