His "explosion" pics remind me a bit of that Discovery Channel logo, that surfacing leviathan of melded icons. Once more, the artist lists nostalgia as a source of inspiration. Pardon my micro-rant here, but I think nostalgia is quickly becoming the watering hole where our culture goes in the absence of non-media-driven experience. That is, when a person needs to "go deep" into personal profundity (or a modern artist needs to find deep-seated inspiration) they tend to go into their own lost past. Pining and regret: the tools of measuring depth in a shallow culture.
Hey, sorry. I like this guy’s images. I can’t help picturing him off-screen somewhere, stacking stuff up and exploding it with a Wile E Coyote dynamite plunger. Very cool.
His Website
I love this guy. I really couldn’t give a rodent’s colon if this is street art or gallery-worthy "high art". The guy knows what matters in imagery.
Make Cool Thing. Let People See It. Duh.
Love it.
His Flicker pages
Incidently, the pics above are blown-up thumbnails. Go check out the (somewhat) bigger ones.
Oh, dear. I’m posting this guy’s work entirely out of loyalty to a past appreciation. For decades, decades ago, he had a large irregularly-shaped painting hanging in the Law Building at the University oif Alberta. I quite like the pic, and often stopped to admire it. I had two friends who were surrealist painters at the time, and we often discussed the painting.
Well, times have changed. I’m not going to slam his work based on the images in the gallery link below. But I have to admit I’m disappointed in what I found there. Oh, well, he got buckets of vocal praise from me for twenty years. I think I’ve paid the piper.
Gallery
Love the deconstruction swipes, or whatever the blue blazes you call those mucked bits. It’s like someone accidently hitting the Undo button after the picture was finished. Man… can you ever tell this guy has training up the yinyang. Gorgeous little stylistic mashup touches here and there. The ’60s party balls in the middle pic. Japanese spatula daubs. Paint scratches in the background. Awesome.
His Website
Oldification. Now, there’s a word for you. That’s what Dave Barnes says he does to his images to make them seem from another era. His works is primarily nostalgic images that seem to have been partially destroyed by a combination of time, a demonic graffiti artist, and being left in a cupboard with a ton of other random pieces of paper and a tipped can of shellac.
It’s tough to imagine these pics on your livingroom wall. That is, if you live in a real house. Maybe if your ‘house’ is a slick post modern Manhattan highrise apartment these pics will pop. Anyway, love ‘em. They look like they were a lot of fun to make.
His Website
In glancing over this artist’s statement,
"My current body of work, entitled the “Misery Children” series focuses on the constant social desire to assign “cuteness.” This often serves as a means to make something innocent and more appealing, therefore, non-threatening. Perhaps this allows us to comfort ourselves. My questions are based on the discomfort of “what if”– what if these sweet creatures had other ideas? What if they knew something we were afraid to open our eyes to?"
I realised what crap half of these rationalizations are. For Pete’s sake, your left butt cheek is being violently sucked into the early 21st Century goth/anime zeitgeist and you didn’t notice? Hmm… been sitting a little funny lately?
OK, rant over. Cool pics.
Her Website
You gotta love photo manipulation in the service of art. It’s ubiquitously in the service of commerce with advertisement retouching, and glam Photoshopping. But how many artists actually take a made-up and lit model’s photo with the specific purpose of messing with it – perhaps making the original image unrecognizable? Not enough, in my books…
His Website
Ah, yes, dunce caps, tree stumps, monkeys and robots. Sounds like a typical Saturday morning sleep in for me. What is this dark hinterland that so many 21st Century artists conjure? Was there some freaky children’s cough medicine on the shelves when they were young? Somebody ought to get them all in the same room for a reunion of the subconscious. Oh, wait, wait. That’s probably a bad idea. Some kind of black hole will probably open and spew scary cartoon characters all over the landscape.
His Website
This is one of the world’s greatest (living) commercial photographers. Nobody has ever questioned whether to hire him. They just take one look at his portfolio, their single vente, no whip, mocha hits the linoleum and suddenly their wallet opens up and spills dollars.
His Website
Prints
His website is officially under construction, but
Here’s a backdoor
Couple pics
Few more
