Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese woman who made her title as an avant-garde artist, raised in Matsumoto before moving to New York in 1958, as recommended by her therapist who said her dysfunctional family would swallow her whole. Kusama was a diamond in the rough, having at first had to use scraps she found and mud sacks to craft her art after her mom threw out all of her supplies. Her mother condemned Kusama’s passion for art which only fueled her further. Her most popular works that gained traction delve into psychedelic and what she calls, a ‘self obliteration’. Many if not all of her works are hallucinatory projections and this notably comes in the form of polka dots — her trademark.
Infinity Mirrored Room – Brilliance of the Souls by Yayoi Kusuma Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Room, 2013
Yayoi Kusama, Transmigration , 2011
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Room, 2013
“These rooms reflect all of her elements: her obsessions, her accumulations, her infinite repetitions. And it’s all very bodily and immersive,” Yoshitake said.
But there was a time before she adapted to the new scene. Her works when she was still a fresh and new, innovative artist had much to do with innate promiscuity and elemental nudity. Kusama abhorred sex, lost and disoriented with the concept of skinship and intimacy, stemming from childhood trauma. This trauma translated into her early works, many of which that puts multitudes of phallic objects on display to more performative pieces of nude men and women alike.
A nude happening and fashion show at Kusama’s Studio, New York, 1968
”I don’t know how long I’m going to survive even after I die; there is a future generation that is following in my footsteps,” she said, sitting in the bright open space that is her new gallery in central Tokyo. “I would be highly honored if people would like to look at my work and be moved by my work.”
Vija Celmins is a Lativian-American who has been engaged in art since she was a child. She has a career spanning over fifty years in Los Angeles and now New York, and continues to create amazing works of art to this day. She is featured in Manhattan at the Met Breuer. Starting her career in the 1960s, she drew and painted everything from her stove burner and lamps to the waves from her beach walks.
Vija, in an interview, commented on her works made from using real life and newspaper clippings, saying about her art:
“This is an invented thing. You know that it’s not like a copy of nature, or copy of photograph. It’s an invented thing you have in front of you” (Vija, Art21 32:49).
She has been inspired to make art concerning space in much of her work after the 1960s space race and the moon landing in 1969.
Night Sky #18 1998 Vija Celmins born 1938 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/AL00178
Vija also uses paints and sculpture to bring her art alive. In her work “To Fix The Image In Memory”, she made bronze casts of eleven different rocks and than painted the casts to resemble the real rocks as much as possible. In the work, the rocks and casts are placed together and the viewer is challenged to tell the real life and painted ones apart. Vija saw this as a way
“…to create a challenge for your eyes. I wanted your eyes to open wider ” (Celmins).
Vija emphasizes the fact that the canvases are part of her work and she spends a good amount of time preparing and “building” them.
“…I often now talk about building a painting instead of painting a painting,” (Vija, Art21 31:14).
she commented when explaining her process of sanding, applying paint and then sanding again as she adds more layers to her work and rethinks the work as a whole.
The thoughtfulness and humility that she speaks with when explaining her work is clearly seen in the works of art themselves. Though many of them are black and white images, the works come to life and feel as if they are moving and breathing.
Ocean 1975 Vija Celmins born 1938 Purchased with assistance from the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of the Judith Rothschild Foundation 1999 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P78336
Her work is truly inspiring and thought-provoking in a simple and calm manner.
“…Once your life is too stable, your creative dies.”
-Yoshitaka Amano
Post by Diego Manalili
Yoshitaka Amano has a wide variety of experiences as a character designer, fine art painter, Japanese artist, theater and scenic designer, costume designer, and animator. Notable for his contributions towards the Japanese animation industry, video games, graphic novels, and the fine arts of painting. His art style revolves around western comic books, Art Noveau, and Japanese woodblock prints according to his work website, “yoshitakaamano.com”.
AMANO’S BIOGRAPHY
Yoshitaka Amano was born on March 26, 1952, and somewhere near Shizuoka, Japan. At the age of fifteen, he moved to a company dormitory to work at Tatsunoko Productions, an animation studio. He created character designs for animation shows such as Gatchaman, Hutch the Honeybee, and Cashaan: Robot Hunter.
He left Tatsunoko Productions at the age of thirty in order to work on more independent projects. When he left the studio, his employers and co-workers were skeptical about his departure, because he was throwing away his financial stability. However, in response to this, he said,”…But once your life is too stable, your creative dies”.
AMANO’S WORKS
Fine Arts
Illustrations
Fine Arts
Illustrations
Character Design
Costume Design & Fashion
Animation
Deva-Loka
Warning: sexual nudity
AMANO’S ART STYLE
I have previously mentioned his art style had an influence from western comic books, Art Noveau, and Japanese woodblock print.
Art Noveau
Japanese Woodblock Print ukiyo-e
Western Comic Books
Art Noveau is an art style that focuses on more of a decorative and fine art aspect within designs.
Japanese Wood Block Prints utilized flat coloring and heavy lines.
Amano’s art style heavily focuses on a variety of fantasy and sci-fi as it can be seen in his works. In 2008 at an art gallery, Gallerie Michael Jansen in Berlin, Germany, Daniel Boese, a critic on the Artforum mentions how Amano was a “superflat concept”, not figuratively but litterally. Boese says Amano’s paintings had fused with “graphic design, pop culture, and the fine arts…”
Maryam Hoseini is an abstract artist on the rise. Her work consists of fluid imagery that exudes themes of discovery, identity, anxiety, and strength. Hoseini was born in Tehran, Iran in 1988. Her interest in art sparked at the age of 13, when she began taking an art class at school. Not only was she inspired by her teacher’s abilities, she was empowered by her teacher’s bravery to be such a strong woman in a place like Iran. Hoseini’s fascination in art grew as a teenager, as she quickly amassed hundreds of her own drawings. Her passion for art prompted her to major in Graphic Design at Sooreh Art University in Tehran. She earned her bachelors degree in 2012, which led her to move to the US to complete MFA programs from Bard College and the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She became a member of the Endjavi-Barbé Art Projects, a collective promoting Iranian contemporary artists, in 2013. She’s currently working out of a studio in Brooklyn.
As far as her art style goes, she primarily uses paint and pencil drawings to make pieces that represent her opinions of gender, sexuality, and politics. She often considers herself a drawer, not only because of her drawing roots, but because of her back and forth method of layering drawings and paintings.
Maryam Hoseini, Snake Charmers, 2013. Acrylic on cardboard. 51 x 41cm.
In her early artwork, Hoseini explored topics of humor and fear. Her love for dark humor stems from growing up watching comedy horror films from the 70s,80s, & 90s. While she was adopting macabre humor into her work, she was also dabbling in surrealism. She’s quoted saying, “The main idea of surrealism is what that attracts me the most. An attempt to create an idea beyond the reality that seems possible and actual.” She has successfully pushed beyond reality in her work, but recently she has been straying from surrealism, turning her focus towards abstractionism.
Maryam Hoseini, Black Milk, White Milk, 2013. Acrylic on Cardboard. 57 X 39 cm.
In an attempt to obscure the politics of identity, Hoseini began her shift in abstract art by cutting off the heads of her figures. Her older work was often driven by the presence of a face, so this shift marks a big change in her work style.
Maryam Hoseini, Princess and Princess in the Garden (Chapter 4), 2018, acrylic, ink and pencil on paper, mounted on panel, 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)Maryam Hoseini, Princess and Princess in the Garden (Chapter 7), 2018, acrylic, ink and pencil on paper, mounted on panel, 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
Hoseini developed her Princess and Princess in the Garden series of pieces by conjuring an imaginary environment where women performed acts of violation and pleasure. Her emphasis on the human body, specifically female figures, explores her ideas about identity, gender, and sexuality. To Hoseini, the female body can represent power, vulnerability, anxiety, love, and inspiration. Ultimately, she sees herself in most of her work. Her use of fragmented body parts represents her experiences in life, especially as a female immigrant. She describes her bodies as having anxiety, but she’s transferring the anxiety to power and courage throughout her paintings.
Currently Hoseini is intrigued by how the space around a painting affects the way we view it. Her recent endeavors have involved painting gallery walls to enhance and extend her art, while attracting the viewer’s full attention one piece at a time.
Tracey Emin is a famous British artist who is well known for her deeply emotional art that explores her traumas, shame, sexuality, love, and her childhood. As her art mostly is comprised of short highly emotional glimpses into her experience of her experience as a woman, many critics describe her works as “autobiographical and confessional”. The reoccurring themes of her work helped her gain the title of the “Enfant Terrible of the Young British Artists movement”. She explores these themes in a variety of different mediums such as sculpture, drawings, paintings, and, sewn appliqués, and neon signs. Many of these different mediums are used to explore different ideas, such as her neon signs often address her thoughts on love, while her paintings and drawings are primarily focused on her vulnerability though sexuality.
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995
In one of Emin’s arguably most well know works, titled “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995“, she lists from early childhood to the current year in which she had created the piece, everyone she had ever slept with, she included her family, her friends, and her sexual partners. She explained “Some I’d had a shag with in bed or against a wall some I had just slept with, like my grandma. I used to lay in her bed and hold her hand. We used to listen to the radio together and nod off to sleep. You don’t do that with someone you don’t love and don’t care about.” She used sewn appliqué pieces, that to some extent look almost childlike, possibly meaning to show that sleeping with someone used to mean something entirely different and innocent.
Mum & Dad 2017 Acrylic and pencil on canvasIt was all too Much 2018 Acrylic on canvas Longed For You NeonThe mother Bronze sculpture
In these selections from her exhibit, A Fortnight of Tears, Emin explores her pain from her traumatic childhood, rape, abortions, and lost love and other tragic themes of the female experience. For Emin, much of this exhibit was about addressing her shame, and conquering it, in an interview she stated “I’ve killed my shame, I’ve hung it on the walls.”
Her variety in mediums help the viewer to understand the different kinds of pain she felt from different experiences. In “Mum & Dad” and “It was all too Much” she uses line and color to show the mental damage of her childhood and sexual past. In both pieces we can see how Emin uses erratic brushstrokes to convey how the mental trauma has manifested in her life and how, but in “Mum & Dad” we also see one straight line in the center, that clearly represents the harsh division in her parents relationship. I believe she chose a similar medium for both of these paintings because she feels a similar type of primal pain, as opposed to the neon used in “longed for you” which seems to be more of a commentary on beautiful pain. In an interview she once said, “For me, aggression, sex and beauty go together. Much of my work has been about memory, for example, but memories of violence and pain. Nowadays if I make a drawing I’m trying to draw love, but love isn’t always gentle. Being an artist isn’t just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it’s some kind of communication, a message.”
Rackstraw downes was born on November 8, 1939 in Pembury, United Kingdom. Downes full birth name is actually Rodney Harry Rackstraw Downes. This British-born painter is known for his meticulous attention to detail and works for months at a time on any one single piece he produces, and does so through ‘plein-air’ sessions. Downes lived in the united kingdom, but became an exchange student at Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. He later returned to the United kingdom to attend the University of Cambridge and attended St. John’s College and received a Bachelor of arts in English literature. His final academic endeavor would be at Yale School of Art where he received his Master of Fine Arts in painting in 1964. Downes began his painting though abstraction, but would quickly abandon that theme for a realism one. In his studies Downes would become highly focused on the unusual man-altered environments.
En Plein Air is French for “outdoors”, and is the act of painting outdoors. In contrast to the studio setting of most mainstream artists, painting outdoor creates a “free flow” of the environment before you and is a practice where conventional studio rules do not apply or can be ignored.
Outdoor Passage Way at 15 Rivington,2016 Oil on canvas
Rackstraw rejects the idea of being labeled a landscape artist, but rather more of a painter who just paints his surroundings. He is well known for finding unusual or not highly favorable spots like cellphone towers, electrical stations, powerlines, and sewer drains. He also tends to choose landscapes that are strange in shape and contain formations or eve rday objects that are normally hidden away for cosmetic reasons. These setting he refers to as “Man-altered environments.”. Downes likes to stick to the old Dutch tradition of finishing all works on site; without the use of a camera.
Delancy at Suffolk, 2012 Oil on canvasBaseball Field in Red Hook Park From Camp Uno, No.4,2002 Oil on canvasNew York State Psychiatric Institute, 2015 Oil on LinenAt the Confluence of Two Ditches Bordering a Field With Four Radio Towers, 1995 Oil on canvasNew Plantings in Millennium Park, New Towers in the Distance, 2002 Oil on CanvasBelow the Hospital Complex at 168th Street, 2012 Oil on Canvas
Downes has a favorite quote by Picasso that says ” Some young people, artists, are older than those who have been dead for centuries”, and reflects back on his own work with how he, and many of us, have to seek out the art of the centuries past and learn from them. He goes on to speak about why it’s important to look back and study works of the old masters. He then refers to his troubles of trying to recreate steam coming from a factory warehouse, and refers back to J.M.W. Turner’s The Burning. Downes doesn’t wish to recreate the works of his favorite studied artists, but rather uses their works as a means to put together the puzzle pieces to create an original work based off of the techniques of those he has studied, but Downes rejects the conventional oil painting techniques, even of those he has studied and has his own way of putting his paint down and removing it. Downes spoke and said “I don’t just let it dry and paint over it again and again. I slap a glob down, and if i don’t like it, I take it off and slap a different one down”.
“I don’t have any sentimentality about those painters. It’s that they seemed useful to me and provocative to me. They were like a challenges to me.
Marcel Dzama is an artist that explores human actions and motivations in his own unique way. The setting of his upbringing shaped his inspirations that can be seen in his artwork even now. His style is unique in being somewhat realistic and surrealistic at the same time, toeing the line between real life events and the world of the subconscious. Dzama mentions how he tries not to censor himself, and usually uses art as more of a stream of consciousness process. He draws whatever he’s thinking, however he’s thinking it. He has had an early fascination with fairy tale creatures and folk lore, themes that show very clearly in his work.
by Art21 August 26, 2019
Marcel Dzama was born in Winnipeg, Canada, a place he says he felt somewhat isolated from others due to the barrier of the frigid weather. Because of these surroundings of snow and cold, many of his pieces reflect that whiteness and emptiness of his hometown in the rather empty backgrounds.
It’s My Nature, 1999
Eight strong winds, 2005
He uses mainly ink, watercolor, and often even root beer concentrate for those brown shades. Many of his earlier works are similar to this kind of composition and palette.
Almost all of his works have political themes in them. Current events affect the subject matter of his drawings. He said that the news stories bring him down, so he uses his art to “exorcize” that negative media intake into the art, to get it out so he doesn’t have to live with it inside him. I can see a good amount of value to such a practice. His inspirations can come from many places, such as the Dada Era during World War I influencing his surrealist, almost humorous deconstruction of politics and modern issues.
Let us compare mythologies installation with Raymond Pettibon at David Zwirner, London
Upon moving to New York in 2004, Dzama’s works became more cluttered and chaotic, once again reflecting the setting he lived in. The hustle and bustle of New York rubbed off on him, and it made his work extremely crowded. He worked on bringing order to that chaos, which is why many of his works now have figures that almost look like they’re dancing in a ballet. That kind of choreography in his work helped bring a little structure and composition, and I personally like the flow of these pieces much better.
The circus is in town, 2015
September 28, 2017 – January 7, 2018 Drawing on a Revolution
The Most Incredible Thing curtain by Marcel Dzama.
All of Marcel Dzama’s works start as paintings on paper. He does many collaborations with other artists to create more multimedia creations, such as sculpture, film and even sound. One such collaboration was with Justin Peck, who worked on the coreography for the New York City Ballet. The dance poses Dzama worked with attracted his attention, and together they worked to create a production of the old fairy tale The Most Incredible Thing (Hans Christian Andersen). Dzama’s works then became costumes to illustrate this story in a truly visually stunning way.
The King, dancers Ask la Cour and Russell Janzen. Photo by Erin Baiano.
One O’Clock: The Cuckoo Bird, dancer Tiler Peck. Photo by Erin Baiano.
Overall, Marcel Dzama is a very inventive creator. He does not let the usual censorships and social rules govern his work, and he speaks his mind through his art. I may not agree with all of his views, or particularly enjoy all the subject matter he uses, but I appreciate his head on approach to these things. I also like how his art makes you think, since many of his works contain stories he’s working to tell through a visual medium.
