Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Color & Emphasis
Banksy’s take on Tarantino’s cult movie was well known in the area and amongst collectors of his work. Transport for London ordered it to be painted over and have a strict policy against ‘graffiti’. The authority released a statement saying that they employed professional cleaners, not professional art critics.

I love the way Banksy replaced the guns with bannas and the emphasized them with color (yellow) He brought street art to the mainstream.
Line & Movement


The Vitruvian Man is a drawing created by Leonardo da Vinci circa 1490.[1] It is accompanied by notes based on the work of the architect Vitruvius. The drawing, which is in pen and ink on paper, depicts a male figure in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and simultaneously inscribed in a circle and square. The drawing and text are sometimes called the Canon of Proportions or, less often, Proportions of Man. It is stored in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, Italy, and, like most works on paper, is displayed only occasionally.[2][3]
The drawing is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise De Architectura. Vitruvius described the human figure as being the principal source of proportion among the Classical orders of architecture. Vitruvius determined that the ideal body should be eight heads high. Leonardo's drawing is traditionally named in honor of the architect.

I have always loved da Vinci and Vitruvian man is no exception. da Vinci was a true Renaissance man who foetold the invention of many modern day inventions.  

Value
Big Self Portrait 1968 acrylic on canvas 1071/2 X 831/2  inches



Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close (born July 5, 1940) is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. Close currently lives and works in New York's West Village[1] and in Bridgehampton, New York.[2]

One of my favorite artists, his early super-realist style shows mastery of value . His work looks like B&W photographs.
Shape & Color
JEFF KOONS
Balloon Flower (Orange), 2006
High chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating
114 x 132 x 108 inches (289.6 x 335.3 x 274.3 cm)
Version 4/4



Jeff Koons was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania. He received his B.F.A. at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since his emergence in the 1980s Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop, Conceptual, and appropriation art with craft-making and popular culture to create his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. His work explores contemporary obsessions with sex and desire; race and gender; and celebrity, media, commerce, and fame. A self-proclaimed "idea man," Koons hires artisans and technicians to make the actual works. For him, the hand of the artist is not the important issue: "Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is."

Koons use of shape and color really catches my eye. While I'm not a big fan I do find his work eye catching.


German artist Walter Mason sees nature a bit differently than most people, and he has the vision to use materials made by nature in his art. Land Art is his collection of nature creations using leaves, berries, water, grass and trees to create striking works of art, which are then documented via photography. Whether he creates a collage from leaves, a spiraling trail of water beads, or makes a geometric pattern out of needles, Mason transforms nature into beautiful designs.

I stumbled across this artist when I was looking for a subject for my texture blog. I really like the fact he uses nature to make his art and that it is temporary. Going for a walk in the woods and finding one of these gems would be very cool.
Henry Moore OM, CH
Recumbent Figure 1938
Green Hornton stone
object: 889 x 1327 x 737 mm, 520 kg

Henry Moore (1898 - 1986) is perhaps the most influential public sculptor of this century. Drawing on his studies of Classical, pre-Columbian and African art, Moore created original and truly modern sculptural forms. Abstractions of organic shapes were his primary motif. His seated, standing, and reclining figures comprise an enduring vocabulary reflecting the universality of the human condition.
"The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration." ~ Henry Moore
"In my opinion, everything, every shape, every bit of natural form, animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything you like are all things that can help you to make a sculpture." ~ Henry Moore as quoted in Five British Sculptors (Work and Talk) by Warren Forma, 1964. 

I've always dug Moore's sculptures. his use of positive and negative shape create a pleasing/sensual shape.