painter – Cleveland State Art

Rackstraw Downes – Emily Gelinas-Darrall – Drawing 1

Rackstraw Downes is a British oil painter who was born in Kent, England in the year 1939. He gained his BA from Cambridge University in 1961 and his BFA and MFA shortly after from Yale University in 1964. He’s known as a realist painter but doesn’t identify as one, because he believes that the way we view things is culturally taught to us. He says that, “There is no solution to the representation of the world,” meaning that each of us has the power to see our surroundings in a way no one else can, and no one way is correct.

Snug Harbor, Metal Duct Work in G Attic
part 2 of a 4-part painting
2001

Although many of his paintings are also landscapes, he also doesn’t see himself as a landscape artist. Downes says that, “I don’t think of myself as being a landscape painter. I like to say that I paint my environment, my surroundings.”

Water-Flow Monitoring Installations on the Rio Grande Near Presidio, TX
part 2 of a 5-part painting
2002–03

The surroundings he chooses to paint are very diverse areas ranging from the city streets of New York to the Maine countryside. When he paints, he never resorts to using photography. He sets up his easel in his chosen location and simply paints what he sees.

His art focuses on extreme detail and clarity of form. I was drawn to this artist because I love how clean and intricate his work is. I admire how he expresses his view of the world and how he puts a lot of thought and time into each piece he creates. “I go over that same little shadow over and over again until I get that shape. It has a character.”

Henry Hudson Bridge Substructure, P.M.
2006

Downes also usually works in series, examining one scene from multiple angles over time. By doing this he expresses the changes in light and shadow as well as changes in his point of view. Downes truly appreciates his surroundings in an untraditional way by painting in a traditional fashion. Many people distort what they see when they create art and change it into something new, but Downes takes the world exactly as it is and presents it in a very honest and sincere way. It’s almost as if he becomes a translator for his surroundings, communicating the shapes that he sees into art that we can see too.

He enjoys painting vast and empty spaces,things that people wouldn’t typically be interested in depicting in art. “It looks empty, but I see fullness there,” He explains, “and I’d like you to see that fullness too in my painting.”

4 Spots along a Razor-Wire Fence, August–November (ASPOTSPRIE)
part 3 of a 4-part painting
1999

I also like how he presents perspective. His paintings appear to bend along the shape of his viewpoint, following the curve of the eye as he perceives the area around him. He doesn’t follow the set rules for applying perspective in a painting but what he does in his art just feels right. It leaves the viewer with the impression that the space is warping around them. He says that, “Perspective is an attempt to standardize the metaphor of the depiction of space.”

The Pulaski Skyway Crossing the Hackensack River
2007

His works have been featured in famous museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC as well as many others.

Jamian Juliano-Villani-Rachel Cobb-Drawing I

Jamian Juliano-Villani is a thirty-one year old painter from Newark, New Jersey. Now living in New York, she draws inspiration from a wide variety of subjects ranging from things like art history to fashion. Her parents were both commercial painters, so growing up, Jamian spent quite a lot of time in their silk-screening factory and learning about graphic design. She later graduated from Rutgers University in 2013. Jamian had her very first solo art show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2015.

She typically works with acrylic paint and uses airbrush techniques to create her eye-catching, colorful masterpieces. Approaching her work with a sense of humor and light heartedness, Jamian compares her art to jokes. She claims that the paintings are tricky and need to be made weirder or dumber or smarter. “You just paint a snowman in the desert… Thats it? Really? Like, there’s no other step, you know? It’s like some stupid one-liner.” As a notorious chain smoker and drinker, she says her body is just a vessel. She believes she should do and experience things now while she has the energy. This just adds to her unique character.

*The Prophecy*, 2016
Acrylic on canvas
48 × 40

In her teenage years, young Jamian Juliano-Villani remembers watching a documentary called Painters Painting (1973), which featured artist such as Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. She was so inspired that she decided to movie to New York City. She now has a studio in Ridgewood, queens. Her montra for advancing in her art? “You’re only as good as your last painting.”

Roommate Trouble, 2013
acrylic on canvas
36 x 40.5 inches

After her very first solo exhibition, Me, Myself and Jah, in 2013 at Rawson Projects, she did an interview with Johnathan Griffin. Featured on ARTnews is a quote of hers about her own work. She says, “My paintings are meant to function like TV, in a way. The viewer is supposed to become passive. Instead of alluding or whispering, like a lot of art does, this is art that tells you what’s up. It kind of does the work for you, like TV does.”^[

The Breakfast From Hell 2014
acrylic on canvas
20.00 x 16.00 in

She has recently had an art show in early 2018 called Ten Pound Hand that earned grand reviews such as this one from critic Zoë Lescaze, “In Gone with the Wind (all works 2018), a cartoon fish gluts itself on Coca-Cola while a helpless-looking firefighter floats above burning California. October depicts an ash-choked Pompeian infant blowing across an empty school hallway. The linoleum floor is littered with shattered glass, in an eerie evocation of recent school shootings. Together, these works convey a loss of control, of entropy overriding security, idealism, and best-case scenarios.”

Shut Up, The Painting, 2018
acrylic on canvas
40 x 48 inches

My personal favorite quote of hers is about deadlines in art. She states that “Stress assassinates creativity.”

Self Portrait in Greece, 2017
acrylic on canvas
48 x 48 inches

Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer

By Rachel Jorgensen

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt. She gained her MFA in painting at the Villa Arson EPIAR in Nice, France in 1989. Ghada now lives and works in New York where she continues to challenge the mind of society as well as the individuals that compose it with her thought provoking paintings, drawings, sculptures, and gardens. Ghada Amer’s art work is very intentionally feminine, seeking to empower woman in any way she can.

Intentionally feminine but not stereotypical, Ghada’s work is more honest than that. The artist attempts to portray women as they are, rather than how society expects them to be.

In her paintings Ghada uses mixed media such as acrylic paint, or gel, almost always accompanied by some type of embroidery. Again this is intentional on the artist’s part to convey a message about femininity to her audience.

“The history of art was written by men, in practice and in theory. Painting has a symbolic and dominant place inside this history, and in the twentieth century it became the major expression of masculinity, especially through abstraction. For me, the choice to be mainly a painter and to use the codes of abstract painting, as they have been defined historically, is not only an artistic challenge: its main meaning is occupying a territory that has been denied to women historically. I occupy this territory aesthetically and politically because I create materially abstract paintings, but I integrate in this male field a feminine universe: that of sewing and embroidery.” -Ghada Amer.

Often used to explore her own sexuality, Ghada creates many paintings and other art work demonstrating strong erotic themes. Some are more obvious than others, some are left for a more keen observer to find in the detail of the work.

In the above painting you see that Ghada has included well known Disney princesses, a theme found in many of her works. She creates a contrast between child and adulthood and at the same time shines light on the figures that young girls are modeling themselves after and what message the princesses convey to developing girls and boys.

As you can see the princesses resemble those in a coloring book, scribbled through by a young child. In the background you see these finely crafted embroidered figures of a nude woman. The artist did not specify what she meant by this but one interpretation that comes to mind is again an exploration of femininity and sexuality.

Other times Ghada creates this contrast without the use of princesses, merely by adding children to the background of an extremely erotic image of a nude woman.

These drawings and prints are used by Ghada, again to explore her own sexuality, but also to really emphasize that woman have it in themselves to explore their own bodies and their own sense of womanhood and sexuality. Ghada wants to empower woman and that is clear in her work.

Aside from her starkly feminine work in her drawings and paintings, Ghada also explores themes of love, war, and peace in her highly critical gardens.

The one I am highlighting is Ghada’s Peace Garden.

Peace Garden – Miami Botanical Garden, 2002 – Miami, Florida USA

“Peace Garden consists of the universal peace symbol, first designed as a symbol for the Ban the Bomb movement in the 1950s, made of carnivorous plants. The garden is also part of a performance in which attendants serve live worms and crickets to visitors who in turn feed them to the plants. The use of carnivorous plants to construct a peace sign represents the shift in attitude of an earlier generation that once strongly promoted and used the peace symbol but then, over time, came to take causes for peace much less seriously.”

Overall it is clear that Ghada owns a passion for her work and her message. Some artists don’t like to be political, they make art for different reasons.. Ghada makes art for herself, she creates a message for others. Important, relevant messages that need to be heard as they address problems that people have faced both historically and in today’s modern world.

References:

http://www.ghadaamer.com/ghada/Ghada_Amer.html

http://flavorwire.com/423765/24-powerful-works-by-contemporary-women-artists-you-should-know/3

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur Texas October 22, 1925. He is an American painter and graphic artist, closely following the pop art movement. He is fairly well known, mostly for his “Combines” in the 1950s. He used different materials and objects and arranged them in different combinations.

Rauschenberg shared the label “Neo Dadaist,” with the painter Jasper Johns. Neo Dadaist means that the artist puts more emphasis on the importance of the art produced rather than on the concept generating the work. It uses modern materials, popular imagery, and odd contrast.

From around 1952 to 1953, Robert traveled through Europe and North Africa with his fellow artist, friend, and partner Cy Twombly. When they went to Morocco he made collages out of trash and anything he could salvage. He then took them to Italy and put them into galleries. He ended up selling alot of them and the ones he didn’t he threw into the river! Using trash as art is a weird concept, he claimed he “wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn’t a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing.”

He has a famous piece of work involving a stuffed goat connected to a tire, as shown below, called “Monogram”:

Rauschenberg created the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 1990 to promote awareness of the causes he cared about, like world peace and the environment. He also set up Change, Inc., to award one-time grants of up to $1,000 to visual artists based on financial need.

René François Ghislain Magritte

René Magritte was a Belgian surrealist painter. He was born in Lessines, Belgium on November 21,1898. He was raised in a middle-class family and began taking drawing lessons at a young age. He started painting soon after his mother was found drowned in the River Sambre, the result of suicide. His early paintings are done in the style of Impressionism.

Magritte studied for two years at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. After this, his paintings became heavily influenced by Futurism, and most of his paintings were female nudes.

At the age of 24 Magritte married Georgette Berger whom he had known since childhood. Magritte worked many odd jobs, including working as a draughtsman and designing advertisements, until he was able to paint full-time in 1926. At this time Magritte created his first piece of surrealist artwork called The Lost Jockey.

Magritte had his first exhibition in 1927 in Brussels. After the exhibition he was subjected to harsh criticism and moved to Paris as a result of this. At this time Magritte went back to working making advertisements. Magritte remained in Brussels at the time of World War II. In order to survive during this time, he made fraudulent copies of artwork by Picasso, Braque, and Chirico. He also made fraudulent banknotes. In order to deal with the harshness of living in Brussels during the war, Magritte briefly adopted a new style of painting known as the “Renoir Period.” This style of painting was more bright and flowery than what was common for Magritte. After the war, he was able to go back to his real passion, Surrealism.

In 1955 he painted The Promenades of Euclid. At first the painting appears to be a window overlooking a castle. When you look closely though, you can see that the castle is actually a painting sitting on an easel.

Magritte wanted his artwork to be an experience. Another set of interesting pieces by Magritte are The Lovers. Legend says that after his mother was found drowned in the Sambre River Magritte witnessed her body, with her face wrapped in a sheet. This proved to be a very tramautic experience for him, understandably. Some think that this served as inspiration for these pieces of artwork.

Magritte’s artwork has been displayed many times in the United States. It has been included in several premiere exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While many may be unable to understand the meaning behind Magritte’s artwork, that seems to be okay with him. He explains his artwork in this quote, ” I paint visible images that conceal nothing; they evoke mystery, and indeed, when one sees my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question. ‘What does it mean?’ It does not mean anything because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.”

Magritte painted The Son of Man three years before his death. The painting depicts a man in a hat standing with an apple covering his face. One possible explanation of this is that it is a subtle nod towards Adam eating the forbidden fruit in the first chapter of the Bible.

After suffering from Pancreatic cancer for a few years, Magritte died in 1967 and he was buried in Brussels. Magritte was a wonderful surreal artist who has had a large influence on many artists to this day. Although the meaning behind his paintings is not always evident, and possibly even nonexistent, his artwork is very influential.

by Alex Angel