John Reuss

John Reuss, painter from Denmark, does these really cool, really dark paintings of people. Sometimes just their heads, sometimes without their heads. The thing I like about these paintings is that they show heavy influence of cubism in some but not all. 

The works show a world inside the mind, it shows the emotion that you cannot see in a physical way which yeah art does that all that time especially in the realm of the abstract but it's a lot more obvious here. The colors are mostly cold and parts of the body layer over each other distorting the image enough to make it look very uncomfortable but not to the point where you can't make out where all five eyes are. 

Also here's a link: http://www.johnreuss.com/

Chucky Chuck Close

   Chuck Close, American painter and photographer. He's got some good stuff. He does a lot of portraits, some of himself and some of his friends and other people. It's not often you see artist going for the classic hyper-realistic approach that was so common back before abstraction blew up and cameras took over the world with their selfies and whatnot. I like Huck Lose a lot for his paintings being so up close (ha) to the subjects face and the scale at which he paints at is also remarkable. 

     The closest things I could find to abstraction in his work where these paintings I believed he called "pixel" paintings (don't quote me) and even these have an astonishing amount of detail in them. It looks as you're staring through a stained glass kaleidoscope, The use of color is really interesting, it uses the same colors he probably use in those areas but makes them more noticeable, or at least that's what I think is going on, I'm not sure, I don't paint.  

   These last two have a very 80s vinetage-esque filter type deal going on, and it reminded me of Fargo so that's also pretty cool. 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

    Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a expressionist artist born in Bavaria. 

   Ernst volunteered in World War 1 which I can only assume brought inspiration to his Self Portrait as a Soldier Portrait. Instead of taking the "war is hell" approach, he's take a more "war was a weird lsd trip where I lost my hand" angle, and that's something I can get down with. Jokes aside, I'm not sure how to paintings are supposed to really make me feel. I know that the war was bad but nothing in this painting conveys that besides the missing hand and possibly the naked person in the background but I'm not sure. Ernst looks fine though he seems chill so whatever.

        Ludwig was kind of a nut, he had a few mental health issues which I can't really blame him for because war. This image brings about a lot of paranoia with Kirchner looking sketched out at the mountains in the distance possibly being on fire. 

Portraits of the Self

 
     
     Self portraits have never really been something I enjoyed drawing, I barely like the way I look and trying to recreate myself through a drawing or painting it doesn't really resonate well. I'm talking more about the traditional style of self portraits, where it must capture your likeness by just actually looking exactly like you. Whether it'd be myself or someone else's self portrait, I find that they tend to be boring. I do find the more expressionistic approach to a self portrait, where it plays more with the idea of how you feel you look like. It's definitely more stylistic and it conveys much more through the colors and shapes used.

Bernard Buffet

Lucian Freud

Bryan Charnley

Bryan Charnley

     Bryan Charnley was a schizophrenic which makes for a very interesting self portrait because, well he's a schizo. There's a lot more to take away from these pieces and it's a shit ton more fun to look at. 

Rafael Zabaleta

Micheal Landy
  Landy has a unique feel to his work. While I personally feel that his portraits are pretty underwhelming, his following work does a lot of interesting things with lines and shapes. The first two pictures look very similiar sharing the same pile-of-trash look and it looks as if one was made right after the other. Each line either directs you to another one and eventually ends in a circle with some more lines.

His choice to stick to black and white feels very right, where if color where added to pictures like the third one, I feel it'd be a little too much for the eyes where the simplicity of the B&W makes it feel like a cluttered newspaper of advertisements.

  Landy also did an interesting project (link below) where he has this giant glass trash bin where he throws in a bunch of various drawings and paintings. His reasoning being is that after they're thrown in, they stop being individual pieces of art and start being one large art piece. The idea is premise is pretty interesting, however the execution was a little meh. I thought it was pretty stupid to just trash so much art (I guess that was the point though) and I feel it would've been more interesting if they have made a large culmination of all the works and got across the same idea while still keeping the idea.






https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EqVPZwiT5Q

Hannes Hummel

These are a few pieces of Hannes Hummels gothic busts. The whole thing is called "Luxury Problems" and I assume that the tittle brings out some deeper meaning in these works. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but they look pretty badass so here they are.

I love how the busts take the traditional feel of like a royal bust but the bust it up. Not literally but I like the whole theme of death and despare.

Also each one has the theme of duality. The first one with two sets of eyes and the second and third have two heads. 

And lastly I really like how the dog is split in half and there's some weird geometry type deal going on. Real neat, real cool. Real. 

Billie Grace lynn

So on my weekly trip on the art hunt, I go to look for some kites. Kites are cool, their like paper sculptures that fly, right? So I find this one of Obama, and thought that was pretty cool. I look through more kites bit none of them tickled me the way the Airbama did, so I went to look to see if that artist had any other presidential kites. 

Instead I found a horse. 

It's got some wheels and it's clear and real awesome looking.

It's got the super dope white elephant with colorful graffiti all over it, which I found really eye popping. 

And then I found some dark shit.

Apperently Billie Grace Lynn is does like some very interesting art that challenges the American lifestyle. So yea, awesome find. 

Haroshi

So there's a guy named Haroshi who makes skatebaord art, which is just art made from parts of a skateboard deck. I've seen slateboard art before but only like smal things like bottle openers and stuff. This has a lot more variety and is more artsy I guess. 

This one I like because it looks like the Santa Cruz hand.

Kiel Johnson

       Kiel Johnson is an the works in both 2D and 3D realms of art. There are works of different graphic designs and sculptures, including different types of cardboard works of art. These camera pieces are especially cool because of the texture (I guess?) of each camera. It's almost feels like a style but it might just be the way cardboard just is. Regardless, it's fun to at.

...And just for a sense of scale...

     He also makes other interesting things besides cameras with cardboard which have a more defining style to them, which I can vibe with. The cartoon-y theme really works with the cardboard with the block edges.

High Relief Scultping

High relief scultping would probably be my favorite type of relief scultiping mainly because of how it plays with perspective and depth on a mostly 2-demesional plane. It immitates the look and feel of a massive 3D sculputure and in some pieces it is. It puts a limit on how the sculpture can be made, but also allows for interesting usage of the wall or block it's made on. 

Alexander Cadler

Alexander Cadler is sort of a jack of all trades when it comes to art. He does works in painting, drawing, sculpting, even a little bit of preforming. He is most widely known for his innovative forms of art, like his 3D wire "drawings". Instead of the traditional style of pen to paper, Cadler uses wire to sculpt drawing like pieces of people and animals.

Cadler was also very innovative in larger scaled pieces such as his work with mobiles. The first of there kind, the mobiles take the idea of sculptures only being still works of art and throwing that away. These mobiles were made to have balance throughout the entire structure, and had the ability to move by push of a person or by the air.