Painted People

Here are two amazing artists that paint people. I have always been interested in body paint (talk about completely re-working the relationship between figure and ground, the body and the portrait...) but this is really crazy.

First up: Liu Bolin- A Chinese painter who paints himself into his surroundings.

 Imagine the precision that goes into creating these photographs...the scale and measuring of the camera position and angle, the lighting has to be perfect...how does he take a specific perspective and then copy it onto himself?



I think my favorites are the forest, grocery store, and security guard. I got these images from google images--he doesn't seem to have an artist website yet, but he is featured on many blogs and art websites.

Next up and a great subject for compare/contrast: Alexa Meade. She paints other people (and sometimes herself) as portraits of themselves. That's right, she paints a portrait of their own body onto their body, but she paints them in a two-dimensional way that is more suggestive of their appearance than representative of it. The result is a freaky invasion of artistic representation into 3D reality...just look at the guy's face on the subway.

 Self portrait of the artist--check out the hair--the only aspect that can't be painted.

Creepy, no? Where can I sign up?

Mexican lunch in OB

Massive Jamaica

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Inspirational Window Installation

That's right, they are little army men! I love art like this--so casual, but witty and captivating. Sometimes just a simple gesture is the most universal and immediate way to communicate. This is an installation piece by the designer Adam Katz.

I found her!

This is the mural that used to live on the wall of the coffee shop next door to me. Several months ago, that coffee shop got bought out by Lestat's and got completely remodeled and re-done. I was kind of bummed about the whole thing. I mean, the old coffee shop, CREAM (Coffee Rules Everything Around Me) wasn't really great or anything, and I barely went there. It had really ugly, unmatching chairs and couches, and a lot of sort of middle-aged hipsters. Actually, the only reasons I liked CREAM, were the name (awesome allusion to 90's rap lyrics) and the two super luscious murals on the outside of the building. The one above was my favorite of the two and she faced Park Blvd. to the south of the shop so I saw her every time I drove home from just about anywhere.

When Lestat's took over, they painted the whole building over a garish shade of red (which is fine I guess, because the previous peach color was pretty hideous also). I'm not really opposed to off-paint jobs, it kind of fits in with the quirky-ness of University Heights, BUT, one day as I was driving to school, I noticed them painting over the mural. I literally almost drove my car off the road into their ladder to stop them. I was so upset, I boycotted their shop for a long time. I mean, who paints over a beautiful mural like that without at least letting people know so we can tell them not to??

So I was slightly devastated...I'm getting over it though, I guess that's the nature of public art right? It also helps that this new coffee shop has really nice people and it's open 24/7 (helloooo 3 a.m. study sessions...fully caffinated).


Then, after I had given up on the beautiful lost mural, I found her here while blog surfing! That led me to find the artist: El Mac who is still active and creates incredible murals all over the world. Check out his blog. Some of my favorites:

Imagine, just walking around in your daily routine, and coming across a monumental work of art just integrated with the urban landscape--what I'm saying is murals are awesome and I love the way El Mac uses subject matter, scale and emotion to make his art transform the spaces they inhabit.

I also came across another one of his murals while in SF last week--a nice surprise

And lastly, this is a picture of me with the surviving El Mac mural (the one that didn't get painted over by Lestat's).

Adventures in Printmaking

One of my favorite new adventures this year has been taking a printmaking class at USD. A lot of people look confused when I say that I'm taking a class called "Printmaking" and they think that it is photography or silk-screening or marketing or something. So let me explain...photography (etc) is a form of printmaking, but before photography was invented, people made prints with other, less technological means. Basically, before photography, people engraved an image into a medium (wood, metal, etc...) and then used that material to transfer the image onto paper like a stamp. That is what I'm doing.

For reference, this is how people circulated images in publications before the mid 1800's when photography was invented. In the 1600's and 1700's Renaissance and Baroque artists such as Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt used this method to create art. See below some of my favorites. The technique of printmaking (specifically woodblock printing) is also an ancient Japanese tradition that only began to influence European art in the later part of the 19th century.

Utagawa Hiroshige
A Cool Summer Evening at Ryogoku

 

 

 

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Trees (1643)

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                   

So basically, what I'm doing is an extremely old and AWESOME art technique. In our class we are using wood, copper and zinc. You basically carve (in the case of wood) or scratch (in the case of metal) a drawing into the surface of a woodblock or zinc or copper plate. Then you use the plate to print that image onto paper. The actual process of printing the image is it's own beast, but I won't get into that. Here is my first attempt at a woodblock print--from preliminary sketch to final product.

So first is a drawing I did of the a little golden Buddha statue that my mom gave me a long time ago for luck. Then I retraced the drawing in ink to get an idea of what the final print would look like in sharp contrast. Then I transferred the image to the woodblock, carved the wood out around the black lines (to create white space), then I applied ink to the block and laboriously printed it onto paper. The whole process took me 2 weeks.

I'm currently working on a bigger wood print for my next project and I also have a copper drypoint in progress (whole different animal). The whole print-making thing is incredibly labor-intensive, but oh-so satisfying. I spent three and a half hours carving my current block on Monday night and I got so involved in the process I didn't even realize that my fingers, arm and shoulder were almost numb.

I'm expressing my inner freaky-plant-lady

So, I'm a little bit of a plant freak.

I really like them. And ever since taking a drawing class, I like them even more because now when I look at plants I see the potential for really cool drawings of them. I can't really explain it...it's like my mind goes on sensory overload with cool plants. Like when we were in the jungle hiking in Kaua'i. It was so awesome! Every twisting vine and colorful flower and holy leaf...

Cameron kind of has to put up with my plant enthusiasm. One day he came home to six mini-succulents I just couldn't pass up at the farmer's market. They kind of just sit outside our apartment in this creepy-succulent-pile-thing.  However, instead of fighting my succulent enthusiasm, Cameron found a way to channel it into something really cool: Eco-orbs!!!

Eco Orbs are basically like hanging spherical terrariums that you can create yourself. They are from this shop in North Park called Pigment which is the closest thing I've found to the boutique shops that I love so much in San Fransisco. Pigment is kind of like a cleaner, less bizarre version of Paxton Gate in the city. Cameron got me three different shaped Eco-orbs and a gift card to go buy stuff to fill them with. Here is my box of goodies that I picked:

And here are the finished products! I'm going to hang them above the old desk that I am stealing from my parent's garage. And maybe I will do some nature-inspired drawings to hang on the wall with them...