It is very rarely that, as a writer, I find myself drawn between two diametrically opposite stories to tell of an artist I have interviewed. The first, and most uplifting, is the tale of Taiwanese artist Lo Chan Peng, the Grand Prize winner of the 2023 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize. Having entered and been a finalist twice previously, Chan Peng’s 2023 entry Eternity Dawn was an overwhelming favourite of the judges.

Those who know his work will be familiar with his stunning realistic portraiture, and the soulful deconstruction that he utilises to emphasise the emotions in his pieces. With the works represented on these pages you can appreciate the mastery that he brings to his craft, but to truly experience their texture and depth, to allow the full impact of their beauty and despair, you must, if at all possible, see his works in person.

What is the job of an artist? Art is a form of communication, in the most authentic form of the artist. When viewers enter the form chosen by the artist, they enter the artist’s domain or realm – and that’s how communication happens soul to soul. This is the job of an artist.

To follow the artistic journey of Chan Peng is to follow a similar trajectory to that of many artists, an evolution of style as experimentation and new inspirations lead them to break new ground, explore new themes. Although his style could always have been described as “dark”, in the earlier years of his career there was often bright colour and use of quirky surrealism to bring a lightness to the canvas. Then, in 2016, tragedy struck, with the death of Chan Peng’s beloved wife through illness.

Always a deeply spiritual person, with an innate need to create connection and empathy through his work, Chan Peng had arrived at a nexus whereby his very world was shaken. Always driven to keep creating, the works that Chan Peng has created since, both drawings and oil paintings, have shared a common theme, no matter the subject portrayed. The results have cut to the very heart of the human condition – to live is to experience sorrow – but as Lo Chan Peng’s art so clearly shows, there is also beauty in the world.

Congratulations on being selected as the Grand Prize winner of the 2023 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize! How did you feel when you learned that you had won, and what do you hope that your win means for your practice?

Thank you! As artists, we eagerly look forward to participating in your Art Prize, as it has undeniably become a significant and influential event. Now, regarding your question, this was my third year participating in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize. I had been a finalist in the previous two years, and I always approached it with a sense of equanimity, treating it like an enjoyable process regardless of whether I would win.

So, when I hadn’t won in the past, I tried to keep my emotions as steady as possible. Now that I have won, I still strive to maintain that calm, though I’ll be honest, I did allow myself a day of happiness (laughs). It’s not that I’m not content with the win; I’m thrilled.

However, maintaining that equilibrium and focus is crucial to me. It’s a form of mental discipline. Because painting is a rather direct art form, it flows directly from our hands onto the canvas. This means that a part of the artist’s soul is also directly captured in the artwork when they can paint as naturally as they breathe.

As for my practice, I’ve always aimed to immerse myself in a broader world, to travel to different countries, learn more, and continually grow without constraints. I’ve been trying to do this all along, but there have been limitations. I hope that this award will enable me to realise this long-term goal and continue to find joy in growth.

Please tell us about the work you submitted to the Art Prize, “Eternity Dawn”. What were your thoughts and inspiration when creating this painting, and why you selected this work in particular for your entry.

At a certain point in my life, I went through a period of darkness, during which I feared the arrival of night. I would wake up at five in the morning, lying in bed, waiting for dawn. I imagined myself lying on a beach, with the waves washing over me, submerging me, and then receding, and I would remain there, waiting until the sky gradually brightened. It was at that moment that I felt profound tranquillity, and I prayed for time to stand still, as it was the truest sense of serenity I had ever experienced.

There is a fine line between tranquillity and madness, and I felt like I was standing on that line, as fragile as a strand of hair. I had to concentrate entirely to stay on the side of tranquillity and prevent myself from slipping into the realm of madness.

Since then, I’ve felt that every painting I create is an attempt to capture that moment. In Indian philosophy, there is a deep understanding of the concept of a moment, with different words in their language denoting various durations of a moment. They believe that there are eighteen different units of time within the concept of “a moment”. I experienced something similar at that moment—it can be remarkably lengthy.

As for why I chose this particular work for the competition, I mentioned earlier that I have participated in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize for three consecutive years. Each year, I submitted what I believed to be my best work at that time. So, the reason is quite simple: when I was preparing for the 2023 competition, I had just completed this piece.

What was your process for creating “Eternity Dawn”, from conception to finished work?

The image in my mind for this piece was clear from the very beginning, and everything flowed smoothly. I knew it would be a good piece from the first stroke. I only struggled during the final stages. At that point, I was debating whether to introduce more “destruction” into the composition. My works typically go through a phase of destruction and then rebuilding, as I feel that I need to go through a certain level of struggle to truly infuse my soul into the canvas.

There is a sense of sorrow in the expressions in much of your portraiture, what brings you to convey this in your art?

Yes, in 2016, I went through the painful experience of losing my wife to illness. During that time, I experienced unimaginable grief and had many profound and mysterious encounters. However, I don’t want to dwell too much on the experiences that might make me sound like a madman (laughs). I want to focus on the rational aspect. In essence, I went through a unique state where spirituality and reason interacted, and it was difficult for me to distinguish what was the “reality” of this world. In retrospect, I found that this experience was quite similar to the realm of art.

You participated in your first exhibition in 2004, how do you feel that your work has evolved over the years since then?

Oh, yes, I think you’ll notice that I’ve always focused on portraiture, but the layers of concern have evolved. Initially, I depicted friends and people in my immediate surroundings. Then, as I grew personally, I attempted to capture the culture of a part of Taiwan’s population. In recent years, I’ve started portraying historical figures and children affected by wars (I call them “Historic Movers & Shakers, and the Doomed”). I believe the themes I care about have continued to expand.

Many artists I have spoken to who have fine art qualifications have said that figurative art was often looked down upon by their institutions and lecturers. What was your experience like as a student?

Every school has its own positioning and style. The school I attended is considered one of the best for figurative painting in Taiwan, so I didn’t encounter that kind of situation. However, I completely understand that such attitudes can prevail in schools that prioritise different styles. Nevertheless, figurative art, like all forms of art, has both good and bad works. When we assess a piece of art aesthetically, we inevitably consider context. In my opinion, I don’t judge the quality of art solely based on its form.

Can a bad concept become good just by changing its form? Or does it suddenly become worthy of discussion? I know many young artists struggle with this, and some even compromise and become something other than their best selves. It’s regrettable. I hope that my success in winning this award can serve as encouragement. We only need to be ourselves, strive to be our best selves, and do the most elevated version of what we feel we’re capable of. Don’t succumb to the world, never.

Now, on the other side of the lectern as an Associate Professor in the Department of Art of Creative Design at Hsuan Chuang University, what do you hope to impart to your students?

I believe that in this era, there are too many things vying for our attention, making it difficult for us to focus. Even various forms of media encourage us not to focus. However, ultimately, it’s only through focus that dreams can be achieved.

For the first time this year we have added an Emerging Artists category to the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize. Do you have any advice for artists at this stage of their career and perhaps on the value of entering competitions such as ours?

I think that’s what makes the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize great. I can feel the founders’ passion for art in their words and actions, and they put it into practice. This is truly remarkable, and I have great respect for it. I also hope to contribute to the Beautiful Bizarre magazine community after receiving this award.

I believe my experience can be shared with young artists. I participated in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize three times, and yes, I was certainly disappointed when I didn’t win. But I didn’t give up. I hope we can all enjoy both success and failure. My past experiences have taught me to be cautious at the peak of success and to be prepared when I find myself in the depths of failure, because opportunities can arise at any moment. Success and failure are never the focus; the focus is whether we are pursuing the highest version of ourselves.

Your works are in the collections of many museums internationally, could you tell us which brings you the most personal satisfaction, and why?

I have great appreciation for all the museums, but if you had to ask me which one is unique, I would choose the Hoki Museum in Japan. Firstly, this remarkable museum exclusively collects post-World War II to contemporary Japanese realistic artists, which is their renowned focus. Being included as one of the very few non-Japanese artists in their collection is a tremendous source of satisfaction for me.

Moreover, there is a bridge between the Hoki Museum and me, and that bridge is Mr. Suchi, the owner of Gallery Suchi, a highly discerning gallery owner. Unfortunately, he passed away from this world the day before I learned about winning the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize.

I deeply regret that he couldn’t see his astute eye validated through this honour. I believe all of this has forged a profound connection between me, Mr. Suchi, and the Hoki Museum.

I have noticed that you have included ornate gold leaf embellishments on some of your recent
paintings. What were your thoughts behind this, and is it something that you will continue?

This was inspired by my travels in Italy. When I was in Italy, I noticed decorative frames everywhere. These decorative frames originally came from architecture, where beams and columns in buildings became frames for murals. Later, when oil paintings were done on canvas (which could be moved), the frames became portable alongside the paintings.

Similarly, many places in architecture were adorned with frames, and in noble architectural designs, these frames often carried the family’s patterns. Each of these patterns had its own story. In some cases, these patterns weren’t presented in sculptural form but were painted, using gold to create a realistic illusion.

At the time, there was a concept – the symbolic presence of figures within the frame (often Greek gods or Christian figures like Jesus) – and it was seen as a “real entity beyond the window.” This meant that we and the divine existed in the same space in the pre-Enlightenment era.

All of these concepts became inspirations in my paintings. Of course, I wanted my work to encompass past and contemporary, Eastern and Western cultures, so I’ve undergone many contemporary transformations and incorporated symbols and metaphors I’ve designed from various cultural and historical relationships. It’s like a game for me.

I’m currently working on a large painting for this series, and if everything goes well, I plan to continue experimenting with this approach.

Are there other ways that you would like to evolve your practice, other mediums that you would like to incorporate into your work?

What is the job of an artist? Art is a form of communication, in the most authentic form of the artist. When viewers enter the form chosen by the artist, they enter the artist’s domain or realm – and that’s how communication happens soul to soul.

This is the job of an artist. So, what I consider is whether what I’m doing is the most authentic expression of myself. When I discover that there are other mediums that allow me to be more true to myself, I’ll explore them. I want to emphasise that choosing a medium must have a deeply personal reason; otherwise, it’s meaningless.

We are eager to see your work for the Serendipity exhibition at Haven Gallery in Northport, New York, in November! Do you have any longer-term artistic dreams that you wish to pursue?

Thank you! I’m looking forward to it and honoured to be a part of it! I’m working on it, and I hope everyone will enjoy the piece.

As I mentioned earlier, I have always wanted to settle in different cities around the world and create for a while to pursue my growth. I hope my art can become a summation of human culture, bridging the past and the present, the East and the West.

Lo Chan Peng Social Media Accounts

Website | Instagram

The post Lo Chan Peng: From Sadness Comes Beauty appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

In these troubled times of pandemic, wars, climate change-induced disasters and runaway inflation, we all need something to lift our spirits and lighten our hearts. Let me introduce you then, to the perfect panacea for what is occurring in the world today, the uplifting and joyful works of the Grand Prize winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, painter Kristin Kwan of Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

Although suffering her own personal travails – in addition to the seemingly endless dumpster fire we are served up in the nightly news bulletins – Kristin has managed to bring us all to a happier place. A place where we can just be in the moment, appreciating the beauty of her quirky oil on panel artworks, reading our own story into the surrealism and symbolism therein, and emerge feeling that although the darkness can sometimes feel overwhelming, there is still light, beauty, and delight to be found. Reducing the tempest that surrounds us, if even just for a while, into a storm in a teacup – or a bathtub!

Although only exhibiting since 2019 (can we even count the ‘lost years’ of 2020-21?) Kristin has rapidly gained a devoted following online, participated in many group shows, and held her first solo shows – with many more to come. Although her skill and technique with oils is clearly evident, it is the themes of her work, an elegant mix of fable, fairy tale, and the beauty of nature – with a healthy dash of Lewis Carroll added for good measure – that makes her work irresistible to the viewer. Kristin’s art takes us away from where we are to a place where we would far rather be.

Yes, art can be powerful, can make arresting and important statements on the world as it is and how we must struggle to make it as it should be. But, equally, art can bring us respite, allow us to breathe and experience that sometimes most elusive of emotions – joy.

My goal is to keep moving towards fearlessness.

Exclusive Interview with Kristin Kwan

Congratulations on being selected as the Grand Prize Winner of the 2022 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Kristin! There is no doubt that 2022 has seen the strongest field ever in our art prize, with more amazing entries than ever before from emerging, mid-career, and internationally renowned artists. How did you feel when you learned that you had won, and what do you hope that your win means for your practice?

Thank you so much! I have to say when I found out I had won I was just floored, absolutely speechless. I may have had a little cry. Starting out as an artist can be a real financial puzzle. It’s next to impossible to have the time and resources without some kind of outside help, and this coming now means yes, keep going, I can keep building my career as I’d hoped and dreamed.

Please tell us about the work you submitted to the art prize, “The Golden Afternoon”. What were your thoughts and inspiration while creating this painting, and why you selected this work in particular for your entry?

I liked the idea of this ludicrously large sun behind someone, a bit flat like a Byzantine icon, but painted somewhat realistically. As with most of the things I make, the initial image doesn’t have any kind of “narrative” meaning to begin with. I think I really liked the idea of painting a giant sun more than anything! But as I paint, I live alongside the painting for months, sometimes years, and a meaning always seems to grow, I think normally a private web of meanings more than a story, per se.

This painting, and the other paintings, I was making at the time were fed with the pain and anxiety of my personal life crumbling, my marriage ending and everything that felt solid and dependable felt like it had vanished, I felt very at sea. And yet through this kind of haze of pain there is still this hum of joy in the world, harder to access sometimes, but there nonetheless just throbbing away underneath it all, inextinguishable.

It’s easy to get stuck in your head with all the fears of failure and vulnerability that come with creating art.

And the process for creating the golden afternoon, from conception to finished work?

I’d made a thumbnail sketch a year or so ago with the idea of painting a figure beneath a giant sun. I’d originally had the figure laying down, but I had another thumbnail of a girl eating a honeycomb with bees flying around her which I wanted to paint, and they seemed to work well as a single piece, so I combined them. I fiddled around with a couple of thumbnail sketches until I got one that felt right, usually something seems to just settle into place and you think, “Hmm, that feels good.”

Then I made a more finished sketch to work out the details. I like working this way, because I feel like when I paint I’m already having to make so many on the fly decisions about colour and paint consistency, technical stuff. I don’t feel like thinking about the image itself, so I plan that beforehand. Then I blow up my finished sketch to the size of my panel, print it out, and transfer it with graphite paper.

I listened to and watched quite a few things while painting this piece, since it ate up a chunk of time being so large. It’s funny, the things I watch while painting get tangled into the picture for me, so that every time I look at the finished painting after, the other thing will come into my mind unbidden. This piece makes me hear the Succession theme, Age of Adz in the weeds, Terence McKenna’s voice in the honeycomb, and a few other odds and ends that I realise only have meaning for me, but are brought back with strange clarity when I look at it.

Could you tell us more about your background as an artist, how your upbringing and family influenced you?

I grew up drawing from the time I was a toddler. My parents were always incredibly encouraging of my dream to become a professional artist. My family moved around a lot, I was home-schooled and allowed to work very independently, so I’d say I had a fairly unconventional upbringing. I spent many days finishing school early, then taking off to wander in the woods or the desert or a field behind our house.

It was wonderful but I also think it may have ruined me for a normal career. I am pitiful with schedules. We also went to the library a lot. It was always one of the first things we had to do when we moved to a new town, get our library cards, that’s how you know you’re home. I’d always check out whatever art books they had. There was a library that had a collection of books of the work of Robert Bateman, a Canadian wildlife artist. I remember reading how he loved the work of Andrew Wyeth, that underneath the subject matter of the painting the abstract bones of it would exist first, and have to be something beautiful independently. I thought it was interesting, how his subject matter was almost like a secondary medium to the paint itself, something to use as well. Instead of just painting a bird, he was making a piece of art, using the bird as a shape, a colour, a line. It stuck with me.

Did you have any formal education in the arts? If so, how do you think that helped you become the artist you are today, and how have you continued to develop your skills and techniques since?

I went to Union College in Nebraska and got a bachelor’s degree in studio art. It’s a liberal arts college, not an art school, so I had the good fortune to be required to take a wide variety of classes. I also had the luck to have a student job that required very little other than sitting at a desk and once in a while answering a phone.

I read a lot of books during that time, I always had a stack from the library, anything that caught my eye, often popular science books about physics or biology or math even. I think the best thing an artist can do is have a voracious and omnivorous mind, and feed it constantly.

When you graduate with a degree in studio art your career path can be a little murky, and it took many years to find my way to what I am currently doing. Over the last few years I’ve been trying to develop my work habit skills, and I think if you’re going to make an investment of mental energy that’s the place to do it. The one thing that has made the biggest difference for me to develop artistically is just to make more work, but I was really struggling to get more than a few paintings completed a year.

When I switched my goal from getting work done on a painting, to just starting to work with no outcome in mind, that’s when things seemed to shift for me. I’m a big believer in quantity over quality. If you want to develop a style or technique, just do it a LOT. And that’s really hard with art because it’s easy to get stuck in your head with all the fears of failure and vulnerability that come with creating art. So now my goal is, start, no need to do anything but start, but you have to start 10 times every day. Then you get really good at starting, which is by far the hardest part.

Was there a particular point in your life that you realised that a career as an artist was your dream, and that you could actually make that dream come true?

It was a dream from adolescence on, with varying degrees of optimism that it could work. I remember when I was starting college and everyone asking what I was going to be studying. I replied “art”. There were a lot of skeptical looks, but my parents never doubted it was something I could do so I felt (maybe a little blindly) confident.

But after college there were a lot of times I doubted my path even though it was the only thing I could really ever see doing. Sometime around 2007 or 2008, I’d gotten a hold of a couple issues of Juxtapoz, and began using the internet as well, so I started seeing this kind of art that made me feel really excited.

I’d started painting more for myself (I’d been doing illustration work) and it was around 2011 when I began to feel like this was something I had the ideas and drive to do full time. I had my daughter shortly after and art became a bit of a hobby for awhile, but I came back to it more intensively once she started kindergarten in 2016.

While your works have stylistically classical influences, you also personalise them by applying surrealistic themes and extensive use of symbolism. What do you hope to convey with the symbolism present in your works?

The symbolism I use tends to be very personal and open ended. I shy away from using my paintings as direct narratives or vehicles for a message. They are more like collections of personal feelings presented visually. I find it extremely satisfying when people are able to overlay their own stories and meanings on a piece. Even for me, the image usually starts out almost devoid of “meaning” other than the shapes and colours themselves. As I work on it meanings start to grow in my mind, but they come after the image is set.

I like to think of a painting as some kind of communal scaffold or trellis that meaning can grow on, my own alongside viewers, and hopefully the image is enticing enough to pull a viewer in and coax them to feel their own meaning into and out of the image. That’s part of why I really love traditional western painting subjects, often from myths.

I think the fact they’ve been used over and over by so many different artists gives them a lot of layered references that are able to be pulled on if you know the story and the work. Or they can just be a visually interesting starting point for a piece, devoid of any backstory.

You are relatively early in your career as an artist, only showing since 2019. How has your art evolved in that time, and how do you see it continuing to evolve?

That’s right, I participated in Suggestivism at Nucleus Portland, curated by Nathan Spoor,
in 2019, my first group show. With painting more and more over the last few years, I feel like my technical ability slowly continues to develop so that I’m better able to make what
I have in mind going into a new piece. There’s often something that I will feel intimidated to paint, knowing I don’t quite have the skill to pull it off how I’d like to. There is always a bit of a dance between making something you know you can, and pushing beyond your skill level and failing and possibly scrapping a piece.

It feels a bit like with each new painting I learn a new little trick to keep up my sleeve. I’d like to be able to work faster because I have so many ideas for paintings, and I don’t know how I’m going to ever get them all painted – ha! My goal is to keep moving towards fearlessness in what I make, that I’m not ever censoring myself, or making something to show off or pander. I think good art comes from following your gut, even if it feels a bit over the top, or corny, or odd.

And to the future! Do you have any longer term artistic dreams that you wish to pursue?

My plan all along has been to paint some thing that makes me feel really excited to be painting it. That’s my long term for now, haha. I’m always convinced that the next painting will be the best one, and I suppose that positive delusion keeps things joyful.

Kristin Kwan Social Media Accounts

Website | Facebook | Instagram

The post Kristin Kwan: An Ode to Joy appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Our interview with Kim Leutwyler was made at an important time for the LGBTIQ community in Australia, with the public having just voted overwhelmingly to legalise same-sex marriage, a long-overdue recognition by the government of the accepting attitude for this important right by the majority of Australia’s population. The process leading up to this change in law was a fraught time for Kim and her community, with the hateful views of a vocal minority being directed at both them and their supporters. But, as the Australian press trumpeted following the vote, “LOVE WINS!”.  As positive as this event was for her personally, Kim Leutwyler has wasted no time in focusing on other inequalities for her to highlight and attempt to bring to the centre of public discourse through her artistic practice.

Interview conducted in conjunction with Kim Leutwyler’s editorial in Issue 20 of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

The bodies of LGBTQ-identified and Queer-allied women in my paintings are evolving with their local social environment. I depict ways in which women modify their bodies, take on various permutations of androgyny, and are celebrated for it.

Kim Leutwyler

I don’t think we can have a full appreciation to your development as an artist, or indeed as a person, without understanding how much your gender and being part of the LGBTIQ community has influenced the life and artistic decisions you have made. As part of the generation which has started (only started, mind you) to gain mainstream acceptance and influence for feminist principles and LGBTIQ identity, how do you feel your work has caught the spirit of these times, and what resistance have you encountered to your artistic and personal expression?

Gender roles are constantly evolving, and there are a multitude of societal and cultural permutations of LGBTQI identity and feminism around the globe that make the concept of capturing the spirit of the times seem like an impossible task to me. The ‘ideal female’ has also changed over time, with varying aesthetics that metamorphose based on age, race, geography and sexual orientation.

I explore a very small percentage of the queer-identified and allied population in my work, focusing on the people who have influenced my life or my community in some way. I am constantly seeking out opportunities to meet and paint an even larger and more diverse pool of the population in the near future.

I’ve had galleries approach me to discuss representation on the proviso that I don’t advertise as an artist who paints specifically queer identified and allied women. They were concerned that the ‘Queer’ subject matter would deter collectors from purchasing my work. I advised in every instance that I’m not interested in censoring my thematic choices for the purpose of a sale. I work a full time job so that I can paint exactly what I want without having to sacrifice my artistic integrity.

There has recently been a major step forward for the LGBTIQ community in Australia with the overwhelming affirmation (over 61% in favour) by the Australian population for marriage equity via a national postal ballot – which was itself a delaying tactic by conservative groups. While this is obviously a cause for celebration, what other barriers do you feel are still in place for those identifying as LGBTIQ, as what do you believe that you can do as an artists to further their cause?

In short, the next step is anti-discrimination protections for all sexual orientations and gender identities. I can’t speak for the role that all artists can play, but I’d liked to continue making portraits of individuals who are making positive impacts on the community individually, locally and nationally. I hope that my work will stimulate a dialogue about equality and human rights in Australia and beyond. Others may choose to share stories of people who have been discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality or for being transgender, which is certainly a worthy subject for art.

You have traveled a great deal, firstly around the US when you were younger, then more recently to New Zealand and now Australia. What differences have you noticed in the local community attitudes in the places you have lived, and how much do you feel your work has been impacted by those attitudes?

As a young person I rarely paid attention to local attitudes toward my ideals, and when confronted with opposition I relished the opportunity to share my point of view, embracing a sense of rebellion. Local attitudes have never impacted me more than the present day. Having my rights put to a public postal survey was more invasive than anything I’ve ever experienced. I encountered more homophobia and additionally more support in the last couple of months than I have in the last 20 years combined. I have no doubt that this will markedly impact my work moving forward.

As for travel impacting my work… I explore fluidly expanding identities in my global travels and depict certain aspects in my artwork. The bodies of LGBTQ-identified and Queer-allied women in my paintings are evolving with their local social environment. I depict ways in which women modify their bodies, take on various permutations of androgyny, and are celebrated for it.

Yet another form of resistance and isolation that many of the artists I interview have found is that of the fine art establishment and academia against figurative or representational art and artists. Is this something you have encountered yourself, and if so how have you dealt with it?

I have been so fortunate to be supported completely in the mainstream art world and academia. In the interest of offering helpful advice many gallerists and teachers warned that no one would want to buy portraits of someone they don’t know, but I’ve found that to be quite the opposite. I’m so lucky to have a network of Collectors, Curators and reputable Artists who all encourage my exploration of representational art and portraiture.

Following on from the fine art establishment issue, have noticed a change in attitudes since being selected as a finalist for some of Australia’s most esteemed art prizes, including twice for the Archibald Prize?

Surprisingly the biggest change in attitudes since being a finalist in the Archibald Prize has been among my friends.  I’ve referred to myself as an artist for years and they’ve always encouraged me, but my friends and co-workers found my self-proclaimed title of ‘artist’ a bit more reputable upon seeing my artwork on the walls of the Art Gallery of NSW and on banners and posters around the city.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into your past! As a child did you have artistic encouragement from within your family, and to follow a career as an artist?

My immediate family is very artistic in their spare time, so I blame them for my interest in art! Mom often paints, Dad dabbles in ceramic sculpture and little sis does sculpture, painting, animation, printmaking, movie props and monster makeup. After graduating high school I initially enrolled in Accounting for my University degree (I know… total nerd) and then made an impulse decision to switch to Art History. My parents were extremely supportive, especially when I layered in a degree for Studio Art focusing on Ceramics and Printmaking. They always believed in me, and I will never be able to thank them enough for that.

Who were your earliest influences and how have they changed from those you have now (these can be people, film, literature, or music as well as art, anything that gets your creative juices flowing)?

Robert Rauschenberg has been my biggest influence. I can’t explain it, but his ‘Collection’ combine painting was the first artwork that made me stop in a very crowded museum and stare for 45 minutes. I visually consumed it from every angle and digested it into my brain. The only other artist whose work has stopped me dead in my tracks that way is Ben Quilty. I also really enjoy works by Cecily Brown, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jenny Saville, Margherita Manzelli and Romaine Brooks.  There’s also a giant list of Australian artists who inspire me and we’ve built a great little community of support for one another both online and in person!

I also draw inspiration from patterns found in nature. Recently I’ve begun painting figures in landscapes that feature scenes from some of my favourite spots around Sydney. If I’m ever in a creative rut, going on a hike in the bush or a swim in the ocean is a guaranteed fix!

There is a healthy dash of abstraction that you include with your figurative work, often in a very strong palette. What are you conveying to your audience with your colour choices and the boundaries between the artistic forms in your work, and just how do you choose those boundaries?

I am constantly exploring the boundary between realism and abstraction to highlight the layers and complexity of identity and place. My love of incorporating strong colour and patterns started with studying the Pre-Raphaelites, and grew with studying Kehinde Wiley. I was fascinated with textiles and patterns employed by the Pre-Raphaelites to contemplate moral issues of justice, beauty, piety and the struggle against corruption.  When I began painting women in front of their favourite patterns I was quickly introduced to the work of Kehinde Wiley, who is best known for his realistically rendered portraits of heroic figures depicted in front of decorative patterns of various cultures.  Upon realizing there was another artist exploring similar juxtapositions I looked to history for further inspiration. I was drawn to the paintings of Tenebrists like Caravaggio who worked on black gesso, painting only where the light hits a person or object. I began to incorporate bright patterned backgrounds with tenebrism, blending abstraction and pattern where the subjects shadows should be. The colours and patterns reflect the taste and personality of my Sitter.

Now for the art nerds! Could you take us through your process from the selection of subject, the decision of colour palette and style, through to the tools you use to develop your narrative -and a question that seems to vex many artists, just when do you decide a work is completed?

I choose to paint the women closest to me, or those who have become a part of my community through a mutual passion for activism in the Queer community. Once someone has agreed to sit for me we meet up at my home studio or a public park and my partner takes hundreds of photos while I sketch, ask them about colour and patterns they are drawn to and capture images of lighting or details I may want to reference later. If my sitter has the time and patience I’ll have them sit for me at the studio for a couple of hours. I find this particularly important if the subject is someone I haven’t spent a great deal of time with. I’m always staring at my friends analysing their faces for lines, colours and details which makes them infinitely easier to paint! I don’t aim to create a photo-realistic rendering, but rather to convey my impression of the subject. The ‘underpainting’ usually takes 3-10 hours, after which the painting must dry. I then paint over the entire thing for another 3-20 hours until it feels finished.

To finish with, another question on sexual identity and gender, but this time focusing more on the latter.  While there have been many openly gay male artists (just how openly depending on their times) who have been celebrated for their work, there have been very few female artists who were known to be lesbian, at least by the public, during their careers. What do you feel this has to say about extent of male domination in the industry, and what other changes would you like to see?

It’s astonishing how male-dominated painting has been in the western art canon. As a student it was exceptionally hard to find queer-identified women in mainstream art history books, so I turned to community articles and alternative texts. Two women immediately stood out to me during this pursuit. Romaine Brookes was a lesbian artist born in 1874 who painted her friends and lovers in all of their androgynous glory. Donna Evans presented ‘sexual deviants’ in such a way that 1990’s popular culture viewed them as unfeminine, aggressive, and unattractive as a result of their body hair, age, muscles etc. I can’t count myself among them as lesbian artists since I identify as Pansexual, but I absolutely feel connected to their work as women who depict queer-identified and Allied women.

I’d like to see more diversity in the mainstream art world. Let’s honour our trailblazing predecessors by educating others on the accomplishments of our diverse community. We need to support curators who are working to improve gender and racial diversity in exhibits and museum collections, and gallerists who promote artists previously overlooked by a male-dominated art world of the past.

Kim Leutwyler Social Media Accounts

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The post Notions of Beauty, Gender & Identity: An Interview with Kim Leutwyler appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

By the time that she actually began to paint works for exhibition and sale Janne Kearney already had the eye and mindset of an artist with many years of experience, and now shows she is unafraid to make radical new steps in her artwork and push the boundaries of artistic expression.

For too long I tried to paint in a loose manner, seeing it as a weakness I needed to strengthen, finally I realised this plan was flawed and knowing my strength was in realism I let my weaknesses go and decided to super power up my strengths, I never looked back after that.

You didn’t start your career as an artist until your 40’s, what prompted this decision – was it a gradual process, or was there a particular moment in time or incident that spurred your calling as a creative? Is it something you wanted to do in your earlier years, but for one reason or another you never took that leap?

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be an artist. I came from a very underprivileged background; when I was a child my mother would save the butchers paper for me to draw on. When I was 10 years old my life was interrupted with the death of my mother on Christmas Eve, my father was not an abusive but was a very emotionally remote man, a product of his era. In an act of love and misguided protection I was not permitted to go to her funeral, my father was a very quiet man who rarely spoke and never about my mother, sparing us the pain of her memory.

I was always told it would be impossible for me to go to university, it was so indoctrinated into me that I never even considered it. As for art school, I didn’t even know there was such a thing, and by the time I found out it was unattainable. My father had remarried within a year of my mother’s death, my home life became difficult and at the age of 16 and in year 11, I left home to live with my boyfriend (later to become my husband) on his very meager 1^st year apprentice wages. Life was pretty tough in those years with barely enough to eat and not enough money for bus fare to school, I would cycle a 20km round trip to school and take cookery classes for the food.

In order to survive I dropped out of school and began working as a labourer in factories, before becoming Australia’s first female apprentice painter and decorator with the Ford Motor Company. This was a brutal, totally male dominated and misogynistic place for a teenage girl to work. I endured daily bullying and rampant abuse, in my 2^nd year of this relentless harassment and after receiving death threats and being told by the independent industrial training commissioner that if I didn’t like it to “fuck off”, I decided it was just too dangerous to continue.

So, for many years I worked in paint shops selling and mixing paint, renovating houses, and raising a family. Fortunately, during my schooling as an apprentice my trade school teacher took me under his wing and taught me how to be an expert in color mixing and decorative paint finishes, this has been an invaluable skill in my fine art career.

What were you doing before you decided this was what you wanted to do, did you have any involvement in the arts in some other capacity? Did you have any formal training in the arts or any mentors during your earlier years?

When I was in my late teens I started life drawing, that was the only more or less constant creative outlet I had. During this time, I met a wonderful artist who was somewhat like a mother figure to me, she badgered me to come portrait painting with her on Mondays, and as much as I would have liked to, I was unable to because I had bills to pay and was busy working and raising a family. Then the unthinkable happened she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I managed to rearrange my work and family schedule and ‘made’ time to spend the last few months of her life taking her to community portrait painting classes.

I cherished those last few Mondays with her and had mixed feeling about painting after that, it was too painful to continue on without her, so I put painting behind me as a lost dream. One night some years later I had a dream of her so vivid it felt more like a visitation, this dream stuck with me and as if an epiphany I made the decision to leave work and start a career as a portrait artist. I figured it would take me 10 years to learn the craft and in my forties, I had no time to waste.

I have no formal art training and have just done the odd workshop here and there, it’s really been a matter of figuring things out as I went. For too long I tried to paint in a loose manner, seeing it as a weakness I needed to strengthen, finally I realised this plan was flawed and knowing my strength was in realism I let my weaknesses go and decided to super power up my strengths, I never looked back after that.

I have always felt that it takes a particular type of bravery to show your work for the public to judge, every artist always puts something of themselves into every piece they create. How did you feel before the first public showing of your work – and after? How has this changed now that your public recognition has grown?

The first time I ever showed my work publicly, it felt extremely uncomfortable, it was as if I was hanging my underwear on the wall. It took me many years before I felt comfortable even calling myself an artist, I didn’t feel worthy enough and felt quite uncomfortable with the title. It wasn’t until I started being juried into some major national and international competitions that I felt validated as an artist. What a silly thing to do wait for validation from some higher being, such a waste emotion and energy.

Talking of public recognition, how do you feel that the awards that you have won or been finalist in (two times finalist of the BP Portraiture Prize at The National Portrait Gallery, London, and winner of the 2017 Corangamarah Award, Small Works Section have affected that recognition and your own confidence in public reception of your work?

I have taken part in over 25 exhibitions across Australia, Italy and the UK, and have been a finalist in over 70 prestigious national and international Art Prizes. Won several smaller art awards, and in 2015 I was a semi-finalist in the BP and in 2017 was a finalist in the National Portrait Gallery, London, BP Portrait Prize, (considered the worlds most revered portrait prize), being hung in the top 50, after receiving over 2,700 entries from 93 countries, the award is regarded as the ‘Portraiture Oscars’.

Most recently I was awarded the prestigious Fashion Week San Diego Award (FWSD), Chosen from 3750 entries from 69 countries, the ARC is the most important realist painting prize in the US and the Americas. FWSD is an award where fashion designers will be matched with 7 winning artists’ work, the designers will create an original couture outfit and look inspired by the work of art. My winning work along with the specially designed garments will be on display with live models at the October 12^th FWSD18 opening night and remain on exhibition paired with the couture creations. FWSA ARC Award, is also a traveling award, visiting prestigious galleries in LA, New York, San Diego, MEAM, (European Museum of Modern Art), Barcelona.

For the opening night event, FWSD and ARC will hold a panel discussion to with the artists and designers to discuss the works with the artists and their partnership. In addition, that evening guests/attendees will be able to “vote” for their favourite piece and pairing. Winners will be announced the following day and additional awards will be given to the “team”/”individual” at that time.

I am also represented by Flinders Lane Gallery Melbourne. 37 Flinders Ln, Melbourne VIC 3000. Ph (03) 9654 3332.

I am in overjoyed that my work has been recognised on such prestigious and important platforms, the odds in beating so many other incredibly talents artists from all over the world is staggering. It is quite a surreal feeling, now at the age of 55 I believe I am flying the flag for the self-taught, older artists (especially women) who never thought it possible to follow your creative dream, if you work hard enough and long enough you can do it! I am looking forward to taking part in the discussion panel at FWSA, my art has taken me places I only thought possible in my dreams.

There’s another type of recognition that figurative artists in Australia have particularly struggled to achieve, that of the ‘fine art’ community. Is this something you have encountered, and how have you dealt with the apparent favouring of the conceptual over technique-driven figurative and realist artworks?

This is a very real situation, getting recognition in this country and my own regional gallery is seemly greater odds than getting in the BP or winning a major American award! I do believe the tide is slowly turning as far as appreciation of the skill required to paint figurative realism, largely thanks to organizations such as ARC, I’m just not sure we have the skill base in Australia required at the tertiary level to teach it, or that our public galleries are committed to embracing it in greater capacity.

To your work itself, you often feature themes with run-down surroundings, daubed with street art, and the subject appearing to be isolated within that environment, perhaps homeless. Is this a social and moral commentary on the plight an often forgotten part of society that you feel strongly about? Have you worked with the homeless in any capacity?

I guess in some ways the lost teens in my work reflect the struggles of my early years. My paintings ask the viewer to disregard preconceived judgements of people, society and, at times, reality, each painting invites us to contemplate life within the margins. My work often examines social issues, addressing unjust discriminatory practises, seeking to give a voice to the meek and draw an awareness and cultural change to the powerless.

Many of my paintings include a subtle rainbow motif, incorporating this symbol is in recognition of every human’s equal worth, promoting tolerance and inclusiveness for all. I started painting rainbow colors as a protest to our government’s stance on same sex marriage, an issue close to my heart.

For your references do you use people you meet in these surroundings, or do you use other references superimposed into the settings?

I mainly shoot in my studio, but I was given permission to shoot at a reinvented abandoned power station that was turn into a public art hub. It was the lighting in the space that I found most interesting, for me capturing light is the most stimulating part of the process. I always take my own photos for my reference, this has been another steep learning curve for me. My models are of family, friends and sometimes randoms I meet at various places and think they have what I am looking for, for a certain concept I have in mind.

Your use of light is particularly striking, are there other artists whose use of light in portraiture you find compelling?

Well of course the masters of light Caravaggio and Rembrandt, I had the privilege of seeing many of their works on a trip to Europe last year. Painting with such high contrasting light is challenging and is something I have been concentrating for a few years now and I love it and will continue to pursue it. I love the symbolism of light and shade as much as I do the effect resulting from the use of it, it sends a powerful message that even in our darkest of moments if we search for it we can find the light.

Who were your earliest influences and how have they changed from those you have now – these can be people, film, literature, or music as well as visual art, anything that inspires your own creativity?

I have always loved the art of Norman Rockwell, Frans Hals and Judith Leyster. It was their animated and narrative aspects of their work that inspired me the most. There are so many modern artists I love so it wouldn’t be fair of me to single any out.

Could you take us through your process from the initial concept to the completed work … and how long does that process take? Are there any particular techniques of your own that you have developed to make the process smoother, to get – and stay – in the right mindset?

I have learnt not to set any concept in stone, my creative process has become quite fluid. I will start out with one idea and grab a model head off for a shoot and then quickly see something else that grabs my attention and run with a whole new concept. I often take hundreds of photos and spend days even weeks looking over them adjusting the color and light etc in Photoshop, I do this instead of painted studies. Another thing I like to do once I have the reference ready is to get it printed off in a few different sizes, sometimes work I thought would make a great large painting actually looked better in a smaller format or vice versa.

Once my work is transferred to my canvas I always work the face up first, I guess this is a residual from the days when if I couldn’t get the head right I wouldn’t waste my time on the background.  I go straight in with color no or very little underpainting so to speak, but I do layer up my work to build up a nice variation of color in the skin tones. Some of my larger more complicated paintings I will block in very loosely with pastel, giving me more of a color guide than anything. I use a range of techniques in the one painting, from direct painting to glazing and scumbling depending on what the work requires, the whole process can take from 2 to 4 weeks painting full-time.

Janne Kearney Social Media Accounts

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The post Contemplative Brushstrokes: An Interview with Janne Kearney appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

What truly astounds is that, when seeing Jeremy Geddes’ art, you are not astonished by these things. With no flaw in the execution, nothing to tell the eye that what you are seeing is not as it truly is, then we are left wrestling with the unreal becoming real, and that takes your breath away.

Interview with Jeremy Geddes conducted in conjunction with his editorial in Issue 14 of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Jeremy Geddes  (photo credit: Bronek Kozka)

Australia seems to have produced an incredible array of hyper-realist artists over the years, painters and sculptors, each with their own unique take on the genre – Ron Mueck, Sam Jinks and Patricia Piccinini to name a few of the sculptors, and yourself, Robin Eley, Joel Rea and many, many other painters. Is it something in the water? Coincidence? A national honouring of Jeffrey Smart? What do you think?

I grew up looking at Jeffrey Smart as well as a few other Australian painters such as Rick Amor and James Gleeson. Australian art has been in an interesting position over the last one hundred years, it’s come very much from a European artistic tradition and has looked to Europe and America for inspiration, but at the same time has been very isolated. I think this has produced some distinctly Australian traits in art making, some for the better and some for the worse.

There has been a certain bleakness in much Australian art, it can be seen in music, film and the visual arts, and often is very distinctive. It’s hard to pin down exactly where it emerges from, undoubtedly Australia’s unforgiving landscape is a factor. But there has also been a dearth of technical proficiency. Much of the techniques developed in painting during the 18th and 19th century were lost in the modernist push in the early 20th century, and whilst pockets of art communities continued these traditions around the world, the Australian population was small enough that they essentially became lost to generations of painters growing up in the mid to late 20th century. As a result, many painters in Australia reinvented the wheel with technique, myself included. Again, this is no doubt positive and negative, with styles that were distinctive, but also possibly not as proficient.

The internet has ended Australia’s cultural isolation now; we are now bombarded with a tidal wave of overseas influences. It has become incredibly easy to find demonstrations of classic painting techniques online, something that was unavailable to me as I was growing up. Hopefully we can use this new technology to enrich ourselves where it is appropriate, whilst still retaining our distinctive and unique voice.

Fortress, 2013-14 [Oil on Board , 54 x 90.5cm]

Begin Again 2012 [Oil on Board, 21.5 x 25″] and detail

Your representation of the astronaut in urban landscapes poses the question – are the landscapes alien or is the astronaut? The disparity in scale in some of the works also invokes Swift’s Lilliput, the loneliness of isolation among others. Who does the astronaut represent for you?

I love the comparison to Swift, and I love disparities in scale, but these are questions I can’t and don’t answer. I’m interested in creating paintings that lack conceptual frameworks to help explain or contextualise the image. Everything I have to say about my paintings I try to say within the painting itself. I don’t create my work with an allegorical or symbolic language, I just try to work instinctively and intuitively.

The meaning of the landscapes and the figures are limited by exactly what I’ve painted, nothing else. When I’m working on them I can see various interpretations I find engaging or convincing, but these are my own stories, no more or less valid than others, and so I have no wish to share them and possibly colour other people’s perception.

Bringing it back to basics, what inspires you to create ~ and what motivates you to keep creating? Did you have artistic influences in your youth, or are you driven by other inspirations; music, literature, daytime television…?

Painting is what I do, I don’t really see it as needing external inspiration. However, whilst I’m developing a work I often use certain music pieces as a sort emotional thru line, it can help me see clearer what elements to incorporate or leave out. Podcasts and audiobooks have also been a boon, just to help me through some of the more mundane and grinding parts of the painting process.

A Perfect Vacuum, 2011 [Oil on Board, 20 x 35″]

We have many creatives in our audience and they just love the gory details of technique. Can you share your process with us, how you decide on your media (mostly oil on linen, isn’t it?) and how this has evolved over your career.

It’s essentially all oil on board these days. I’ve been using oil paints since I was young, and it’s the medium I intuitively understand now, so I’m not sure whether I ever consciously adopted it. Rather I fell into it and kept running with it. It has the most versatility of any paint medium, and so I couldn’t really think of any reason why I would abandon it now.

It terms of technique, I begin with an initial drawing up in ink, and then proceed to a thin wash over the board to outline the broad colours and tonal values. After that I proceed with the major detail pass, using fairly thick paint with little or no medium. This phase is easily the most time consuming, often taking many months. Once this has been finished, I go over most parts of the painting with thin transparent passes and glazes, modulating colours and adding additional subtlety to the surfaces. It’s a process that in its particulars is, I think, wholly my own, as it has evolved through much agonising trial and error. That said, I’m still cognisant of the many flaws it has, and at the moment I’m in the process of pulling it all apart and searching for whether there’s a more rational way to put it back together.

“I think reality at its core is a messy random unstructured storm of particles, and any order we impose is merely a figment of our imagination.”

Hypostasis, 2014 [Oil on Board, 37 x 37″]

Foundation, 2015 [Oil on Board] and detail

Ascent, 2014 [Oil on Board, 29.5 x 29.5″]

White Cosmonaut, 2009 [Oil on Board, 27 x 26″]

Your works can be described as though provoking, technically brilliant, challenging … but perhaps never as uplifting, joyous. Have you ever considered a journey on the lighter side, or would you prefer to leave that to others? …and if so, who’s work brings that other side out for you when you see it?

I see many of my works as having an uplifting quality personally. Perhaps it’s people’s initial frame of reference that colours their ultimate interpretations. My outlook on life might be classified as rather bleak I guess. I’m a materialist and nihilist who rejects any meaningful conception of free will and who sees peoples’ internal life as a muddy and incoherent conglomeration of evolved mental processes that fools itself into thinking it has a degree of independent action. I think meaningful communication is in many ways almost impossible, even amongst those other humans you might share the most commonalities with. I think reality at its core is a messy random unstructured storm of particles, and any order we impose is merely a figment of our imagination. Given that starting point, there is beauty and serenity in the smallest acts of kindness or interaction. It is all we can hope for, and that makes it all the more profound.

“Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.” ― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Jeremy Geddes and his beloved dog, Colin the whippet 

Jeremy Geddes Social Media Accounts

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The post Cosmonaut Ascent: An Interview with Jeremy Geddes appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Painting, for Jeremy, is an intensely personal process; each completed work, a piece of his soul for us to share. Therefore his need to tell us exactly, precisely, what his innermost being is attempting to express… and the genius of his art speaks to us clearly, the phrasing clear, the prose perfect, and his eloquence knows no bounds.

Interview conducted in conjunction with Jeremy Mann‘s editorial in Issue 14 of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

“No Sleep Where Sorrow Woes” for Maxwell Alexander Gallery

“The Quiet Morning’s Light” for Maxwell Alexander Gallery

Your figurative work is unabashedly romantic, and old school romance at that.  The feel is lush and decadent ~ 20’s New York or backstage at the Moulin Rouge perhaps… do you have a period you feel best suits your work, that you could see yourself living in?

Well, definitely not THIS one, that is for sure.  I can’t really place an exact time frame on when or where I should have been living, though it feels more like living in a memory.  Personally, I desire a quieter pace of life, one easily found in mountains, forests and small European villages.  I see beauty in all things antiquated, well used and made with love, crafted, educated, and aware.  Though being tuned to these sort of notes also makes one well aware of the ugliness and the torment of living in today’s world; digital, crisp, new, lazy, unaware and self-absorbed.  However, in order not to be completely insane, I have to work within the times I live.

I use antique cameras and develop the film in my basement to get the quality and accidents reminiscent of memory and hand crafted distress, which are impossible to truly obtain with digital means… though I use a monitor to paint from because it’s a form of “light”, which best emulates actually painting from life. I study, paint and draw from life with models and plein air painting constantly, but always use image references for my studio paintings because my art is a result of both what I see and know, my eyes as well as my mind.

There can be no substitute for the knowledge gained about even abstract fundamentals when learning from life, and those qualities are severely lacking in a world of artists searching for those things relying too much on digital and photo reference. So many of the things I wish to involve in my art is that strange middle space… between a scene that can exist now, but which longs for an older, “better” time now since gone. The decadence helps elevate the paintings emotion above the distress and solemnness, it adds a personal taste of women’s fashion, meant to attenuate their naturally beautiful forms with all myriad things of attraction.

Time for the inevitable inspiration/influences question, let’s try to mix it up a little though ~ who/what are your major non-painting related influences? Is there a soundtrack to your work (Gershwin perhaps?) or a book or film that you would give thanks to in your (insert award name here) acceptance speech?

Dear lord, music and film take up a massive percentage of what I would call my influences.  Hell, I have playlists upon playlists designed and oriented to imbue within me certain moods to inflict upon my paintings, blasting at full volume, dancing like a twerp and singing off-key without reservation.  So much so that I become outwardly irate for days when a simple “update to new version” of anything makes my playlists nonfunctional, or if I simply can’t find the right music for my temperament.

Very melancholic ambient or classical, dark and morose, beautifully haunting symphonies and simple piano sonatas.  Shredding blues guitar and metal music bashing heads (when once I had dreads, now just head banging a balding one) breaking brushes in mid painting while air-drumming during a solo. Whistling along with the singer songwriters of quiet afternoon summer evening songs, and the sweet sounds of some female singer’s sad stories. Ancient scratchy records from hidden French cafés. Complete albums from the Armenian churches.  You can’t pinpoint the type, but you can describe the feeling, and it is that feeling that stirs my soul while I paint. I wouldn’t dare pigeon-hole the sounds in my ears to styles or names, there are too many, and too much grey space between.

And then, when I can’t paint anymore, exhausted, mentally, physically, I love nothing more than to turn my subconscious servant to the recharging ecstasies of strange films. The films I enjoy are the meaningful, surreal, filmed and composed with artistry, the ones you must let soak into your eyes, ones that move and confuse but still make absolute sense somewhere within. If you can talk and eat during the film, it’s not usually worth watching for me.

I’m always inspired by the eastern European nations because they hover between familiar and completely otherworldly for me, an Ohio boy, raised in a country who thinks they know everything.  And the recent (a few years ago) discovery of some of the surreal films of Czechoslovakia moved me to the core. Again, I could list names, but people put too much weight on a label where its more about the idea. I would give anything to have another 24 hours in a day to pursue film making, where associations and combinations give rise to storytelling and emotions, which I hope to capture somehow in my paintings.

Those sumptuous backdrops for your figures, rich in detail and opulent to the senses ~ are those included in your references or is the reference just the figure with the backdrop the product of your own vision? Are there signature details that you tend to use often?

I struggle with my own preaching often, but that’s a good thing. And “reference is everything” is one of them.  The closer my reference is to my idea, the better the painting will possess a springboard to life. I’ve gone so far as to build my own Polaroid cameras in order to get those feelings in my references, and it’s not even the Polaroid that is the best result, but the leftover, often discarded, negative that can be brought back to life, which has the real guts I’m looking for. Life is the best reference. And as I like to combine life with my subconscious or emotive states in my paintings, I need my references to be as true to life as possible, well, at least the life I see in my mind. Therefore, my studio, my house, furniture, knickknacks, lights, all the things which I like, for one reason or another, end up as decorations in my house, and inevitably backgrounds for the paintings. Because I view my life as an artist, and not art as my job, my entirety is devoted to it, there is no line between the two, there is no “end of the workday” for me, it’s not even work, but it is difficult, stressful and exhausting for sure. I often go through phases; I had a mirror phase, a drapery phase, a tassel phase, a silky dress phase, and now progressing to ribbons, transparency and darkness. So my studio, my house, is surrounded and built up with these things you see in the paintings, changing and growing as I do, with objects melding into others, covered by new interests, dust on the old, left for a reason, combining as the remains of the background of my life.

Even, almost especially, the lighting in every room, with every fixture, candle, window shade, time of day, is devoted to inevitably ending up in a painting. I spend more time dressing and undressing the model, adorning her with all kinds of accessories and dresses, fabrics, setting up the backdrops and lighting while she’s nude, taking long exposures and messing with the cameras than the actual time it takes to paint the paintings. Reference is everything, to whatever “reference” may be.

We have many creatives in our audience and they just love the gory details of technique. Can you share your process with us, how you decide on your media and how this has evolved over your career?

Always a hatred for this question, because the answers people are looking for are not actually in the materials. I completely understand the reasoning for WHY people ask this question, why everyone wants to know, and therefore I always love answering it with something else. My MFA Thesis was a proposal where, basically, if I have the utmost amount of knowledge about the fundamentals of art, of life, of whatever I wish to call it, then it truly does NOT matter what is in my hands. which I use to make the painting, it lies within the artist themselves.

Consider this: If an artist paints with the most expensive and well cared for, baby-hair, brushes, using rare flower, hand ground pigments from mountain villages painted upon the rarest and softest high quality linens made of kitten skin, but the painting itself is complete garbage, it is still just that… fucking garbage. All those “quality” instruments not worth a damn. And yet, if another artist, with only a sheet of cardboard, some feces, a mop, and his own two, time-worn hands creates an image, a painting you can call it at that point, that stuns and amazes, moves people to tears, and is known the world over as the most moving image ever created, who is the more profound artist?

It matters not the materials that one uses, it matters that the artist creates marks and paintings using the materials, which produce those marks, which speak to that artist’s soul.  Why is it that a first year art student is always told something like “art can be whatever you make it!! But first I need you to go buy these brushes and some canvas.”  The key is in the understanding of what you wish to paint, and how to get the materials, which sing the same songs as you, to make those marks, which exemplify that which you wish to paint.  You know if a portrait looks terrible. Whether it was painted with a soft filbert, a palette knife, a corncob, a banana or a cat head, it is still terrible. But if you can use a banana to make it correct… was it the banana, or you?  Materials are just a thing to learn how to harness.  A medium, a thing between the artist and that which they are trying to expose.

For poets, they are words and rhythms. For composers its notes and mathematics. For painters, it’s whatever they can get their damn hands on. If the song is good, would it matter that the composer didn’t have a piano when he wrote it? And if the painting is good, what is the point of the question “but how was it made. What toooooooool!?”  The tool of knowledge, ya bastards, the material of experience.

For me, I discovered the rollers when I was mad and tipsy because my childish paintings looked exactly like all the students around me. I went art crazy and painted all night using every material I could think of, find, dig out of the drawers or trash, those which I wasn’t used to using and hunted for hours while painting for the elusive marks which would be solely my own. When I found the next day I had only created a 4-foot piece of garbage containing only one good mark, I was exalted, thrilled. I dug through the piles of crap on the floor to find the jerk, which made that one mark, and it was that roller. I immediately got all the rollers I could think of, experimented, and perfected its use… and I continue to perfect it to this day, over 400 paintings later.

Every day it evolves. As more people are seeing the roller as a way to get marks, I’ve moved on to other techniques involving masking, and immediacy, stains and scrapings using weather stripping, door jams, four-foot rubber rollers, home built four-foot scraper bars, spatulas, razor blades, wine bottles, my own spit, shitty brushes, eight-inch blades… whatever. Once that tool is learned to the point I’m comfortable with the marks I know how to make with it, I retain that weapon, and search for newer marks using different techniques than ever before. Often with failure, but sometimes with a great discovery.

It’s the guts to make those failures that eventually produce some of the most meaningful things for an artist, hell, just for life in general. So my suggestion to anyone is to do just that; have the guts, experiment, but all the while be intelligent and knowledgeable. Despite how it seems out there, it’s quite obvious when art is created with flare and pizzazz and not a lot of intelligence. Lots of smoke, no barbecue.

Your two distinctive streams of work, the figurative pieces and the cityscapes, share stylistic touches but not much else. Do you have a different mindset when you are creating these, a particular mood that is more suited to one than the other??

I feel as though I am an artist without boundaries. I revolt at the thought of being coined a “cityscape painter” or “figure painter.” I actually developed as quite an abstract painter, and have a lot of expertise and love for photography.  Every seemingly different subject I approach serves its own purpose. The aggression and grit that exists within my cityscapes evolves from my distaste for modern concrete jungles full of bumbling people.  There are certain types of personalities I love to be around, and those characters are not often found within crowds and masses. So cities, fast and heavy with cement grey slate slabs crowded with populations and neon unnatural lights, give me a miasma of distasteful things with which to pour that aggression out upon the panels I paint on. But see it not as simply childish anger, it’s like facing my fears while focusing on foundations.

You see, every cityscape painting in itself, I view and approach as a creation of naturally intangible foundations of art, balance, harmony, composition, color arrangements, line, shape, value and the inexorable qualities of light. To focus upon the, which underlie all things in life, try to see that beauty in something, which fills me with sorrow and depression, and create a painting out of it, is the challenge I impose upon myself. A hundred challenges a day to keep me on my blistered toes.

These things, I learn from the cityscapes, find their way into my figure work. The pace and emotion is different, the adoration of the figure and things like softness and longing are different from the cityscapes, but those foundations are still there. And often, marks from the cityscape, should I have the balls enough to destroy the things I care so much about, find their ways across the figure as well. What I garner from the peace and love I have of nature while plein air painting, can be found in the rendering and edges of the figures, in their flow and her skin, the fabric and light which lays upon her… and in many more places.

The photographs I’ve been taking, the sketching with thin 2b mechanical pencils and solid dark unending 6b heavy pressed outlines also find their way into my paintings, as well as the reductive techniques I use in painting end up with the powders and erasers I use in graphite drawings. They all cross paths through these same hands because they are all just as jumbled and mixed up in my mind. If I could not bounce between subjects, I’d go mad, like not being able to explain how I feel because I haven’t learned the words.

Jeremy Mann Social Media Accounts

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Interview with Martin Wittfooth  in conjunction with his editorial in Issue 017 of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Martin Wittfooth

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Interview with Martin Wittfooth

When looking at your work and trying to nail down a specific influence I must admit I was stumped! While surreal-realism (or is that realistic-surrealism?) is widely practiced today, with your use of the classical techniques, when combined with the animal as protagonist, you seem to have found a voice that is exclusively yours.  Did you set out to present something unique, or is this something that evolved with your artistic practice?

I arrived at my “style” through a long period of searching, trying different techniques, trying to emulate something a previous artist had been able to evoke in a work. It felt like a long time just trying to figure something out, and there’s no clear point in time where it felt that things clicked together and my work began to feel like my own, and not just derivative of something that I was trying to learn from. I’ve picked up a lot of ideas and pointers from visiting galleries and museums, and while living in New York I have gotten to do quite a bit of that, and in that same time my work has arrived at some place that I feel is its own organic thing; still going through changes and new explorations but with a more solid base to launch from.

While I am sure that you are asked often about your use of animals as the centrepiece of your works, as an analogy for the impact of man on the world… well, I’m not going to be any different! What I would particularly like to know though, is about when you made the conscious decision to exclude the human form from your work. What was the germination of this central theme of your oeuvre?

I decided to remove the human figure from my work (yet retain a suggestion that a human fingerprint has an influence on the scenes I paint) sometime during my two-year Masters program when I first moved to New York in 2006. I wanted to see if I could express emotion and ideas without the aid of a human agent. Earlier I thought about incorporating human forms but found that in an attempt to carve out my own identity as a painter I stylized them heavily and didn’t feel that I could bring forth a kind of gravity that I was seeking to work with. Once I removed the human figure this started to emerge. I attended a lot of painting classes back then and feel like my skills grew in conjunction with this new avenue of exploration, and now a decade later I’m still on that path.

With your upbringing in Canada and Finland, the move to NYC must have been a shock to the system. Did you feel a disconnect from the motivations and style of the tutors and other students at the School of Visual Arts because of this?

The program at SVA had twenty students per year, and everyone I shared that program with had their own ideas of what they wanted to achieve and aspire to. Some went into editorial illustration, others to creating children’s books, and myself and maybe one other person decided to pursue the gallery art route. So in a sense I was out there on my own, but the school made a point to connect everyone with artists and events that might be of specific interest to them, so I felt that there was good support despite me flying solo so to speak. That was a valuable lesson in itself: to be tasked with finding an independent direction and exploring it deeply, in a brand new environment filled to the brim with intimidating but enormously inspiring talent. I wouldn’t change anything about the experience.

The other striking aspect of your work – overall that is, there are many striking features to individual pieces – is the classical style. Who were your main influences, and do you use classical techniques or have you created your own to replicate that style?

I like to think of my style as a stew of a lot of different influences, the majority of them classical. I like to use this as a symbolic device, insofar as it might suggest a reminder to a bygone kind of spiritual connection to the world around us – a world that our materially-obsessed species has exploited, pushed to the margins, and largely forgotten. It might just be subjective, but the dance with paint (and clay and bronze in sculpture) in certain classical pieces feels somehow deeply connected to a dialoguing with the living world happening outside of the limited human story, while simultaneously playing with the magic of symbolism and allegory to speak to us of the human condition in the time that it was created. The philosophies, the struggles, the highs and the lows, the “vibe”, so to speak. It’s all there, if we follow the lineage of image-making all the way back to the caves. My artwork turns to a relatively short period in European painting history for the majority of its technical inspiration, as there’s something there that conveys a feeling that just fits right. That said, I want my work to feel trapped in two worlds: the nostalgic past, and the troubled now.

Could you let us know about your process, how do you move from initial conception to completed work, and which part of that process do you find the most demanding?

With an idea in mind for an image, I start with a small thumbnail sketch and make some written notes to myself, to just figure out key concepts and compositional elements. From this stage, I often go on a reference quest to shoot things that will be useful to look at for whatever I’ve chosen to include in the painting. I compile everything into a digital composition, and once that is pretty well worked out I move onto the painting stage. I tend to abandon the digital comp about halfway through the painting so as to move into a kind of playful mode where I just let the painting dictate what it wants to do. This stage generally feels the most rewarding to me. It’s often difficult to figure out exactly when a painting is finished, so that can often be the most frustrating part, to know when to fold em.

Do you want your work to document the adverse effects of humanity upon the natural world, or do you want to educate / change behaviour among your audience?

I guess maybe both, though I don’t like to paint with a “phantom audience” in mind. Ultimately, I’m really just painting for myself, with risk of sounding selfish. The reason I may object to that adjective being placed on my approach is that I think that the themes I’m working with are of genuine interest to me (they trouble me), and when translated from a sincere place I think that art has the best chance at honestly connecting with a viewer. In other words, just making the work because it feels like it needs to be made, without real regard to the result, tends to yield work that is free or pretense, and feels genuine. I’m not someone with a subjective story that I find interesting enough to paint about, but our collective situation as a species, at odds with the very world we emerge out of, is something that I care to comment about, to explore through allegory. I hope that it resonates with those that see the work I make, but ultimately I’d also like for everyone to have an individual response to it, rather than be told clearly what it is they “ought” to see.

Martin Wittfooth Social Media Accounts

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Beautiful Bizarre was fortunate to have a conversation with Kent for Issue 013, to take our readers into the studio with him and shed some light on his background, his inspirations, and his creative process.

Interview conducted in conjunction with Kent Williams editorial in Issue 013 of Beautiful Bizarre. We hope you enjoy!

Kent Williams

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How much of an influence was art to you in your early years? Did you find support and inspiration in becoming a creative from within your family?

I’ve been drawing or picture-making since I can remember. My earliest images consisted of monsters and creatures that were very much influenced by the Universal and Hammer horror films. No artistic influence from my family except possibly my father’s desire to do things right and well, and his ability to most often achieve this. I wouldn’t say there was an over-abundance of encouragement (my parents certainly had the fear of the standard perception of the “starving artist” model), but there wasn’t discouragement either. They supported me for sure ~ probably based on them seeing me follow through to completion with other interests that I had in my youth.

Who were your early inspirations in art?

It was in college, when I moved to New York, that the whole of the art world opened up to me. I don’t recall having ever visited a proper gallery or art museum as a kid. Whatever exposure I had, I got from art books and magazines, I suppose. My move to New York – in the middle of the art world – was the first time I was exposed to all that New York had to offer, and I soaked it all up like a sponge. I fell in love with it all: going to the Met and MOMA and seeing all those originals for the first time. I discovered Egon Schiele and Degas, Franz Kline and de Kooning; I saw Rembrandts and Francis Bacons for the first time! That raw, unencumbered energy of Bacon was fuel for the fire! – and along those lines, it wasn’t very different than what I got from Frank Frazetta, whom I had a passion for when I was in high school. I started developing a taste for artists who I didn’t even know about just a year earlier. Was having discussions about Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel in school, and I had an immediate attachment to the paintings by Leon Golub.

What do you think is the main difference stylistically and thematically between your graphic novel / comic work and your fine art practice. Do you find there is much cross-over in your process or do you maintain a conscious separation between the two? 

I don’t see, and I think most people would agree, that there is a difference stylistically between my graphic novel work and my “fine art practice.” I draw and paint the way I draw and paint. I’m not assuming a “style” regardless of the medium I’m working in. My language or voice is my voice. Thematically, or content-wise, naturally there’s a difference. With the graphic novel, I’m storytelling. With the other, I’m usually responding with an emotive and analytic reaction to a given thing. Highly personal. Both can be this, I suppose, but they’re very different vehicles.

If you’re seeing a difference, it’s probably simply that I haven’t done any graphic novel work in over a decade, and naturally – hopefully, my work itself has developed, grown during this stretch of time.

I’m going to quote myself here: Style (a term I generally shy away from when used in the context of art) should not be something one consciously chooses and places upon oneself. Style, or one’s artistic language, is something that comes about as a by-product of sweat equity during the sincere pursuit of something better than he or she is capable of doing. I hear so often from other artists, especially students, about wanting to “find a style.” But in so many cases these folks are not willing to put in what it takes for this to happen: to put in and to discover the passion for observation, for drawing, for looking outside of their insular worlds – to feed and nourish the passion that will ultimately lead, by the act of doing, to a personal language. They think they can kind of just step in and choose a “style.” The pursuit should never be to find a style, but rather to look, to discover, to soak in, and then to transcribe as best he or she can. And through this most simple and complex WORK, one’s look, or language, or style will develop on its own.

The blurring of abstraction with realism to a greater or lesser degree is a signature of your work ~ what process do you to decide the boundaries, and do you do it from a particular direction i.e. here realism ends and abstraction begins or vice-versa?

By incorporating both of these extremes in my paintings I am able to weave the tangible with the intangible. This incorporation of disparate calligraphy generates a sort of electricity, a juxtaposition of opposing forces that makes come alive the human aspects of my picture-making and/or meaning. Also, quite frankly, including both – or creating a world where both can exist – allows me the opportunity to bring into play my enthusiasm for, and influences from, historical and contemporary art. Real estate where the blessed and forsaken can play together.

Portions of fabrics, often with traditional Japanese patterns or themes, are a frequent element of your work – is there a particular relevance of this for you?

I’ve always seemed to be more interested in peoples and cultures other than those that immediately surround me. As a kid, I was particularly interested in Native Americans, which I suppose I could partly attribute to my family’s part Cherokee lineage. Honestly, though, I think a lot of my cultural interests were initially stimulated by going to the movies so much as a kid and watching films like ‘A Man Called Horse,’ for example. I remember so vividly witnessing the bear claws buried in Richard Harris’ chest as he spun ritualistically in the middle of the tribal lodge with the sun bearing down on him from the roof opening, and all of the members of the tribe looking on. A ceremony in which he was becoming a member of the tribe, I believe? This and other films, at a time when Native Americans started to no longer solely be portrayed as the enemy, shaped my connection with other worlds. I was always more than happy to play the “indian” when we played cowboy and indians with my friends. I wanted the bow and arrows, when they wanted the guns.

And then Bruce Lee came along for me at around age 10 or 11. I really do contribute a lot of my love and ability for drawing the human form to discovering Bruce Lee. I must have drawn thousands of pictures of him, copied from magazine after magazine. Anything Bruce Lee that I could get my hands on, I would grab up. That obsession led to my interest in the martial arts, in particular Okinawan Karate, which then led to my interest in the films of Akira Kurosawa, and so on and so on.

Of course, Japanese art had a large influence, especially compositionally speaking, on the Impressionists and other artists of that era — artists that had a large impact on my work, such as Degas, Whistler, Bonnard.

I’m just taking all this further, in different combinations, and with a contemporary mindset.

Kent Williams is represented by KP Projects in Los Angeles, CA and EVOKE Contemporary in Santa Fe, NM

www.kentwilliams.com

The post Take Hold of the Human Condition: Interview with Kent Williams appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Dirk’s name will be very familiar to followers of PoetsArtists, indeed he was one of the first artists published by PoetsArtists to have their work acquired into a major collection. Entirely self-taught, Dirk is the epitome of the modern figurative artist, achieving success and acclaim in spite of the prevailing opinion of the ‘fine art’ establishment. His hyper-realistic drawings and paintings feature carefully elaborated stagings of light and shadow, revealing the sensitivity and vulnerability of his models. An extreme level of detail in combination with calculated set of light create an enigmatic mood of melancholic beauty in his images. Dirk’s work has been exhibited in the US, Europe and Tokyo and are part of numerous international private collections.

presents

Figurative Realism

Dec 1, 2018 – Jun 1, 2019

Interview with curator Dirk Dzimirsky

What inspired you to curate this show, is it your first experience curating? How are you finding the process?

Yes, this is my first experience in curating, and I actually found it quite hard to do. My major problem was that with every artwork that I did not choose I felt the need to tell the artist why. A lot of submitting artists were good but they were lacking certain elements that I would have loved to discuss with the artist, and then maybe the artist could learn from that.  But I felt that a mere rejection might just leave the artist frustrated and wondering what might be wrong with their art.

Susannah Martin
“Reservoir”, 2018 [oil on linen, 20 x 20″]

Daire Lynch
“The Call Of The Wretched Sea” [oil on panel, 28 x 20″]

Anne Christine Roda
“Manya IV” [oil on panel, 27 x 27″]

June Stratton
“Maggie Watcher” [oil on linen, 20 x 20″]
 

Are you keeping strictly to the realism part of the exhibition & issue title, or do works also featuring surrealism / pop surrealism play a part?

No, I have also included other art styles. I wanted to make sure there was a diversity of styles, it can get tiresome to look at one art style all the time, especially if a lot of the artworks are quite similar.

Kimberly Dow
“Beguiled” [oil on canvas, 27 x 30″]

Barbara Fox
“Parting With Illusions” [charcoal & pastel on paper, 21 x 10″]

Miriam Escofet
“Portrait of Sophia” [oil on linen over panel, 70 x 50 cm]

Geoffrey Laurence
“Nightingale” [oil on canvas, 26 x 86″]
 

It seems (at long last!) that contemporary figurative works and an appreciation of skill and technique are beginning to penetrate the fine art / museum world. Do you believe that the democratisation of art through the internet & social media has played a part in this? What other factors do you feel may have been important?

Because of the internet emerging artists can now promote themselves as never before, and seeing their art of course inspires others to start creating art themselves. I don’t have any exact numbers to back this, but I am certain that we have more people creating art than every before. So it is just a matter of time before the best of these new artists are getting their own voice in the art world, and not only on the internet. It’s very gratifying to read and see that I also have inspired a lot of new young artists.

Mary Chiaramonte
“Remember Me” [oil on panel, 18 x 24″]

Ramos Christina
“Maternal” [acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24″]
 

Matthew Quick
“The Rules of Engagement” [oil on linen, 120 x 100cm]

Aixa Oliveras
“Resilience” [oil on linen, 30 x 24″]
 

Being self-taught you don’t necessarily view your process or other artists work through the prism of acts academia. How do you feel this has shaped your career as an artist?

When I started drawing and painting realism, and particularly hyper-realism, was a genre rejected by every art academy here in Germany. It still largely is, but despite this you see more and more realism art in galleries and museums here. If I had studied art here (not that ever I wanted to) I would not have had an artistic career. German art elitists have a really disturbing and discouraging attitude towards realism in art.

Riley Doyle
“Reconnect” [oil on panel, 48 x 72″]

F S Hess
“The Dream Of Art History” [oil on canvas, 54 x 96″]

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According to Wikipedia, The human condition is “the characteristics, key events, and situations which compose the essentials of human existence, such as birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, and mortality. This is a very broad topic which has been and continues to be pondered and analyzed from many perspectives, including those of religion, philosophy, art, literature, anthropology, psychology, and biology. As a literary term, “the human condition” is typically used in the context of ambiguous subjects such as the meaning of life or moral concerns.”

It seems we humans are in a predicament, spawned from our inability to understand our state of “imperfection.” Some philosophers posit that this arises from the premise of “good and evil” in our nature. We humans are capable of horrific acts, such as murder, torture, rape, etc. We are aggressive and selfish, yet we can be cooperative, selfless and loving. We struggle with this incongruent state of being, which produces feelings of guilt within us. Our behavior goes beyond instinct, having psychological facets that involve our conscious, sentient minds. We are egocentric, deceitful, arrogant, jealous, mean, insincere, immoral, etc. Our imperfection is not driven by animal instinct; rather, it is derived from our conscious, human minds. We are flawed beings, and it bothers us greatly.

Despite the negative aspects of our being, we also possess a moral conscience, imbued with a caring sense of unconditional altruism and the capacity for kindness and love. The struggle we face creates a dilemma within us, often causing us to deny our human condition. It is something we often shy away from, as it is at the root of so much misery in the world. Yet, it can be the source of so much good. Our human condition is a state of imperfection.

The subject for this theme is vast, giving the invited artists very wide latitude in creating their expressions of the human condition. Each artist is asked to ponder and explore aspects of the theme that appeals to them and challenge their sensibility. The work should focus upon the human figure within the context of the theme.

THE HUMAN CONDITION

AnArte Gallery

7959 Broadway Street, Suite 404
San Antonio, TX 78209 | 210.826.5674

Opening Reception:
November 1, 2018 | 5:30 to 8:00pm

A Poets and Artists Exhibition

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Daryl Zang
Jennifer Balkan
Johan Barrios
Teresa Elliott
Madelyn Sneed-Grays
Regina Jacobson
Stanka Kordic
Karen Offutt
Mario Robinson
Victor Wang
Pamela Wilson
Anna Wypych

“The Crow”  by Victor Wang; Oil/Collage on Canvas; 53″ x 50″

“Still a Negro” by Madelyn Sneed-Grays; Oil on Canvas; 48″ x 36″

“Just as I am” by Regina Jacobson; Oil on Birch; 46″ x 40″

“Discernment” by Stanka Kordic; Oil on Panel; 36″ x 36″

“Within” by Jennifer Balkan; Oil on Canvas; 60″ x 60″

“Fifteen Minutes” by Daryl Zang; Oil on Canvas; 42″ x 50″

“Wallflower” by Karen Offutt; Oil on Panel; 24″ x 20″

The post The Human Condition: A Poets & Artists Exhibition @ AnArte Gallery appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Curator Samuel Peralta has selected a compilation of science fiction art which reflects both the intellectual and emotional variety of science fiction itself. It is by turns utopian and apocalyptic – technologically “hard” and metaphorically “soft” – fun and tragic – exuberantly colorful and calmly monochromatic.

Chronicles of a Future Foretold

A Poets and Artists exhibition

33 Contemporary Gallery

1029 W 35th St, Chicago

Exhibition Dates: August 17 to September 14, 2018

Opening: Friday, August 17 from 7 to 10 pm

Featured artists:

Albert Sultan, Astrid Ritmeester, Brianna Lee, Boris Vallejo, Cheney Lansard, David Molesky, David Versluis, Debra Livingston, Donna Bates, Jan Nelson, John Hyland, Julie Bell, Kelly Matthews, Kerra Taylor, Lauren Bergman, Mariana Duarte Santos, Matthew James Collins, Michael Bergt, Michael Jewula, Pauline Aubey, Shana Levenson, Viktoria Savenkova, Zack Zdrale.

Chronicles of the Future Foretold book available HERE

Daniel Maidman of Poets and Artists previews the exhibition with a few of his personal standouts:

For me, part of the original and primary purpose of science fiction was to project oneself into the city of the future. Sultan’s cityscape captures the fizzing excitement of the soaring city, the city from which one sees only more city in all directions, the city of motion, of disrespect for gravity, of sleek and rapid movement, of a million stories unfolding at once. It captures the excitement of the technological future.

Albert Leon Sultan, Destruction of the Ten Sephirot, oil on canvas,  diptych, 60″ x 120″

At another pole of science fiction is the space opera, the age-old adventure story, with its romance and derring-do, reset on other planets, with all the armor, weapons, monsters and powers that territory allows. Vallejo is one of the very few masters who helped to define and extend the look of this particular strain of science fiction.

Boris Vallejo, Not One More Step, oil on board, 28”x20”

There is little of the science fiction set piece about this painting, but it captures the penetrative quality of science fiction, the sense that one will confront the future at the level of the flesh, and the flesh will be transformed. The ant’s-eye view of the human body in confrontation with futurity is an important theme in science fiction, even if it has absolutely failed to help us recognize the sheer weirdness of the cyborg future, which has, in fact, already been here for decades.

Cheney Lansard, Channel X, acrylic on birch, 13”x20”

We see here yet another element of the giant terrain available to science fiction. Here is science fiction as low-budget theater. This is not a denigration at all. It is in the low-budget theater, without the distraction of special effects, with only the simplest of props that we are able to encounter the drama of pure human situations and awaken our imaginations to animate an entire vivid universe.

Kerra Taylor, The Fear, oil on wood panel, 12”x16”

For me, this piece captures an essential element of science fiction as tradition. Childhood is a time of fascination with the future – both the personal future, which will obviously be so different from the present, and the universal future of the species and the cosmos. One thing children do with this fascination is make doodles. This piece is about how science fiction is passed down from one generation to the next, SF-oriented children absorbing their spiritual forebears’ visions of the future as they grow into their own.

Mariana Duarte Santos, The Future Told By The Past, pen and watercolor, 7.4”x15.7”

In my personal experience with the idea of science fiction, there has always been this as well – the recurrence of the past, of all cultures and artifacts; the idea that the past is not lost, and will appear again and again in brightly-colored recombination. It stands in counterpoint to the metallic future, to the premise that the future will represent a brutally clean, utilitarian break from the ornamental and decorative impulses of the entire history of humanity. In the recurrent-past future, culture is a gigantic, shimmering tapestry, visible where it always is – in art, everyday objects, and fashion. Bergt captures that science fiction vision here.

Michael Bergt, Traditions, 
gouache, color pencil 19.25”x14.5”

Finally, we have Zdrale’s Seer, which answers to the tradition of literary science fiction. It does not take delight in technological design, the enhanced abilities of men and tools, the panorama of the stars. Rather, these form a minimally sketched-in backdrop for exploration of eternal human themes. The hinted-at fires in the distance, the understated performance of powers under the title of seer, these are the least fantastic images one can use, while remaining in the realm of the fantastic, as one seeks to elucidate some fundamental human truth available only through this slight disconnect from the restrictions of the real.

Zack Zdrale, Seer, oil on panel, 24”x18”

Other work from the ‘Chronicles of a Future Foretold’ exhibition

Brianna Lee
A Cautionary Tale | oil on panel | 15” x 30”

The post Chronicles of a Future Foretold – a Poets & Artists Exhibition @ 33 Contemporary appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Please enjoy this intriguing interview with Scott by Natalie Holland of Poets & Artists. In addition to being a frequent contributor to Poets & Artists, Natalie is herself a talented and lauded figurative artist, having had works displayed at London’s National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Scott teaching at Laguna College of Art and Design – photo by Carol Covarrubias

Natural Selection

Scott Hess was born in Baltimore in 1955. His family moved to Sarasota, where his parents divorced when Scott was seven.As a response to that, he started making a series of bondage drawings. He didn’t realize at the time that those nude bound women represented his mother, who he was trying to control. Little did he know that the erotic drawings he created out of personal psychological necessity marked his birth as an artist.

Scott got his BSA in Fine Art from the UW-Madison in 1977. The painting department was primarily abstract, so he stayed with drawing and printmaking where he could do figurative work. His desire to learn to paint brought him to the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, which he attended from 1979 to 1983 in the Meisterschule Rudolf Hausner. There, he  had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Herzog, 1979,  and thus started making a living from art.

Looking back at his artistic career, he reflects upon the driving force behind his creativity.

“You can’t control the world, but you can control what goes onto your canvases. In the studio I am a god. And like any god what gives you the most joy is bringing the creatures you are inventing to life. I especially like developing the psychology of the people in my paintings, delving into what makes them tick, and expressing their interactions visually. People have always been at the core of what my work is about.”

Los Angeles

Despite being a god in the studio, the process of creating art doesn’t usually makes him happy. Scott simply doesn’t think the enjoyment is the goal; painting for him is pure grunt work.

“I often come into the house grumpy as hell after a full day in the studio. What painting does give me ultimately is a sense of fulfillment that is greater than anything else I’ve done in my life. That said, the anticipation during planning a work, and the first half of painting it, are more enjoyable than the second half where I have to polish and perfect the image. The work never turns out to be quite as wonderful as it was in the initial vision.”

Scott works at the large two-car garage attached to his home.

“The space is ugly and raw. My studio is a mess, there is stuff everywhere and chaos reigns. This rarely bothers me. When I’m working my consciousness slips behind the picture plane and stays there as I paint. I clean up the studio when I have visitors because they’d otherwise be disgusted.”

He doesn’t have a favorite tool, or color, or brush.

“I have a limited number of artists’ materials that I need to make my work, but I need it all to accomplish anything. There’s nothing exotic about any of it, just colored muds, sticks with hairs glued on the end, and some woven fabric support. Making paintings is like alchemy: you turn mud to gold.”

Allegory of Mud

However, turning mud to gold doesn’t mean that the result will be a pretty picture. Scott doesn’t aim to please, he doesn’t want to decorate your house or put you at ease.

“I think I want you to feel compelled to love my work despite being deeply disturbed by it. Human emotions and psychological issues are messy and complex beyond belief. We are attracted to our own odd desires, often unwillingly, and I like finding that edge between attraction, repulsion, and obsession. I find my works beautiful, but I know that over the years a lot more people are freaked out by my paintings than share my sense of beauty. But when you do find those people who share it, you’ve connected to a kindred soul.”

 Although sometimes current social or political issues find the way into his work, the true source of his inspiration is his own experience of life.

“Usually the content has more direct links to things  like relationship issues, parenting and family, ageing and mortality. These are timeless and universal concerns that get filtered through my unique experience of them. Political work often has a short lifespan so I tend to avoid it, though I might add some things that I find humorous that connect to current affairs.”

Indeed, he did put Trump and Hilary Clinton into a show piece he created using his own students and professional models.

Triumph of Democracy

With the career that now spans more than forty years, there have been many milestones that Scott recalls, and one exhibition in particular.

“My most popular exhibition was The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation. It was an exhibition of 102 objects that told my missing father’s family history since 1634. I had to invent the artists and artifacts they made to tell that story and use every variety of skill that I’ve ever acquired to do it.

The exhibition traveled to five museum venues, mostly across the Southern United States. It was a success also because so many museums don’t want to see skilled representational painting hanging on their walls.”

Another milestone was his sixty painting retrospective at the Municipal Art Gallery of Los Angeles in 2014. The show went on simultaneously at Begovich Gallery at Cal State-Fullerton, and although the retrospective didn’t travel anywhere, Scott was proud of a four decade span of work, followed by the book that is available on Amazon.

Apart from successful exhibitions, he finds that survival as an artist can be tough.

“Besides the highs and lows of art world attention, there is a financial hurdle that many find insurmountable. You have to realize that this career has some wonderful high points, where the money flows and everybody seems to love you, and incredible lows where you are broke and nobody gives a shit about what you do. Add a family of four to the mix, and mortgage payments, and all the other expenditures of life, and it can get scary as the bank account dwindles. I am lucky my wife has been very supportive and has an innate sense of frugality. As a family we were never wasteful, drove older cars, and lived modestly. Somehow we got through it, the kids are grown, and life at the moment seems pretty solid.”

However, Scott finds that the hardest part of being an artist today is actually making something that people are interested in.

“Your first job as an artist is to get a viewer’s attention, and if you don’t you’ve failed. It’s over. Today there is such a glut of imagery, a daily online inundation of paintings, drawings, and photographs, that rising above that tide is a feat in itself. Then, having their attention, how do you hold them, give them a deeper experience or something to ponder? Things seem to be moving really fast in our hyper-technological world, and as an artist you have to adapt to that new reality in some fashion -or risk being irrelevant.”

Despite acknowledging the importance of presence on-line, Scott doesn’t have a personal website – because he simply hasn’t found he needs one. However, having said that, Scott does consider the Internet a useful and necessary tool to search out new opportunities.

“I post on Facebook and Instagram, and have Twitter, Tumblr, Ello, and Linked-In accounts; Poets & Artists has published a fair amount of my work over the years. I realized that a lot of things have happened in my career over the last ten years that simply would not have occurred if I’d not been posting online. It is logic: if you post, then opportunity knocks when it sees your beautiful door. If you have no door, opportunity passes you by.”

Table

He adds that being of an age and having a long record of shows imply that most opportunities seek him out.

“I get invited to participate in quite a few group shows every year, solo shows seem to come along when needed, and museums are acquiring works here and there. I’ve also have had a hand in training a whole generation of figurative artists. I enjoy helping them out when I can and recently curated a couple of shows that included a group of former students mixed in with established artists.”

When it comes to the business side of being an artist, Scott admits that he has never been very good at it.

“I think to be really highly successful, at a Jeff Koons or Damien Hurst level, you have to be 95% businessman, and 5% artist. If you enjoy business, then I guess that is fine. I just enjoy making my paintings too much to pay greater attention to the business side of the equation. I do just enough business to keep it viable.

It used to be the interaction with the galleries, curators, and critics that took up your time, but that seems to have lessened as the amount of time spent online has increased. I hate Instagram, because I think it is cheapening art and influencing the art that is made today. I think of Instagram as a necessity, just like trying to find a gallery once was. Both actions had some very unpleasant aspects, but you hold your nose and do it.”

By the end of the interview, Scott has been asked to name his favorite work, and he chose his current piece that is based on a dream from 1978.

Dream of Art (WIP)

“I was sick, with a high fever, and dreamed that the history of art was coming out of our second floor toilet, like a giant mummy-worm full of paintings and sculptures. It rumbled down the hallway, out the door, and down the highway. Suddenly I was caught up in the history of Art, and it was horrible. I was wrapped up with a couple of paintings that had made me famous and was bouncing uncomfortably down the highway when the history of art was struck by a Cadillac Eldorado. I was blown out of it into a nearby ditch, and as I lay dying my last words were, “Thank God I’m not in the History of Art anymore!” I woke up then, and 40 years later I am making a painting about that dream, my legacy, and my own mortality. It has the spiral of art history, which is not unlike the daily cascade of online imagery, and some muses or guardian angels flying in around the breach of the Cadillac. The three women are nude because I don’t know what guardian angels wear, and one of them seems to want to ward off death, the skeleton figure to the right. There are thousands of little images from art history.”

This canvas has taken him the better part of a year to paint. 

“In the studio I am a god – and  like any god what gives you the most joy is bringing the creatures you are inventing to life,” -F. Scott Hess, the artist

Interview courtesy of Poets & Artists

The post In the studio I am a god: an interview with F. Scott Hess appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Many thanks to co-curator Walt Morton for this insightful essay on the power of the figure in art.

Painting the Figure Now

Co-curated by Didi Menendez from Poets & Artists and Walt Morton

Wausau Museum Of Contemporary Art

Wausau, Wisconsin USA

July 7 – September 28, 2018

Rebecca Leveille

Why paint the human figure now?

People have been illustrating the human figure for at least 30,000 years. There are worldwide paintings on rock walls that indicate a primordial desire to express the human form. Five thousand years ago, Egyptian artists painted complex figures on the walls of tombs. Around the year 900 CE, human figures were carefully rendered in illuminated bibles. Innovation in figurative painting ignited in the late 1400’s with Leonardo DaVinci who invented convincing ways to express dimensional drawing effects and to paint light and shadow. DaVinci gave rise to the next five hundred years in painting history, where artists advanced the craft of figure painting and portrait painting to an all-time high. This was a progression that took centuries of accumulated knowledge and invention, usually passed hand-to-hand, ceremoniously after years of hard labor, from master to student. You had to grind your own paint. Nobody had a digital camera. And there was no internet.

Tim Okamura

F Scott Hess

Fast forward to 2018, artists continue painting the human figure. Why haven’t we exhausted the subject after all this time?

For one, figurative art investigates our identity: who we are and what we are. What does it mean to be a human being? In the past, figurative art was often nationalistic, celebrating cultural heroes loved by a mass of admirers. An example is Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze (1851, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). But the internet has fractured traditional barriers of region and identity and created a million tiny social networks and countless digital tribes. More than at any time previously in history, humans have the power to choose who they’ll talk to. Chat happens anywhere on planet Earth with wifi. Distance is no longer is a limiting factor. You can pick your digital tribe, and membership may be spread from Moscow to Buenos Aires.

Who are your people now? It’s your circle of friends, chatting and messaging on a multitude of digital devices. Your followers on Instagram care deeply about you. Everybody is a “brand” today, and skilled self-marketers speak to their followers with emotional images that shape thought itself. The images you see in someone’s Instagram stream define your idea of that artist and their identity. Yet it’s very unlikely you’ve met them in the flesh. The structure of communication across these smart phones, tablets, and laptops is deep, not superficial. It affects viewers’ thinking, a concept popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. When artists paint a figure, they are actively encoding ideas about identity into the work. The art might be about female identity, gay identity, Latino identity, or any micro-subcultural group. The fact that it’s a painting underscores the hands-on designed encoding of ideas. A painting is not a found object like a photograph. Every bit of a painting (be it blobs of paint, marks, or color choices) is a result of human direct intention to code specific things. The whole point of the exercise allows a viewer to decode the art and extract some message. If the message is agreeable and well-executed, the viewer may get out a Citibank VISA card and buy the art. Buying art is a cash vote for solidarity around ideas of identity and representation.

Tina Spratt

Natalia Fabia

No matter how fringe, the internet has an identity-matching group for you. If you want to chat about Marvel’s new gay black Spider-Man, there is a community interested in probing this identity and welcoming any new visuals to support the discussion. If you draw or paint gay black Spider-Man, people will be hotly interested in how you present this figure. Your painting tells us what you think it means to look gay. And to look black. And to look like Spider-Man. In this new configuration, a painting of gay black Spider-Man becomes an icon, a thing charged with extra meaning beyond what is literally seen, and the icon speaks to an in-group of followers on a privileged channel.

One of the reasons superhero movies are popular now is we’re all interested in the idea of flexible identity and especially the key super-power of shifting your identity, a shift always signaled by a costume change in what the figure wears. A mask, a cape, the visual change overlies something deeper down, normally hidden. There is an implicit thrill in the idea of having a secret identity, an urge that runs counter to an equally strong impulse to be open about yourself. Back in 1969, if you were a Star Trek fan, you were likely in the closet about that fandom, since it felt terribly geeky to identify yourself as a “Trekkie.” But since that time, over the last fifty years, the geeks built the internet, earned trillions of nerd dollars, and now run the entire economy on Amazon. Today, it doesn’t matter how obscure your identity obsession is, go to Comicon and you’ll meet the rest of your Sailor Moon tribe celebrating living on the fringe with great joy.

Maryam Gohar

Susannah Martin

In 2018, traditional aspects of fixed identity are in greater flux than ever before. In the past, religions, nationalism, and racism tried to draw hard definitions, segregating groups and limiting freedoms. While these issues are evolving and unresolved, today’s world encourages different thinking about identity. Gender-neutral bathrooms, LGBTQI rights, gender fluidity, and changing standards and terminology are familiar news. For artists painting the figure, the issue of labeling is significant, since labeling connects to how work is sold, a practical reality of marketing oneself.

Artists, more than most professions, have always been conscious of the personal identity they present to the public. There are a lot of mythic representations of the eccentric artist in popular culture, and these work to establish the special nature of the art product, different from products of the butcher, plumber, or janitor. The artist identity is always a manufactured product, often a collaboration between the artist and a pioneering gallery selling the new. The public face of Andy Warhol was just as conscious a creative work as any of his paintings or prints. Warhol knew the audience didn’t just want art, they wanted a show — a distraction, amazement, a jolt. Marketing the artist can be show business.

Joshua Dean

David Eichenberg

The marketing notion leads us to a core issue attached to painting the contemporary figure, which is “truth.” The word “true” is a hot potato in art, since it can be loaded with heavy meaning (“a true artist”), but more practically one hears things like “true color” as part of any debate on accuracy. Words like “honest” and “authentic” are favored by savvy art sellers these days. Any whiff of sincerity carries a special power in a global factory economy that takes your money in return for handfuls of disposable tech-gizmos.

In other words, mass-market consumerism has transcended morality for almost every product we buy. However, contemporary paintings represent a retro antidote. A return to an era of handmade items. Part of the magic in painting the figure now is carried in this increasingly rare connection to the world of handmade craft products. Painting requires real artists to work with actual physical materials and to produce a singular object in the material world. The one-of-a-kind nature of painting supports the curious idea of the real thing. An object that is truly itself and nothing else.

Viktoria Savenkova

June Stratton

Truth is where great liberties get taken by artists painting the figure. While a finished painting on canvas, linen, or aluminum is a real physical object, the image is never entirely true to the source material. The physical reality of the painting is an indisputable thing, but we’ll never know for sure what the model actually looked like. No, despite a modern obsession with more megapixels and high-definition detail, even the most hyper-realist contemporary painting presents a view of the world skewed by the artist’s mind.

Skewed is a good thing. We want the artist’s outlook and mental state to impact the look of the painting, because without that interior psychological aspect, we may as well just use a camera for an objective, non-partisan view. The camera is quicker, easier, and has greater density of information. But what the artist gives us in a figure painting is a human-calibrated selection of most-essentials. What’s left out — that says everything about what the artist believes is most important. In considering the works shown in 2018’s collection for Painting The Figure Now, this should be your first question: “What does the painting tell me about how this artist thinks?”

Donna Bates

Nick Runge

Human life is fragile and relatively short. To capture an image of the human figure that endures centuries touches on a power to hold back the ravages of time in a way normally forbidden to biology. A painting offers us the capacity for the important moment, frozen forever. The artist who thinks to capture the figure this way sometimes dares the flaming pit of ego, with a selfie. In following Rembrandt’s example of forty self-portraits, from youth to withered age, we find hope to discover the truth about oneself. There is hubris in this, a wish for understanding, recognition, love, even egomaniacal greatness. More than that, a marker that you do exist. You matter, right here and now and forever.

Even if you are a queen, a president, a hero, or a great beauty, the one thing that will erode your image and erase your identity is time. You cannot last. But a painting of you, if nothing else, may remind future generations of your marvelous, spectacular existence. This is also a good thing: to capture us as we are, bold humans clawing a daft mark across endless eternity.

Pamela Wilson

Adam Caldwell

Teresa Elliott

The post Poets & Artists: Painting the Figure Now @ Wausau Museum Of Contemporary Art appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Kelly Thompson
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest

Maker’s Mgmt
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My first question has to be – just how on earth do you manage to find time for your artistic practice? Between founding and managing your own creative agency, your brand ambassador work and your many speaking engagements you must squeeze more hours into the day than the standard 24 the rest of us get!

I’m not going to lie, I do have a tendency to get overenthusiastic and load myself up more than I should, then quietly stress to myself about it all wondering why I can’t stop turning everything into a project!

Lately I’m doing a lot less illustration work and am much more selective about what projects I take on and who I work with, it’s not always a money thing, but very much about if a project is a good fit for me. I’m very focused on the growth of the agency, and with illustration I just needed a bit of time out to find my love for it again

Now, because I work across a few different areas, I obviously have to be super organised to ensure things don’t end up half ass (which has happened in the past). I have a pretty strict daily routine, get up, walk the dog then spend the morning focused on urgent issues, paperwork, emails, client communication, planning, then I use my afternoons to action plans or work on assignments, hopefully without too much distraction. I also have a great Marketing Assistant Susan who works for me a couple of days per week on Maker’s Mgmt things and she is my HERO!

Keeping some kind of balance is also really helpful when getting things done, I find that getting outside at lunchtime and going for a walk greatly improves my afternoon productivity. I’ve also had to start to make more time for my health and book myself in my calendar for exercise, I find that if I book a class or sign up for something I’m much more likely to go instead of letting work push everything aside. I’ve also got a few apps that block me from social media after about 5 minutes per day, these are the best! It is amazing how much more can be done without these tiny constant distractions.

Your early career as a fashion photographer has definitely influenced your illustrative work, but it has moved well beyond those origins. What do you find most appealing about working in this way compared to capturing your subjects through a lens?

When I was working as a photographer I loved it so much, it was like play for me, but I always felt like I didn’t know enough about the technology, or just had some kind of separation between myself and what I was creating. When working on paper with a good old-fashioned pencil, there is something so calm and connected about it, marking out stroke after stroke is so meditative and positively consuming. I think I most enjoy it as a moment of complete alone time, just me trying to capture a vision with a basic tool and my hands.

Was working as an artist always part of your life or career goals, or was this something you found yourself drawn to further down the track?

Illustration happened after working as a photographer for a few months, when I was brand new and poor and trying to find clients. I started to draw in my spare time because I had no money to party like all my pals were, and everything rolled from there. It was never really a plan; I still don’t think it is part of a plan really. I’ve always just wanted to be an awesome employee for someone if I’m honest, but nobody has ever believed me in the past when I’ve applied for jobs! I think because I’ve built profile in my field people just assume that’s what I really want to do with myself, but in reality I started illustrating in my spare time, sold some things, picked up some clients, got some agents and the spider web grew without me realising until one day I was just stuck in it!

…and when you did start your artistic work who were your influences, your artistic heroes?

I started before social media was such a huge thing, which I’m grateful for. When I drew I purposefully wouldn’t look at other artists because I really wanted to try and make something up without too much influence. I had always been a huge fan of Richard Grey and the agency MM Paris and their free flowing illustrative work and alphabets, and like many young illustrator females, I was obsessed with Audrey Kawasaki who was propelled into fame around the time I was starting out.

You work with creatives of many different types, do you find there is a difference when working with artists from your agency (or elsewhere) rather than those that have a purely commercial focus? Fashion photographer vs. fine art photographer for example.

I don’t really work with many creatives who would consider themselves as “fine artists” the majority of the artists, creatives and art directors I work with are primarily commercially focused. In saying that, a couple of my artists including Merijn Hos dance beautifully between the two. In the past, when working with artists who work less regularly at a commercial level I usually find the main issues that come up are time management related, ego (they appear less happy to take feedback and really don’t like it!), and sometimes, because they are not used to working commercially, they find sharing their process step by step a bit strange.

All quite understandable, and obviously I am generalising based on my history, I am sure this is not the case for all. When working with an artist who isn’t used to the commercial process it’s just really important to explain the process before the project starts, make sure all of their questions are covered and be available should they need any help or support along the way. It’s just a different journey, but all artists want to make the best work they can.

I often find myself expressing my disappointment with the direction and exclusivity of the fine art market and establishment in Australia.  Is this something you have encountered, and if so how do you deal with that?

Oh yeah! I know one of Australia’s most recognised painters and so many times in the past he corrected me when I called myself an “artist”, “oh no, you’re an illustrator, not an artist (dear)” …my mistake.

I personally think that the division of titles is a bit of a joke and laced with such snobbery. It all comes down to positioning of work, the audience and marketing. Put an illustrator’s work in a traditional gallery setting, market it to an art collector crowd under a different name with a bigger price tag and if it’s good it will still sell as “art”. It’s all context, put an “artist’s” painting beside an editorial and it’s just the same as an illustration.

I do think however that the boundaries are being broken down, creatives need to survive and have an income, there are hardly any Kings wishing to act as a patron these days so a lot of artists work commercially too which I think was originally what categorised them as an “illustrator”. A lot of illustrators now also create one of pieces or special projects, collectors buy prints and fine art pieces and hang them together, I think it’s just a bit of an old way of thinking about art in general; art is completely subjective, so if I want to call myself an artist I’m going to!

Social media is an increasingly important way for any emerging artists to gain exposure, do you have any advice for those artists who are trying to gain a following for their work?

Well I think that now it’s all about that damn algorithm and paid marketing, things are changing again. I would say to young artists don’t pin your hopes on Insta-stardom and don’t tick all the required social media boxes, likes don’t mean success. Instead focus on creating a strong body of work that is distinctly yours, don’t just follow social media trend, think about what makes you special, what are your strengths and who are you as a person, these things really matter in a crowd full of mediocre when everyone is trying to tag the same dream clients. I would suggest getting involved in your creative community, approach clients directly, build a body of work to get an agent, and these are things that will pay off with exposure in the long run.

Our audience loves to get into the nitty-gritty of process! Could you let us know how you bring a piece from conception to completion?

I usually start with writing ideas on a page and then very roughly sketching compositions (that look a lot like a child drew them!). I work for reference and have a huge library of photographs I’ve taken or imagery I’ve found. I categorise everything into folders like “good hands”, “Vines”, “Big smiles” etc. etc., so that I just have things waiting for me when I need them. I always build my own reference in Photoshop if working from sourced imagery to make sure that things are still original.

I then print out my manufactured reference and put it on the table beside me, usually working from a grid system to transfer it over to my page. I work on huge sheets of recycled cardboard, it’s so cheap ($2 per sheet that’s almost a metre wide), I like it because of the texture, and draw most of the time using Faber Castell polychromos blacks. I’m that horrible person who goes to the art store and buys all the black pencils and all the pencil sharpeners! I scan and do all my colouring in Photoshop, I like this because I like to play with colour and change things, and it’s also so handy when working with clients who like to tweak things.

Now to the future, what are you working on at the moment, and what shows or other events do you have coming up?

I’m really focused on growing Maker’s Mgmt and our online store Maker’s Mrkt at the moment, this is really important for me. We are still the little guys so my main goals are around building our community and client base.  I’m also in discussion about a pilot for a web TV show with a creative focus and we are waiting on investor approval so fingers crossed that comes through, I think it will be really fun and different if it goes ahead. Later this year I’m speaking at and hosting the Curvy Women’s Conference which is visiting the Gold Coast for the first time and also one other location (I can’t remember where, that has completely slipped my mind atm!).

I have been doing a little bit of illustration, I just drew about 70 pieces for an animation for a candle company that will be out soon,(maybe that’s not actually a little bit! haha) and have started to play around drawing a bit in my spare time again. At nights I’m currently doing a fashion design course, but I’m just doing that to have a hobby that isn’t my job more than anything…

I’m also trying to be a fit person and look after my health a lot more, I’m currently a bit of a Pilates and Barre junkie and I’m finding it so relaxing and energising having a bit of life balance … for once!

The post An Interview with Kelly Thompson appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Helice Wen
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

I don’t think we can have a full appreciation to your development as an artist without understanding how much your childhood in China has influenced both you personally and your work. What were your first steps as a creative and how much of your early inspirations do you retain in your work now?

I was born in Shen Zhen, a new and modern city by the Southern sea of China. As I remember, I was a quiet kid that preferred to stay home and read rather than to go out to play with other kids. My parents bought me lots of picture books, and copying the illustrations from those books was the biggest entertainment for me! I still keep many of those books at home in China.

Speaking of those early influences, does your family have any history in the arts, and were they supportive of your choice to pursue a career as an artist?

I moved to San Francisco with my family at age 14 – it was an interesting time to start in a brand new environment, with a language I didn’t know. Both of my parents were doctors in China, and since I am a first generation immigrant, they had certain expectations of me. I was also frustrated adapting to my new life in San Francisco, so even though I had been practicing and learning art through my childhood I stopped doing it, and never thought it would be an option as a career. But realizing that’s what I had always wanted to do, I chose to go to art college after high school. My parents were supportive even though wasn’t what they wanted, and I am very thankful for that.

Your BFA was in Illustration, what led you decide on this field against the other BFA streams available?

I love illustration and my plan when I went to art college was to become a children’s book author and illustrator. However, during my years in school, I always took my time and did my own thing during illustration classes (never as good or as quick as my classmates), and I enjoyed the fine art and painting class more than my major classes. After I graduated, I illustrated 7 children’s books. Since then though my focus has been mainly on showing paintings in galleries, and I love the freedom it gives me to express myself.

While you have always worked with a variety of media, I have noticed that you have now started working in oils. What motivated this change and what challenges have you found moving from your illustrative and acrylic work to oils?

Drawing is more comfortable and natural to me, and somehow I associate acrylic with drawing, oil painting is a completely different world to me. However, as I become more confident with what kind of image I want to create I have come to realize that the medium just a tool and I try not to be intimidated by it.

Your work often contains a narrative with darker overtones than the ethereal expressions of your subject or the floral motifs might suggest. The appearance of Shibari – sometimes overt, sometimes less so – is a common theme. Do you have a particular interest in this, or is it a tool for you to add to the juxtaposition against the lighter elements?

The darker overtones are much like my personality; so I always want to add some comforting element in my painting to balance that out. The floral motifs are more a design decision than the meaning itself, I like patterns and want to integrate them into my painting composition. It’s the same with the Shibari; I like how the dark red (rope) makes patterns against skin. As I draw more of that, I grow more interested in the idea of joy/pain caused by physical touch, and also with the subtle suggestion of self-restriction.

Another element you have used in your work is the speech bubble, most often empty. Is this something you see viewers of your work filling with their own thoughts or words when they see those pieces, or is it perhaps where the subject is restrained from speech as they are restrained physically with the Shibari?

I look back to many drawings that I made as a child and teen – the majority of the characters come with a speech bubble. It can be sourced from Japanese Manga (like lots of Asian kids, Manga was a big influence on me), and when I put it in my paintings now I use it as part of the design. But the empty bubble is also about the unspoken mind of a person. I am never comfortable sharing my mind and thoughts verbally with other people; I guess that’s a form of self-restriction as well. Also in most cases, I don’t have a set mind of how a viewer should see and feel about the painting, leaving the speech bubble blank leaves room for the viewer to fill in their own thoughts.

Who were your inspirations that have brought you to where you are in your artistic practice? These can be film, literature, music as well as art, anything that inspires your creativity.

I still read every day, and listening to electronic music and classical music is very inspiring to me. I also love to look at photography – from masters to fashion, interesting composition, lighting and color trigger my creativity. I especially love the work of photographers Francesca Woodman and Diane Arbus; the way they record the emotion and sensibility of the physical body through the eye of a woman really inspires me.

Could you take us through your process; from the selection of subject, the decision of which media to use for a particular piece, through to the tools you use, to develop your narrative and a question that seems to vex many artists, just when do you decide a work is completed?

I usually start by writing some short sentences or a phrase in both English and Chinese, mostly about how I feel in the moment, sometimes about an interesting shape, composition or color that I have seen. Then I will transfer those ideas into rough sketches, after which I will start researching references and look through random pictures I have taken in passing. Once I have a clearer idea, I will find models for photographs. After I have all the information I need I will begin to work on the actual piece. For me the preparation and planning is more challenging, the execution comes more naturally to me. I have been working to deadlines for the past years so I have a timeline of when / how a piece is finished. For the future, I would love to do some works that have no definite deadline; I can just take my time and let it flow on itself.

Now to the future, what are you working on at the moment, and what shows do you have coming up?

My third solo show will be at September 2018 at Spoke Art, San Francisco. Until then, I reserve myself to create without time pressure. I always have so many exciting and new ideas that I have wanted to try, but have always been cut short because of deadlines. I also want to start writing my own children’s book! It is still the reason I started to draw and paint in the first place.

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Ben Smith

Web | Instagram

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Your work is largely figurative  with a healthy dash of abstraction and forays into the surreal.  How do you feel this has affected your practice in a fine art world often dominated by the conceptual?

It can be tricky being a figurative artist, as it seems many commercial and non-commercial galleries are a little figure shy. However, things have been getting better in recent years and figurative work is making a comeback especially internationally. Resistance to the figure has made me think harder about what makes a good piece of figurative art. Often the key is a strong concept. I don’t see necessarily figurative art and conceptual art as being mutually exclusive.

Do you feel that your studies at the Julian Ashton Art School allowed you develop your practice more in this way, compared, say, to the tuition you would have received in a university degree?

Julian Ashton’s was a great place to get a solid grounding in drawing, tone and colour. After I finished there, I kept on learning and developing the techniques that I now teach in my own studio. If I had my time again I would consider doing a degree as well, as I think I would have enjoyed pushing myself in different directions.

While you were teaching at Julian Ashton was there a common career-related question you were asked by your students? If so – what was your answer?

I can’t remember being asked a lot of career related questions at Ashton’s. “Career” is almost a dirty word there. It was all about making art for the sake of it. In the rest of the art world, this can be a difficult approach to maintain. However, my career advice is to always paint the work you love. That way you can’t lose. Paint the most ambitious work you can paint and get them out there through prizes and social media. Start going out to exhibitions and be open to meeting people. If you’re finding it all too much retreat to your studio batten the hatches and paint until you’re ready to come out again. Hang on to all your art friends.

Many works in your recent series “Threshold” have a very nostalgic feel, the settings, vehicles, clothing, all seem to hark back to a simpler time (the 50’s I think, but I may be wrong there!). Obviously, you are too young to have lived through this period yourself, so what appeals to you about that particular time?

It wasn’t a conscious decision to give the works a nostalgic feel. I just happen to like the shape of older vehicles. Some of the works included involve more recent elements and I want to include more elements from our present time in future work.

Given your themes, who are your art heroes? Whose work did you first love and who is rocking your world at the moment?

My first loves were Rembrandt and Francis Bacon. My current favs are Neo Rauch, Justin Mortimer, Adrian Ghenie, Alex Kanevsky and Louise Hearman. So in a sense my interests haven’t changed a lot as all these artists are all linked in one way or another. Generally, my favourite artists are those that combine realism with abstraction and have strong but slightly oblique narratives.

Speaking of first artistic love, when did you decide that this would become your career? Did you have any family background in the arts?

I have almost no family background in the arts although my grandmother did love a bit of watercolour. Growing up I never thought I would be able to become an artist.  However, after a couple of years of working as an engineer I threw everything at getting a scholarship to art school and fortunately I got one. I then spent several years working part time while also working very hard at my art.  In a strange way, the GFC helped me as I was made redundant from my engineering job and I decided to spend a year doing nothing but paint. At the end of that year when I was almost broke but I fortunately I suddenly started winning art prizes and I haven’t had to do engineering work since.

Could you let us know about your process ~ how do you move from initial conception to completed work, and which part of that process do you find the most demanding?

Sometimes I have a very clear concept for a work from the beginning but mostly I just have some guidelines and I begin to collage, draw and play. Play is very important, I believe you shouldn’t worry about your ideas being good enough, just accept that most of your ideas won’t work and keep playing regardless.  In my earlier work, the play would, in a sense, end once I started painting and I got down to the business of making a picture work. However, in my newer work the play with colour, texture and abstraction lasts up until the last brushstroke. I find the rendering of mechanical objects the most demanding.

When you are planning your work, how do you decide where to transition from the figurative to the abstract? While with some of your pieces this abstraction seems to add to the haze of time, like the fog of memory, with others it seems to be more emphatic, asking more questions of the viewer.

I really wish I knew the precise answer to this question as it would save me a lot of anxiety. It is an exciting but difficult part of my painting process. Basically, if a certain section of a painting gives me a little thrill I leave it alone and work on another part of the picture. If I’m still just as happy with it later it will probably stay around for a while.

Now to the future, what are you working on at the moment, and what shows do you have coming up?

I’ve been drawing Australian megafauna. I don’t want to say too much about it as ideas at this stage are very fragile. It’s almost as if as soon as you speak about them, they up and leave you.

Ben Smith talks about his art, influences and the time he painted Nick Cave for the Archibald.

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 Jonathan Viner

Website | Facebook | Instagram

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Many of your paintings seem to pay homage to the 60’s / 70’s, in fact it seems to me a slightly futuristic view as it would have been seen at that time. What draws you to this period stylistically?

That’s a great question. This is going to sound bad, but I wouldn’t say my paintings really pay homage to anything.  They are too egocentric to pay homage!

I loved figurative painting from an early age.  But I realized early in my career that I didn’t want to be an anachronism. If you’re not careful, being a figurative painter can be like walking around in period costume. I had to figure out how to make my work unmistakably contemporary, fresh, and relevant to a sophisticated, contemporary collector base.  To this end, I often mine the late 20th century era, as well as the present, for aesthetic cues and content that grabs me.

Your palette is definitely on the cool side – even when the figures in them are in bikinis or nude. Why do you work with these tones, rather than warmer hues?

In general, I just use the colors that feel right. Why did Picasso have a blue period, a rose period, etc?  Your guess is as good as mine!  However, in 2014 I exhibited a solo show in NYC with Sloan Fine Art called “Cold Snap”, which on one level was an allusion to the 20th century Cold War, and what is now shaping up to be a new 21st century Cold War.  This theme and cool color scheme carried over into my 2016 solo exhibit “Strange Math”, at Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle.  The cool color scheme is a context in which certain intense colors can really pop.  It’s like finding the welcoming glow of civilization in a dangerous and indifferent universe. Or the warmth of a shot of whiskey on a cold winter night. Or something. So that’s my guess.

Figurative, oil on panel, technique driven … these aren’t necessarily the things that have been in vogue in the fine art world is recent years. What inspired you to develop your style? Have you found that recently ‘figurative’ is making a comeback alongside ‘conceptual’?

For better or worse, I never cared about what was in vogue in the contemporary fine art world.  I just had a strong desire to make things, and I felt that urge most intensely for painting figurative imagery.  I instinctively sensed enormous power there.  It was pretty visceral. I would get butterflies and surges of adrenaline.  There’s still a certain optimistic mania about starting a new canvas. It’s a pendulum swinging from worm to god, and I just ride it back and forth, over and over.

Figurative art seems much more accepted in the fine art world than it was 20 years ago. Whether it’s made a more recent comeback or not, I don’t know. From where I’m sitting it never left in the first place.

Who were your inspirations that have brought you to where you are in your artistic practice?  These can be film, literature, music as well as art, anything that gets your creative juices flowing.

The use of dramatic light and shadow in Baroque art really grabbed me as an adolescent. At that time, I was into typically adolescent stuff. Fantasy and sci-fi. Comics. Horror. Computer games. Heavy metal. But I also loved old fine art and old classical music. I remember my first serious medium was charcoal.  Great for my infatuation with chiaroscuro. While normal teenage boys were playing sports, sneaking booze, and chasing girls, I was copying some dramatic photo of Leonard Bernstein from a Rimsky-Korsakov cd cover, and then copying a paused still from Metallica’s video for “The Unforgiven”, and then copying grainy old black and white photos of pre-Holocaust shtetl life by Roman Vishniak. This was just the stuff lying around my house when I was growing up.  A few drops in the ocean of random things that influenced my creative development.

RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) was a huge influence of course. The intense boot camp of freshman foundation, exposure to the complete span of the academic art history narrative, drawing and painting from live models, studying skeletons and taxidermy, experimenting with color and mark making, drilling down into the physics of light, dissecting the compositions of Velasquez, or Degas, etc.

Shortly after art school, Dave Hickey’s essay “Enter the Dragon” opened my eyes to the dissonance within the art world and the psychosocial mechanisms of taste.  I knew figurative painting was frowned upon at the time, and it made no sense to me. Even though I didn’t share Hickey’s taste in art, this essay gave me hope. It also led me to Foucault, who wrote about systems of power and the ‘the gaze’ of authority figures.

Later on I happened across “The Black Swan”, by Nassim Taleb, which is basically about the limits of human understanding and the enormous consequences (for better or worse) of unforeseeable events.  The unlikeliest of things frequently occur.

More recently I’ve been influenced by the writing of George Friedman, who’s a geopolitical realist thinker. He offers a counterbalancing perspective to the unpredictable universe of Nassim Taleb.  Friedman acknowledges that the world is pretty unpredictable, but with enough understanding some people can still make pretty sharp predictions that seem crazy to the rest of us. His books “The Next Hundred Years” and “Flashpoints” fascinated me and partly inspired me to look at the Cold War era for inspiration at a time when it seemed pretty irrelevant to most of us.  He also got me thinking about the role of nationality in art and culture.

Speaking of music, with your headphone portrait series – do you have a track or album in mind for each as you paint them, and if you do how much does that influence the look of the final piece?

I painted the “Harem” series back around 2010. The title of each painting is a Russian girl’s name. Irina, Zhenya, Yevgheniya, Nadezhda, etc. This was a time when Russian oligarchs were making headlines with big art purchases. A few years before I realized the Cold War would make a comeback.

I always paint with music playing, but the music changes. I don’t really keep track of which music I listen to with each painting.

Another notable influence I see in your work is architecture and design – is this a field you have ever thought of pursuing further?

I would love to be involved in architecture and design, but seriously pursuing it would require so much time and training that I wonder if it’s possible without detracting from my studio practice.  But hopefully I’ll figure out a way to collaborate with architects and designers someday.

In art school, I took an intro to filmmaking course and loved doing it as much as I love to paint. Editing in particular.  I’d get butterflies and lose track of time. Good stuff. But film is an expensive endeavor that would require the support and cooperation (and potential interference) of many other people. Painting doesn’t hinge on anyone else, so I decided painting was the best way for me to execute my vision, over the course of my life, simply and directly.

Now to the future, what are you working on at the moment, and what shows do you have coming up?

There has been a wave of galleries closing in recent years.  Social media is taking up more and more of everyone’s attention. It’s a confusing time in the art world right now, so I’m keeping all of my options open. I’m working on a new body of work that I’m very excited about and looking forward to exhibiting when the right gallery comes along. There seems to be a major shift of some kind underway.  I’m just going to keep painting until the dust settles.  In the meantime people can follow me on social media, purchase prints on my website, and contact me directly about available work. Also I’ll be showing six smaller paintings in a summer group show at Arcadia Contemporary in LA.

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Agostino Arrivabene

Facebook | Instagram | Tumblr | Twitter

When I look at your works what comes to mind for me is a sense of visual poetry, but with the narrative remaining tantalizingly out of reach. Every time I think I have the full story of one of your works there comes another detail to question that perception. Do you challenge the viewers of your work to find a specific meaning within each piece, or do you see your work as furnishing the stage for the viewers’ imagination?

I’m not purposefully creating any challenge: my path as an artist undergoes the urgency to confront the world of Literature as well as the one of the intellect, so there are authors that have accompanied me over time by nurturing me with their teachings, their lives, their imagination, and the strength of their poetry. For instance, Homer with his Odyssey or his Hymn to Demeter, or Ovid and his Metamorphosis. Not to mention Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Joris-Karl Huysmans with his book imbued with “anarchic” references to Decadentism and Symbolism. They all introduced me to atmospheres where the boundary between reality and esoterica is very subtle. I also enjoy exploring alchemy through the texts of Paracelsus, which contributes to foster my own imagination as a means to counterbalance my own anxieties and inner demons. In this light, Greek mythology became a necessary language to identify and understand my own life, and the meaning of existence. My obsession for the above mentioned subject, at some point, turned into a desire to feel protected and see the most significant moments of my life interpreted through the lens of gods Hades, Persephone, and Demeter.

While the traditional focus of works featuring symbolism around death, religious and otherwise, has taken cues from earthly decay, your work heavily features undersea life. Is there a particular relationship for you between the oceans and death / suffering?

In 2008 a psychological trauma made me plunge into a dark journey to the darkest world towards an imaginary hell populated by creatures that had to be an exact reflection of each and every sleeping tragedy of mine.  Representing them in the guise of stratified totemic figures allowed me to free the monsters locked in my subconscious, make them more powerful outside of myself, and purge my own wounds in an attempt to cathartically exit the land of the dead. In the painting The Swimmer of Abysses, which I created in different versions and multiple techniques, the protagonist of the composition is triggering a new journey towards another kingdom. A kingdom where the abyss is bottomless and the outside world is weighting on the journey itself, by evoking the way Hercules lost his mind in the underworld, or the story of how Orpheus looked for Eurydice in the land of the dead and failed his mission. Every tragic aspect of the reality we face is like an immersion with no oxygen in an imaginary ocean that is a metaphor for pain and transformation. Unfortunately, nowadays the words “pain” and “death” are covered in warnings and taboos, which leads to a kind of sleep of the human consciousness.

The religious overtones to your work are also a strong feature. Do your beliefs / spirituality play an important role for you in the creation of your work?

I was born in a small Italian town where in the ’60s and ’70s the sense of Christian and Catholic religion was fostered by mysterious, and sometimes bloody, rituals that, back then, where considered to be necessary to shape the faith of the locals. In Italy, the Christian religion was used to intersect certain aspects of Greek and Latin pagan and non-pagan beliefs; this ambiguity became obvious, to me, during one of my trips to Greece, where I noticed on what extension Orthodox Christian faith is charged with the same mystery the ancient Greeks used to worship their gods.

Any article about your work must pay heed to the extensive use of techniques and materials long out of common use. Do you consider the creation of your colours and temperas an integral part of the creation of each piece, or it is a separate practice for you, part of the preparation but not of the creative process?

I’ve always loved the painting of the Masters of the Italian and North-European Renaissance. Leonardo Da Vinci was the artist to whom I dedicated my first steps as a young painter, before I started being influenced by 15th century Flemish painters such as Jan Van Eyck. I studied their techniques in ancient books, and after hundreds of experiments I came to figure out their methods and how they changed over time. Teachings that were mandatory in the 1800’s, nowadays are often skipped or adapted to more modern needs, however. Although I do not consider myself a Mannerist, I’ve always created conceptual hybridisations between ancient and contemporary techniques.

There is a clear foundation of classicism in your work, but just as obviously a myriad of influences have gone into the creation of your own style.  Who’s work do you feel closest to – who would it please you most to be held to be comparable with?

I do not enjoy making comparisons. The sources I used as references over the years are too vast. I developed my own, metamorphic language, which is in a constant state of mutation.

There have been comparisons made between aspects of your surrealism and that of HR Geiger. Geiger’s work was subsumed into the modern consciousness by the design of the Alien science fiction films, what genre do you feel your work would fall into if viewed through a similar lens?

My imagination has been nurtured not only by Literature and esoteric disciplines, but also by cinema. Giger gave a great contribution to cinema with his unique vision, as can be seen in The Cell by Tarsem Singh, Avatar by James Cameron, the great saga of The Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro with the Labyrinth of the Faun, Jodorowsky’s filmography, Aron Aronowsky’s The Fountain or Noah, and Ridley Scott with Prometheus and Legend – a cult movie that influenced me as a teenager – not to forget Tim Burton). Now I’m working on a series of sketches based on epic works such as the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, which for now are at an embryonal state as an aim to illustrate the whole medieval work of Dante Alighieri, which in my opinion also deserves a decent cinematographic transcription. Another sacred mountain of European epic poetry is John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

If there were to be a motion picture interpreting your style who would feature on your ideal soundtrack ~ who has written the ideal musical accompaniment to your work?

Music has always functioned as a background to my work, and has always inspired it. Currently I’m into the work of Johan Johannsson, Lisa Gerrard, Max Richter, Michael Nyman, Olafur Arnalds, and the Sigur Ros.

I have seen it mentioned that you do not place a high value on your formal artistic studies. Do you have any words of advice for any our readers about to embark on fine art studies?

My teachers have been the great Masters of the past. To the new generations I can say, “Do not forget the great artistic heritage of the past! You have to investigate it, live it, and love it deeply to create whatever new is on its way to take form in the future.”

Now to the future, what are you working on at the moment, and what shows do you have coming up?

I’m experimenting with theatre and opera. During the past few years I’ve designed the sceneries and costumes for an opera, Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint Sense. It’s a big production that will be performed by a collaboration of several international theatre companies, including the ones of Monte Carlo with the Festival of Orange in Provence, Israel, and Shanghai.

Great thanks to Deianira Tolema for the excellent Italian / English translation of this interview.

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These truths may be uncomfortable for us to face, so confident are we in the supremacy of humanity, but here Joel does not allow us to dissemble, to hide. We are at once far less than we imagine in the scale of the natural world, and far more powerful than is desirable in our ability to destroy. Joel shared with beautiful.bizarre his background, his motivation, his methods, but even with all of that to arm us we are still no less in awe. There is no defence when next one of his works captures us within its detail, then sweeps us through unreality to yet another potent truth.

Joel Rea

Web  |  Facebook  |  Instagram | YouTube

The appreciation of technique and craft seems to be making inroads into the fine art world – and not before time! Do you find that there are still barriers to the acceptance of artists like yourself among the artistic “establishment”?

Barriers are mostly just people ignoring you. I ignore interesting things in life all the time, sometimes something just doesn’t move you, maybe it’s the time in your life or your energy and it’s ok to feel nothing about something others find epic. So when you’re the one being ignored, it’s also ok.  Also culture takes time to catch up in Australia, I find culture density is linked to population density. In the United States or Europe Pop Surrealists painters are the museums stars, it could be due to more progressive and sustainable museums taking note of crowd attendance too, realism, hyper realism…are enjoyed much by the general public if not art elitists.

The Time Has Come

Echo Repeat

I have remarked to other Australian painters I have interviewed recently, including Robin Eley and Jeremy Geddes, that there seems to be an incredible vein of surreal hyper-realism in Australian art at the moment. What do you think we could chalk that up to – something in the air / the water / a collective up yours to arts academia?

Probably the internet and technology opening up things for us obsessive OCD types, it’s the best time to be alive and explore the visual world. Camera’s and the filming devices are making things open up for artists on a budget too. But for technicality I think everyone is observing each other very closely (via the internet) I know the healthy completion pushes me to go longer and harder, seeing a lot of current content and fresh art all the time, it’s very motivating to make your own.

Elevation

Conquest

Since we’ve broached the subject of your style, let’s break that into its two components. Firstly, hyperrealism – was this always core to your arts practice and if so what were you inspirations to head in this direction? It is surely a very painstaking and meticulous process – do you ever feel the urge to grab a really large brush and just lay into the canvas?

I’m entertaining something internal for sure, I’ve always loved looking at technically impressive art, and oils were always behind my most important earliest positive art interventions. Dali freaked me out from an early age. I may try bigger brushes one day, never count me out as my eyesight is deteriorating from sitting too close to the TV as a kid, and now as an adult I’m sitting too close to the painting.

Solo

Returned

Brave This Storm

Now to the surrealism so clearly evident in your work – what were your motivations for that? The continuing themes such as the tigers, the dogs, the falling businessman with papers scattered to the winds … do these carry a particular weight for you, a message you are conveying to your audience?

I started really simple, and with subject matter from immediately around me, over the years my life and career got more and more interesting and it shows in my imagery. Travelling has really helped and also a lot of research, I listen to audio all day mainly documentaries and podcasts, over the years my thirst for knowledge has really intensified, I get obsessive. I’m moving from a period of making very self-reflective work to now choosing an approach based on commentary and my reaction to place or time in history, again an expanding theme, the complexity of our existence saturating my every intention. The tigers featured in the painting live about thirty minutes’ drive from my house at a theme park, I go and watch them feeling excitement, terror and also some sadness. The humans in my paintings give the viewer accessibility and also provide reference to my use of amplified scale. I’ve always seen tigers as the most beautiful animal in the world, so it was quite simple to start painting them. Tigers are powerful and wild, their appearance is fantasy like but tigers also are manipulated by humans for their own needs, and it’s those themes I discuss in my paintings and in an idealistic way I try to correct the world in my paintings.

Clash

Works in progress

The Other Side

Speaking of inspirations and motivations, who/what were your early artistic influences? Did your move from the UK to Australia alter the way you looked at art or the type of art you wanted to produce?

Dali of course, and Australian painters like Jeffrey Smart and James Gleeson, but I always floated in and out of fine art and into other visual worlds such as comic books, illustration, album covers, cartoons and pop culture. I’m pretty lucky because I love almost everything. I left the UK too early to remember the impact the move had was more of my interpretation of my parents’ identity and therefore my own. The natural world is my greatest consistent inspiration, its complexity and infinite detail really blows my mind. My personal ideology is to acknowledge my place as merely an organism sharing this planet, I portray myself navigating Earth as one of its most complex animals, the human, and within this rich narrative I have endless material to explore.

Traverse Blue

Eternal Return

Water – sky – clouds, your reproduction of these with the complexities of shadows, the play of light, can only be described as incredible. With many artists’ work the background is very much secondary to the dominant theme or central figure, whereas for you there is no respite from fine detail from corner to corner. Do you place your figures within a landscape, or is the landscape, the background, an integral part of the whole?

The sky and landscapes are very much characters in my paintings, as they are in life. Living in Australia we have amazing natural surroundings, there is life, beauty and danger everywhere. The weather also affects moods so it’s a useful tool to evoke that same effect in picture making.

Last Man Standing

Footage of Joel working on his painting ‘Last Man Standing‘, oil on canvas.

(cut and paste question to all artists here)We have many creatives in our audience and they just love the gory details of technique. Can you share your process with us, from conception to completed work, and how this has evolved over your career? And speaking of conception to completion, how long does that take considering the detail required? (and are you envious of artists using those previously mentioned really large brushes?)

No, I don’t think you choose your style it comes out of you mostly automatically, most art making is finding a satisfying end point, I’m pretty much always clashing my end points with my deadlines and trust me it’s a struggle to hand over finished work.

I go everywhere with a camera, I feel naked without it. Photography is my sketch book and the majority of my creative process happens in the design process of a painting, after that it is mostly all labour to bring the painting to life, hours and hours sitting still and concentrating very hard. The initial idea will come to me in a spontaneous vision, I’ll make a quick sketch and then begins the task of pulling all the real things in the world towards me in order to create the piece, primarily using photographic reference and often real objects and models from life as well.

Works in progress, ‘The Promised Land‘

The Promised Land

Now to the future, what are you working on at the moment, and what shows do you have coming up?

Jonathan LeVine Gallery, ‘Welcome to NJ’ group show to launch – Jonathan LeVine Projects, based in Mana Contemporary in New Jersey, USA, February 18 – March 18

Solo – New Paintings, Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane, Australia. September 2017

Soft Inside

Held Within

Star Catchers

The Final Pieces

Depths of a Memory

L: Pursuit Under Silver Skies | R: Walk Alone

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Chris has also embraced the internet for his own practice, from sale of in-demand prints through to organising the oil painting workshops he holds around the UK – and is now planning for the US. An embrace of social media and cross-linking with other fields, such as his appearance at Tattoo conventions, all drive a greater visibility of his work to a larger audience.  This is ideal for Chris, with his work gaining ever greater exposure and acclaim, and for us it ensures we never miss the release of his next work, a serendipitous outcome for all!

Chris Guest

Web  |  Facebook  |  Instagram | Twitter

Portraiture can be an uncompromising field for an artist, everything is there in that single character and with that comes a singular need to capture your viewer with that character. What was your journey to specialize in this, did you try other forms or were you always focused on the human expression?

Yes I did try many different forms of painting. I tried landscapes and cityscapes to begin with – even messed around with abstract for a bit! (Mainly because I thought this was what you were supposed to do as a painter). Luckily, for everyone out there – the majority of these works ended up in the bin!! I found that whatever subject matter I tried, I’d always get drawn back to painting people and the human form, mainly because that was the most fun to paint. I believe making art should always be something you really want to do, and you should always feel inspired about what you want to paint. As soon as this stops happening, it starts to feel like a chore, rather than your passion.

Becky Blue

If anything your more recent work has been even more focused, the background reduced to broad block strokes, the figures fading into the background with the same technique.  How do you decide what needs detail and what is unimportant?

I generally like to keep a face as the focal point, and yes, as you said a background reduced to abstract strokes. I find painting this way, keeps it looking interesting, rather than painting everything in minute detail. A lot of people when seeing my paintings in the flesh, are surprised how brushy they are in real life – I just try and use a few techniques to ‘imply’ detail, and the viewers eyes do the rest.

L: Platinum | R: Cigarette

Ink – I love it, you love it, we all love ink! When was the last time you painted someone without tattoos? …and talking of your subjects – what do you use for references, live models, photographs, found images etc?

I paint different models from life, at London Fine Arts, where the emphasis is painting using classical painting and drawing techniques practiced for hundreds of years. Those models are often not tattooed. I paint from a mixture of live models, but use my own reference photos when I have an idea or concept that would require longer than someone could realistically sit for.

Visor

Dolls

Mask II

Inevitable question about inspirations and influences … let’s try to change it up a bit though.  Who was the first artist who’s style you tried to imitate when you were young, who is the biggest non visual artist inspiration on your work and your career, and who’s work is really rocking your boat at the moment?

Good question – The first name that instantly sprung to mind was Todd McFarlane (Comic book illustrator who drew Spiderman, Incredible Hulk, Spawn, etc) When I was in my early teens, I wanted to be a comic book artist, and I used to spend countless hours and days copying his characters from the pages of the comics. Saying about this has made me reminisce about how much fun it used to be, copying all the gorgeous illustrations – I might go and do some again soon, just because it was so much fun – Haha! Non-visual artist, I would have to say I find the story of Nikki Sixx very inspiring – somebody who had a vision of where he wanted his band to be right from day 1. I love a rags to riches tale, and anyone who started out with no money, left their hometown and believed in themselves and that they could get to the top, is something that resonates strongly with me. Rocking my world at the moment, I really like the alla prima paintings of Michael Hussar, I could stare at his paintings all day!

Further inevitable question for the art nerds in our readership (and we have many!), can you share your process with us, from conception to completed work, and how this has evolved over your career?

So..it starts from an idea, which can come from anywhere – I keep a list on my phone of potential ideas – I always write ideas down straight away, as I can be out and about, then totally forget, and that’s quite annoying! Most of them are a load of rubbish, but it’s always worth writing something down, because you never know! I then look to hire a model for a reference shoot that I think will best suit this idea. When I have the reference photos back, I spend quite a bit of time going through them, and picking the ones I think will best work as a painting. Once I’m at the stage of putting paint on a panel, I build up layers of paint, letting each one dry for several months sometimes. Due to the slow drying time of oil, I always have a good 5-10 paintings on the go at any one time. Sometimes paintings sit there for months in my studio, as I only like to work on pieces I feel inspired to paint.

Work in progress, ‘Peony‘ [Oil on panel, 16 x 12″]

‘Peony’

Work in progress, ‘Pink Hair‘ [Oil on panel, 16 x 12″]

‘Pink Hair‘

You have embraced the Internet as a medium to expand your reach, connect to your audience and sell your work, while many artists still seem reluctant to do so. Was this a conscious direction on your part or just a natural progression for you, and what would you say to artists who view this move with trepidation?

I think it was a natural progression – when my paintings got to a certain level, I was getting asked a lot if I could make prints of some of the most popular ones, so it went from there really! I do enjoy making prints – I like collecting prints from other artists myself, so I know the excitement it can create in others, making a limited edition print run – I feel very lucky to have many loyal collectors, who collect my art, so I always try and look after everyone as best I can, and pride myself on providing good prints, at a collectible price. I would say to artists who view this move with trepidation, start off making a small run of maybe 10 prints, tell everyone on social media that you have some available and see what the response is. That way you’re not investing loads of money, if the take up isn’t too good. Also, the people who were there at the beginning and put faith in you from the start, will appreciate owning one of your very first prints from a small edition, when you’re a full blown mega star artist, up there with Andy Warhol, and selling paintings for millions!!!!

Did your art studies at Bournemouth University and Brunel College inspire, or were you left jaded with the strictures placed by academia of the “fine art” establishment? (Actually, on review that question is loaded with my own views of the fine art establishment … feel free to shape it however you like!)

I enjoyed my time studying art at Brunel college, but my university experience, wasn’t the best – I felt I learnt more about pubs and nightclubs, rather than how to paint (some of this my own doing, some of it down to tutors and poor course structure) That’s one of the things I love about painting at London Fine Arts – You actually learn techniques that make you a better painter (Shock, horror!!) which was something sadly lacking from my university experience.

Pool floats! Fairy floss-coloured hair! So much fun in your work, but once you move past that the expressions are often fierce or pensive. Is this a conscious juxtaposition, and what would you like your audience to take away when seeing your work?

I’m always interested to hear how my work is perceived, and I have heard a few times that it comes across as fun, which I think is great! I like to paint subjects I think will be interesting to paint, and let the viewer decide what they think of it. I normally look for expressions that appeal to me to paint, so there’s no conscious juxtaposition there.

Shark!

Flamingo

Pink Shepherd

Now to the future, what are you working on at the moment, and what shows do you have coming up?

Coming up this year, I have regular painting workshops in London, plus I’m doing one in New York in May, at Sacred Gallery, so really looking forward to that! I also have lots of crazy ideas for new paintings; so keep a look out for that! Also, I have a solo show the end of the year in London at Underdog Gallery, plus doing various conventions, so quite a busy and exciting year!

Check out Chris at work below.

Mask

Sunburn

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The post Interview with Chris Guest appeared first on Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.