Skip to main content

Marcel Dzama





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 where these interesting and frightening stories and scenes come from. 




Comments

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...

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...

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...