Category: Artists

Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in 1942 from a long line of Polish peasant farmers; she and her family lived in Germany where her father was drafted to farm for the Germans during World War II.  After the war, they immigrated to the United States and settled in a small town in Connecticuter and began a very different and new life.  She never learned what an artist was until she came to America, but it seems she was predisposed to be an artist.  After earning her Master of Fine Arts at Columbia, Ursula worked for a while in steel but found it too masculine, saying, “I couldn’t put tenderness or soft sweetness into it.”  One day the artist Michael Mulhearn brought her some cedar, and that was it, she could speak through the cedar charging it with emotional forces in a way she could not with the steel.    

Ursula says, “Sculpture gives a greater sense of reality. That’s a ridiculous word to use, but they have a greater substance. You can grab a sculpture. You can’t grab a painting. There’s something about things that really exist in this world, which seems different to me than ideas that float.”   Her sculptures are personal, many times referring to them in as feminine, calling them “she” or “princess.” Yet she does not see them as female, “I don’t think of them as female figures,” she says. “I just think of them as ‘shes.’”

I find her work visually stunning with the way that she joins human-made and nature.  Most of her works are massive sculptures that resemble things from her heritage such as bowls, tools, and walls from the cabin she lived in.  Her works may be abstract at its core, but they follow a flow of nature in their beauty and grace.  She sees her work as responsive to eastern European peasant traditions, in form, process, and meaning all coming from her background of where she came from.  Although she works primarily in wood and has pushed the limits of this material, she uses wood as well to cast bronze and resin.  She experiments with paper, lead, animal intestines, and other materials both hard and soft as well, she is fascinated with the expressive possibility of materials. 

The first time Ursula combined bronze and cedar is in her piece, Luba.  Just as this piece does most of Ursula’s sculptures retain a sense if human scale, one can see the graceful member flowing down from the main body; Ursula has said that it is intended to resemble the arm of a mother cradling a baby.  This lower portion of the arm is made of bronze with rest being cedar, she has taken graphite and rubbed it into areas the emphasize the shadow and depths of the cirucular saw’s cuts.

For Ursula von Rydingsvard, Making Art Is a Way to Survive

Ursula von Rydingsvard home page

Mika Tajima was born in 1975 in Los Angeles, California. And she lives in New York ,and she talks about political,social and economic points of reference as her inspiration. Some of the things that she enjoys doing and does as a job too are sculpture, painting, installation and performance. When she had moved into a new studio about eight years ago it was still preoccupied by someone else. But over time it became her space. She has a special interest in mechanics of production and the mental and physical transformations that molds as she places it on the human body.

And that is one of many pieces that she has turned into a sculpture. I think that her sculpture work is amazing. She does a lot more than sculptures though, and I think that is amazing. She has entered some of her work in art shows. Some of her work overlaps ,and that is cool because then there is not just one thing that is there but multiple things. She has some horizontal pieces that move vertically. She also does plastic and fabric. She wanted to test some of the different things out environmentally. She works at a fabric workshop with the staff.

She says that a portrait is a frozen image of a particular time. And some of her pieces are a mute image of a passing moment. Sometimes she likes to do abstract art. There are a lot of people moving as well. The subject is pointing back to itself and what is perspective drawing. You have to have measurements and the right tools to make things for a sculpcher, but you have to make a gesture for it first. “I become a dance performance” is the abstract one where she is making beautiful work but making them an unusual color. She paints it, and it is like a cubic form, a cube form, and a sculpture all in one. The body is being controlled by the body movement. And you can make a sculpture pretty much out of anything. She has a lot of people come in and help her with posing in different ways so she can take a picture and she begins to sculpt it out. She has different areas where she works at to make different things. And she is loving art more and more. She is figuring out more things out with art, and she is trying out new ideas that she has now discovered that she could do.

So this first piece is like a dress, but she made it out of wood and put some bolts into it. I love the design to it and how she put the bolts in it to make it stand out a little. And she put it onto a nice stand.The next piece is like smoke. She likes the idea of it so she started playing around with it. I like this piece because I like how it looks fire in away, but it is purple and white. I love the whole idea of it.

The next piece is like a mirror with all kinds of designs in it. I like this piece because I think it looks like gears, and it is cool, and it makes you want to look all over it. The next piece is an very good texture stripe piece it took her 3 days to make. When I first saw it i thought it was the United States Flag. I like this piece because I had to take time to figure out what it was.

The next piece is a painting of some kind of space with two lines in it. I like this piece because I feel like it is taking you to another world. And because of the colors two. The next piece she calls the “Furniture Art.” But it looks like the sky. I like this piece because of the pink turning into a peachy color, and in the middle it is blue then back to a pink turning into a peachy color.

The last piece is another smoke one that she painted. The smoke is formed in the shape of a human, and towards the top of the head she made the smoke flair out to make it look like fire.I like this piece because it is different and original in a smoky way. I enjoyed looking at Mika Tajima, and I had a lot of fun with this artist.

Richard Serra                                                By Sue Hatcher

Richard Serra is considered by many to be the most important sculptor of the post-war period.  Serra has a fascination with the possibility of curves. He has a huge mathematical imagination (Enright, 2017).  Serra uses his life experiences and mathematical ingenuity to create some of the most interesting architectural sculptures around the world.  He uses his thoughts on space and time to create sculptures on a grand scale.

He became interested in metal design in his youth while working with his father at the steel mills and shipyards on the west coast.  One day his father took him to watch a ship launching. It was a powerful moment for him and it still shows up in his dreams. It started him thinking in terms of size and space and what that means.   He uses steal to organize space. Richard took sculpture off the pedestal and made you think of sculpture more in terms of time and space. It changed the way we think of sculpture forever.

His pieces are massive, he wants you to not only see them but to experience them by walking around and through them.   The idea of dealing with space has been central to his entire career. The rhythm of the body through space. He considers space to be the material as he attempts to use sculptural form to make space.   Space is the subject steal is the vehicle. He uses the steal to organize space, steal holds the space. Richard creates slowly and on an enormous scale, his work resembles architecture. He creates by shaping and stretching steel like rubber.   When you see one of his works it is hard to articulate with words how you view it because you are having a sensory experience and language is a transcription, not the event you are experiencing (Enright, 2017) (The Weight of History)                                               

Richard took art at Berkley, but he felt as though he was not learning anything.  So, he started playing football, till he broke his back. He ended up going to California and a new direction in the English department.  He was also reintroduced to art. This time he was taken under the wings of Rico Labrum and Howard Warshaw who were experienced draughtsmen who were working on a mural in the library in downtown Santa Barbara.  Dedicated vision and commitment that will make him an artist whose work will last long after he is gone (Enright, 2017) (The Weight of History)

When I started this project, I had no appreciation for this kind of art sculpture.  But as I read and listened to Richard talk about, and describe how and why he does his work  I found as I started to understand the meaning I starting to like this kind of art, and to think more about what art means to me and what art means, in general, I have a  broader outlook on art I will think more kindly on art I don’t understand right away.

Enright, Robert. “The WEIGHT of HISTORY: Richard Serra’s Sculpture and Drawings.” Border Crossings, vol. 36, no. 4, Dec. 2017, pp. 26–43. EBSCOhost, cmsmir.clevelandstatecc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=127167579&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Rose, C. (2001). Charlie Rose Special Edition: Richard Serra.  https://charlierose.com/videos/18060

                                    These are a few of his pieces.

Left:“One Ton Prop” (House of Cards), 1969 – Four Lead Plates – (c) 2007 Richard Serra,

Photo: Peter Moore

Right:”To Lift”, 1967 – Vulcanized Rubber – (c) Richard Serra 2007, Photo: Peter Moore

Snake (1994-97)                                                     Torqued 1996 Art foundation

                                                      The Brooklyn Rail

Maya Lin, American architect, artist and designer, was born on October 5, 1959 in Athens, Ohio. Maya comes from a small lineage of artists of all sorts. Her father, Henry Lin, was a ceramist and former dean of Ohio University College of Fine Arts. Her mother, was a literature professor at Ohio University and is a poet. Maya’s mother is also the niece of Lin Huiyin, who is an American educated poet and artist and is also said to be the first female architect in modern China. Maya attended Yale University to earn her Bachelor of Arts (1981) and Master of Architect (1986) degrees. While an undergraduate at Yale University, Maya submitted a design for the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C, to which her entry was picked. The design she laid out was an angled wall with one end pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and one end at the Washington Memorial. Her design was to give an “open wound” in the earth to represent the gravity of fallen soldiers during the war. Although it was picked, she had received a bunch of controversial backlash because the design was not the “standard” memorial wall. Today, the wall holds 58,318 names of fallen soldiers.

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After Maya graduated Yale, she designed numerous peojects, some of which include the Civil Rights Memorial (1989) in Montgomery, Alabama and the “Wave Field” installation at the University of Michigan (1995).

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In 2015, Lin finishes and opens her installation of “Folding The Chesapeake” in the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum. The art is a large scale replica of the Chesapeake Bay but it is folding and curved along the walls of the room. The installation is made of 54,000 industrial fiberglass marbles to create the water-like effect. She got this idea from opening a box of marbles her dad had brought home when she was 8, saying the marbles looked like opening a box of water.

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Lari Pittman was born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California. He has a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is inspired by commercial advertising, surrealism, gestural abstraction, Victorian silhouettes , folk art, and various traditions. He works are known for being far from minimalistic as every area of his canvases are full with details and meaning. He uses many symbols and decorative motifs to get those meanings across. The ideas he is trying to convey range of social and issues like aspects of commercialism and even aspects of tradition like crafts. In an interview with Art 21 the interviewer says his work manages to “strike a funny balance between gore and beauty” to which he responds, “If you have a bittersweet cultural context, it allows you to entertain the possibility of the gorgeousness of personal suffering. You can actually fetishize it and make it beautiful. Suffering and beauty are not antithetical but actually complementary. It isn’t about morbidity. It’s actually a cultural mindset that is predisposed to aestheticizing even pain and suffering. It’s not seen as decadent. It’s just about a duality of things.”

He makes using paint, and he also creates prints. In his early works, he used silhouettes of people to convey what he wanted more directly it was like using a social code so his work was more declarative. He is very interested in this code which comes through in his use of symbols and the silhouettes. One of his works that employ the use of silhouettes is This Landscape, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless which he made in 1989. His more recent works include a Six illustrated books, each opening to more than four feet in width called Mood Books. They have 65 paintings total by Pittman within them which make various social commentary and reference real and made up mythologies. Major ideas and themes in his work include love, violence, mortality. He also focuses on narratives like rich heterogeneity of American society, the artist’s Colombian heritage, and the distorting effects of hyper-capitalism on everyday life.

I found his work, The Dining Room, to be interesting as it tackles the idea of spaces having a male or a polymorphous identity. He focused on residential spaces as he wanted to depict residential spaces in the paintings with as much power as public spaces that had, for long felt predominantly male in a sense, like banking world or law. I found that it was an interesting concept that even buildings have this assumed power to them.

In the Art 21 video interview Lari Pittman says, “As a male, it’s about a type of focus and social comportment that usually isn’t expected of a male. I guess there’s a dutifulness [in craft] that maybe has historically been referenced or attributed to females. So I guess I’ve always seen my devotion to craft as a type of protest.” The idea that crafts are for women is a stereotype that bothers me whether it’s more along the lines of trying to force women to fall into craft media or pressuring a man away who wants use crafts in his work. The entire idea that gender can influence media someone uses intrigues me. At one point art itself was seen as for men, and art had been stereotyped again in a way. Hearing him talk about that is just one reason why I wanted to talk about him. There are aspects of what he says here that I am tackling in some of my own work.

https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/lari-pittman-craft-short/

Works Cited

The Broad, www.thebroad.org/art/lari-pittman.

UCLA Arts: School of the Arts and Architecture, www.arts.ucla.edu/single/lari-pittman-mood-books-at-the-huntington/.

“Craft, Lari Pittman.” Art21, art21.org/watch/extended-play/lari-pittman-craft-short/.

“Culture and Aesthetic Sensibility.” Art21, art21.org/read/lari-pittman-culture-and-aesthetic-sensibility/.

“Lari Pittman.” Art21, art21.org/artist/lari-pittman/.“Lari Pittman.” Regen Projects, www.regenprojects.com/artists/lari-pittman/biography.

Camille Rose Garcia born on November 18, 1970, in Los Angeles, California. She’s a painter, illustrator, and toy maker. She is known for Gothic, “creepy” cartoon style.

She was the daughter of a Mexican activist filmmaker father and a muralist/painter mother. Her parents divorced when she was at you age so she was raised with her mom and sister. She stared to be an apprentice with her mother working on murals at the age of fourteen while growing up in the generic suburbs of Orange County, visiting Disneyland and going to punk shows with the other disenchanted youth of that era. Camille’s layered, broken narrative paintings of wasteland fairy tales are influenced by William Burroughs’ cut-up writings and surrealist film, as well as vintage Disney and Fleischer cartoons as well as Walt Disney and Philip K. Dick.

She got her Master Degree of Fine Arts at University at Davis in 1994 and her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 1992. After six years of school left her feeling disillusioned and bitter as a result she moved to Huntington Beach, California to form a band called The Real Minx. She has illustrated two classic children books and is currently working on a third one by illustrating and writing the third one unlike the other two just illustrating them. She has also published three actual books.

Some of her collections are in art galleries such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Resnick Collection, and the San Jose Museum of Art. She has been featured internationally and in numerous magazines such as Juxtapoz, Rolling Stone, Flaunt, BLAB! and Modern Painters. On November 2, 2013 she was a part of a four women show in Los Angles, California called “Black Moon”.

I really love Camille’s artwork it really inspires me and by just looking at her work she has done over the years. I have actually enjoyed reading the books she has illustrated so far that is. They make the stories have a more creepy vibe to me and I love it. I hope others can find and enjoy Camille’s artwork as much as me.

Rackstraw Downes was born in England in 1939. Known for his realistic oil paintings made of a variety of different landscapes and scenes, Rackstraw was invited to introduce himself and his art to the Art21 website, which is where I found him. Rackstraw Downes always makes his art with the old school easel in the spot he likes best. He never takes pictures to use as a later reference. Nothing can stand in this mans way, not even the limitation of his easel. If he feels the piece needs to be larger, he will staple strips to the sides of his canvas to make it bigger. One of the reasons he seems to enjoy painting landscapes so much is because he loves to capture the change in the world and how the animals have been challenged to adapt to the change humans have made. Because of the oil paint and his skill, Rackstraw is able to make landscape pieces that look so realistic, it can barely be distinguished from a photograph.

What is seen above isn’t a photograph. It is one of the many pieces Rackstraw has made with his magical oil paint. Rackstraw has a unique way of seeing the terrain around him. With his body still, he sometimes shifts his eyes left and right. This gives off an almost warped look to his art. It adds almost a form of liveliness to his piece that makes you feel almost as if you are there at the spot, and able to see the terrain with your own eyes. It doesn’t look flat and plain.

I’ve never held much of an interest for creating realistic art. However, I often time do find myself dumbfounded by some of the realistic pieces I find. It is just incredible how people are capable of taking the information created by sight, processing it in their minds, and replicating it almost perfectly on a canvas using only that of simple paint and brush. Yet, Rackstraw has taken this already incredible concept, and has taken it to a new level. He is able to almost warp the terrain to make it seem like the viewer is in that exact spot Rackstraw was in, and is able to look around for themselves. It is almost an illusion that tricks the viewers brain into thinking they are seeing something from another persons eyes. I find that concept absolutely mind boggling.

Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany.  Most of her work consists of brightly painted acrylic structures/paintings. In her work, Katharina hopes to grab the attention of the audience through the color and shape rather than the meaning or idea itself. She wants the audience to become almost engulfed and overwhelmed by the color to the point of having their own ideas and their own thoughts. To have the audience, rather than try to guess what the artist is trying to say, create their own meaning to the piece to help them relate to it and value it.

The piece above offers a bit of an idea of what Katharina mainly produces. Taking 3D or 2D objects or spaces, and just completely covering it in intense bright and contrasting color.

In this piece, Katharina smothers a book in primarily yellow acrylic before heavily painting it with blue, green, and orange acrylic paints. As explained earlier, she takes an object and completely covers it with bright, loud colors completely.

The pieces above are 4 of many disk like circles she has created. Katharina seems to focus a lot on the shape of circles. I’ve noticed she has created a lot of pieces that consist of nothing but spheres and 2D circles like the ones above on canvases to buttons to disks that she hangs on the wall. I personally really like the small and simple pieces above.

The pieces above really define the kind of artist she is. To take a landscape or an object and completely envelope it with bright colors. I absolutely love color in my work, I’ve never been a huge fan of using graphite or ink for any of my pieces. I think the main reason why she caught my eye is because I almost felt a sense of excitement when I saw all these colors in one place. It gave me a sense of encouragement to get on my computer and start drawing again. I feel like color has a much stronger impact on a persons feelings about a piece. If you were to give somebody a picture of a rainbow in black and white, it would have the power to almost disappoint the person. Color has the ability to bring emotions, and I think Katharine is trying to just that with all of her pieces. She is trying to provoke emotions within her viewers.