Australian artist Rachel Coad creates hauntingly enchanting portraits…
Sandie Stewart – acrylic on paper, 270cm x 300cm, 2005
Scramble No. 5 – oil on linen, 84cm x 152cm, 201
Fallout – oil on canvas, 198 x 122cm, 2011
Frontier I – oil on linen, 2012
French artist Sylvie Guillot (1972, Paris) started drawing in criminal courts, which in her view was the best drawing school imaginable; with just that element of urgency to get straight to the heart of the matter and produce a drawing that bears witness and shows emotions. Over the years her work has gradually focused more on the human figure, particularly the nude.
“I like the ideas of tension and movement, using compositions where the body seems either to stretch, to fall or to huddle up. I also like to emphasize the tension within the body by drawing contorted torsos, sharp shoulders or strong and nervous hands.”
Artist Ariana Page Russell creates images that explore the skin as a document of human experience. She uses her own “dermatographia” – a hypersensitive skin condition that causes raised lines to appear on skin when scratched – for her art, by drawing on her body and taking pictures of the embossed patterns that occur.
When American artist Leah Yerpe captures her models twisting, floating and falling on a ground she sees them transformed from free individuals into symbolic figures. The influence of mythology is often hinted at in the titles, though her work is not a direct illustration of the stories.
Pleiades, 2011, charcoal on paper
Medusa, 2012, graphite and ink on paper
Hook, 2012, graphite and ink on paper
Wing, 2011, graphite and ink on paper on board
Suzan Schuttelaar is a Dutch portrait painter who’s seemingly unfinished portraits are simply stunning.
Spanish artist Patricia March was trained in Fine Arts and Cinematography, hence her interest in movement and time. She aims to incorporate a cinematic style in her drawings and captures movement in terms of her own time perception, which is something like water; it erodes and destroys forms while building new ones.
‘Falling’, a series of sculptures and drawings, visualises Clara Lieu’s personal experience with depression and anxiety. Unable to “release” herself from these episodes, she waited for the physical limitations of her body to end them.
Italian artist, Nicola Samori intensely disfigures his Renaissance influenced paintings using a palette knife, a scalpel, paint or his hands.
“I like taking the image to a breaking point, putting its form into danger. My work stems from fear: fear of the body, of death, of men. I think my nature as an artist is something like feeling hopeless. Works are just temporary shelters and painting is a leisure place where you can conceal yourself.” Quote via Huffington post
© Nicola Samori
Evasion is a series of large-format paintings by Portuguese artist Pedro Batista. His figures fade into motion seemingly captured for just a moment in time.
© Pedro Batista
Today it’s Spring yet still seemingly winterish here at 52.2066° N, 5.6422° E; somewhat like Egon Schiele’s “Early Spring”.
Egon Schiele, Early Spring, 1913, Oil on canvas
Kunsthaus Zug , Sammlung Kamm via PaintingDb
Italian artist Domenico Grenci is heavily influenced by Japanese art and portrays Western women in “ukiyo-e” (literally translated: floating world); impermanent, fleeting beauty divorced from the responsibilities of the mundane, everyday world.
© Domenico Grenci
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film in Tokyo will present an exhibition of works by Francis Bacon opening today to April 6. The exhibition will include 11 contact sheets, which were used as important image sources in his production process.
It is well known that Bacon worked from photographs rather than live models. While he hired John Deakin and other established photographers to make some of the photographs, he also frequently hired unknown photographers who were active in New York at the time. Some of the contact sheets show sequential photographs, which evoke Eadweard Muybridge’s works, but they also betray his idiosyncratic perspective on the human figure. In 1974, Bacon explained, “I want to isolate the image much further and take it very much further away from the photograph. I only use photographs as I would use a dictionary in a foreign language.” He wrote directly onto some of the photographs to formulate ideas for his works.
Contact sheet of female nudes from the floor of Bacon’s Studio, ca. 1975, Prov. The Robertson Collection, vintage gelatin silver print, paper size: 41.9 x 50.8 cm, Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
Contact sheet of two men wrestling in a studio from the floor of Bacon’s Studio, ca. 1975, Prov. The Robertson Collection, vintage gelatin silver print, paper size: 41.9 x 50.8 cm, Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
Inspired by unstable human emotions, Korean artist Miseon Yoon‘s makes thought-provoking textile portraits that are the result of a compulsive process of cutting and attaching hand-painted fabrics. Via Saatchi Online.
© Miseon Yoon
German artist Werner Knaupp‘s (1936) thick layered acrylics turn into dark, savage seas – statuesque and gorgeous.
For French artist Benjamin Carbonne (1970), painting primarily provides him with a means to express his sometimes violent, yet always tenderly torn subjects without using words.
Tiina Heiska‘s paintings are stories about both the process of painting and about subjects of the paintings. Considered individually, they are separate fragments, but joined together they become series whose elements dovetail in a temporal or thematic continuum.
“A recurring theme in my paintings is a woman who is constantly changing her form. She is like the main character in a play, the script of which she has misplaced. She changes roles along with the scenery, yet she is always feeling a bit lost and off-course. It is uncertain even to me who she ultimately is, although she has her origins in photographs I took of myself in staged situations that were based on my fantasies or fears. The woman is therefore not a self-portrait, she is a fantasy.
![tiina heiska 1[5]](http://graafland.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/tiina-heiska-15.jpg)
Ina Hjorth Jacobsen graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of
Architecture in 2012. She loves land art, drawing maps, sculptures and
graphic novels. Above all I am passionate about architecture, scenography and illustration.
Her graduate work had been featured in Wallpaper magazine.
© Ina Hjort Jacobsen
Taiwanese artist Chen Chun-Hao had been using thumbtacks as his medium of choice in creating sculptures, wall pieces and installations for over a decade. In the past couple of years he departed from thumbtacks and shifted to nails. More specifically “mosquito nails”— small headless pins about a third the size of a toothpick. Using a nail gun, Chen nails these small pins into canvas-covered wood, creating reproductions of traditional Chinese ink landscape paintings.
Via CollabCubed
Alex Simpson is a multi-disciplinary artist based in London who works intuitively across painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Her work centres around personal narratives that are played out in worlds of melancholic children and strange creatures exploring their relationships with loss, fear and the unknown. At the core of her practice is painting – a dialogue between artist and medium – in which she invites spontaneity to bleed out her delicate figures into washes of ink.
Cross, 2010
The watcher, 2011
Patch him up, 2011
Birthdays, 2011
© Alex Simpson
Louis Boudreault’s Destiny project is a series of mixed media childhood portraits of such greats as Picasso, Warhol and van Gogh. Via The jealous curator
Andy Warhol
Pablo Picasso
Edith Piaf
Albert Einstein
English artist Annie Kevans created the series “Ship of fools”, addressing her interest in the changing perception of madness and its relationship with societal notions of success and achievement, in 2009. The fact that 1 in 4 people experiences some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year and is still stigmatised, was the conceptual inspiration behind the exhibition. Her examples include Winston Churchill, Michael Jackson, Kirsten Dunst, Jackson Pollock, Drew Barrymore, Charles Dickens, Yves Saint Laurent, Albert Camus, Beyonce Knowles, Ewan McGregor, and Mark Twain.
Kevans’ semi-translucent style possesses a slightly melancholy quality. It is interesting that her paintings are achieved not by using watercolour as one might expect, but thinned oil paint on canvas paper. Via Artnet
Pier Angeli
Diana Spencer
Beethoven
Patty Duke
© Annie Kevans
Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen (1986) is a self-taught artist whose creative production revolves around classic figurative painting, presented in a contemporary manner. The atmosphere in his subject matter is often depict in a limbo or dream-like state. Despite his realistic approach, photographic accuracy is not what he seeks to achieve.
Guy Denning (born 1965) is a self taught English contemporary artist and painter based in France. He is the founder of the Neomodern group and part of the urban art scene in Bristol.
Denning’s early work included an interest in the work of Franz Kline and was characterised by powerful, expressive brushstrokes in mainly abstract paintings. More recently he has combined earlier influences with an increasingly figurative style of painting. The human figure features strongly in his latest work and he uses this subject matter to convey powerful emotions.
“Painting is a focusing; a process of exaggeration and editing of a suggestion of reality. I can start with a skeleton, like a foundation illustration, perhaps taken from a life study or a photograph and then I start to manipulate that framework. All the time I am hoping for accidents with the paint as the accidents are usually the source of greatest productivity. Perhaps the accidents of paint give me a similar perspective as the viewer to the finished painting: the surprise at something fresh or something that is not immediately understood in its construction. This aspect of painting is like, perhaps, finding the uncontrolled intention.
I know when it’s right or, at least, tending towards right but I don’t know how to do it. If I knew how to do it, that there was a predetermined and guaranteed method, then it wouldn’t be the challenge that forces me to paint continually.”
Source: Wikipedia
© Guy Denning
Sara Fanelli’s activity book asks young readers to help the onion break free by answering thought-provoking questions and completing the activities within, finally pressing a three-dimensional character right out of the pages. The book encourages young children to be imaginative and think about complex issues in unexpected ways.
Nick Lepard’s richly layered portraits are truly pervading.
“Through colour, scale and gesture my work celebrates painting’s physicality, both in terms of its application and its dependence on space in the real world. The images are bright and playful, but also macabre and grotesque.”
Paintings by Nick Lepard
