Walton Ford

Walton Ford is painter, as well as a talented storyteller.  He adapted his love for storytelling to his paintings, as well as took inspiration from many different artists.  Walton Ford was inspired from the work of nineteenth-century artist, naturalist and watercolorist John James Audubon.  He was influenced by J.J. Grandville and Sir John Tennial, who were both French artists whose caricatures of part-human, part-animal subjects satirized nineteenth-century French and British Society. 

Ford’s meticulous paintings satirize the history of colonialism and the continuing impact of slavery on today’s social and environmental landscape.  For also used many other forms of political oppression in today’s social environment to help create his work, as well as his ability for storytelling to create unique and massive pieces of art.  His works are extremely detailed, seeing as he was a very meticulous person.  Each painting is a tutorial in the scenes of his stories depicting the wrongs committed by nineteenth-century industrialists.  Each of Ford’s animal portraits doubles as a complex, symbolic system, which the artist layers with clues, jokes, and lessons in colonial literature and folktales.

Ford’s works are amusing in the sense that they depict scenes in such detail that they could be real, but from what is being depicted the viewer knows they are not real, but just a story.  His paintings are vivid with color and life, showing us as the viewers the stories he is telling us as if we were actually in them.  When an artist can give someone the emotion of reality, but knowing the stories are not real, it is a great and renowned thing.  As artists, we tell many different stories in our own work.  Ford being able to depict his stories or images brightly, colorfully, and realistically is a great feature of his own work and what makes him a fine artist.       

Tim Hawkinson

Tim Hawkinson is renowned for creating complex sculptural systems through surprisingly simple means.  Some his work, such as Uberorgan (Pictured below) is a stadium- sized fully automated bagpipe.  This work was pieced together from bits of electrical hardware and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting.  This kind of work is what makes Hawkinson a fine artist, his ability to take objects we wouldn’t think of using, and blow away our minds with them.

Hawkinson not only has a fascination with creating giant sculptures and using un-thought of materials, but also with music.  A lot of his work is revolved around music, such as with Uberorgan and another work called Pentecost.  Hawkinson has a lot of reoccurring themes in his work such as music and their physical size, but a lot of his work is an extension of the body.  In his works, you can begin to pick out and recognize different items in his work.  Some of his works contain organs, such as with Uberorgan, and others intestines and other parts of the body.  Some of his works, mostly his self-portraits, contain the physical body, but morphed or altered in some way.

A lot of the inspirations for most of Hawkinson’s pieces have been the re-imaging of his own body and what it means to make a self-portrait of his new or fictionalized body.  His works reveal his attention to detail as well as his obsession with life, death, and passage of time.  Hawkinson’s works let us see the human body being portrayed in different ways, and even though the body is not in most of his works, we can still sense that they are a part of it somehow.  Tim Hawkinson’s use of the human body and how he manipulates it is the main focus of his works, and what makes him one of the greatest artists of the twenty-first century.   

 

Balloon Self-Portrait 1993

Divan 1997

Drip 2002

Emoter 2002

Sweet Tweet

Uberorgan 2000

Wall Chart of World History From Earliest Times to the Present 1997

Roni Horn

Roni Horn’s work explores the nature of art through sculptures, works on paper, photography and books.  She describes drawing as being the key activity of her work, leading to how a lot of her work is centered around words and drawings.  Her drawings concentrate on the materiality of the objects being depicted, and what they mean.  Words are the basis for her drawings and other types of works.  Each word and phrase plays an important role in each one of her works.

 

The use of words in her works builds a relationship between the viewer and her work.  Horn also crafts complex relationships between her viewer and her work by installing a single piece on opposing walls, in opposite or adjoining rooms, or throughout a series of buildings.  By doing this, she gives a different meaning to each work, making the viewer look at each piece separately and having them try to define how each work works against or with each other depending on the area it is in.  This gives a new definition to how work is displayed in the art world, usually similar pieces are put into the same room or area together, but Horn has removed that familiarity from her work.  She does this to insist that one’s sense of self is marked by a place in the ‘here-and-there’ and by time in the ‘now-and-then.’  She describes her works as being site-dependent, meaning they rely on the places they are position and stationed.  This helps create and extension of the body or ones-self by showing how objects mean different things in different places. 

Horn’s art embodies the cyclical relationship between humankind and nature.  She uses words and the location of her work to build on this relationship.  These relationships allow us to attempt to remake nature in our own image.  Her work challenges us to see how they relate to us and how we see and use them to our own benefit.  Drawing is about composing relationships and building on those relationships.   

Black Sphere 9 1988

Else 4 2010

Else 5 2010

Else 6 2010

Untitled (Isabelle Huppert) 2004

When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes #689 1993

Doubt by Water 2003

Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley is best known for his sculpture work.  He is most famous for his work with worn, dirty soiled stuffed animals in sexual positions in cold, clinical settings.  Kelley has been a major figure in contemporary American art in the later half of the twentieth-century.  Kelley’s work ranges from the highly symbolic and ritualistic performance piece to the studies with stuffed animals.  He also has done wall-size drawings, to multi-room installations that restage environments such as schools, zoos, and public places.  He also has done work with other artists such as Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler and the band Sonic Youth.  If anyone in the art world has done it all, it is Mike Kelley.

Kelley also writes for art and music journals, and has organized numerous exhibitions incorporating his own work, work by fellow artists, and non-art objects.  By doing this, he is not only promoting his own work, but the work of others, helping people see what work is out there.  Kelley’s work questions the legitimacy of ‘normative’ values and systems of authority.  He attacks the sanctity of cultural attitudes towards family, religion, sexuality, art history, and education.  This all plays an important role in his art because it undermines what the normal society would deem appropriate for art, and he blows it out of the water.   

What makes Mark Kelley a fine artist is his ability to take societies norms and undue them to a point where changes people’s views on a subject, such as stuffed animals being loving and nurturing for children.  Through his work he redefines what is acceptable in the art society.  Through his own work, he has shown the art world different views on normal objects that we may have not thought to use them as before.   

   

Arena #7 (Bears) 2010



Memory Ware Flat #18 2001, full view



Memory Ware Flat #18 2001

Riddle Sphinx 1991

Michael Ray Charles

Michael Ray Charles is a designer and illustrator.  He later moved to using paints, which is now his preferred medium.  Charles’s works are graphically styled, as if they were an old poster or advertisement from product packages, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials.  Charles draws comparison between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities or both colors, and athletes.  The images he chooses to use are seen constantly when someone think of the old black south, such as with Sambo and Mammy.

Charles chooses to use these images because he can.  He is an African American man, and who better to use these images than himself?  These painting receive different views when they are done either by a white man or black man, and Charles shows that in his works.  He uses images of Sambo and Mammy in his work because they are embedded in the views of people when they think about the black, slave man of the south.  Most people see the Sambo image when they think of the south, the big lips, bright white teeth, and smiling like crazy.  Charles uses these images and stereotypes to his advantage in his work by portraying them in a way that people have to look at them; they can’t look away and forget about it.  “Stereotypes have evolved,” he notes. “I’m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today’s society.” 

Michael Ray Charles work is different from most people seeing as the content it deals with and the context in which it is displayed is something other artists don’t do.  In each of his paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us we cannot forget about a past that has led us to where and who we are today.  Michael Ray Charles work helps us remember this.       

Forever Free

Mathew Barney

Mathew Barney is an Idaho artist.  Barney has a lot of influences for his works, such with themes of the desert, such as coyotes and sand, to parts of the human body and extensions of the body.  A lot of his influences came from living in Idaho with his father, playing on the football team, and visiting his mother in New York, visiting all of the museums and art galleries.  His works show us how these parts of his life have influenced his work and performances.

Barney’s works are based from fantasy and dreams.  His works use special effects such as making live animals dead, aesthetics, masks, and using folk lore in his works.  His collection of works, Cremaster 1-4, is some of his most famous works.  The cremaster is a muscle that is part of the male reproductive system and in these works the cremaster is a stand in for conflict in these sets of works.  His works contain conflict between two ideas, peoples, or how violence is supplemented into form.

Barney sees the world through physical movements and bodies, rather than from models.  His works are an extension of the body, such as with his work Drawing Restraint, where he had a pencil tied to pole, and puts himself in awkward positions to draw.  He moves around, adjusts the paper into different areas, but he tries to restrict himself from being able to draw like he would usually be able to.  He does this to try and get what it would be like to see and do his art from a different view.  He restrains himself so his work will become an extension of himself.  That is what a lot of his work is about, trying new things and seeing if he can make his ideas come to life.  

Cremaster Work

Cremaster Work

Cremaster Work

Drawing Restraint

Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford is an artist who incorporates ephemera from urban environments and situations into mixed-media works on canvas.  He creates textures on the canvases to add visual interest and complexity.  Bradford has worked in other mediums throughout his career, such as with pubic art, installations, and video.  Though he has been known for those works, he is most well-known for his work on canvas.  These works are massive pieces of art, which are abstract collages that he assembles out of signage and other materials that he collects from around his own neighborhood.  His works are visually interesting and massive.

Bradford’s aesthetic language makes us of such elements as bits of billboards, homemade advertisements, string, foil, and permanent wave end-papers from beauty shops.  He arranges these papers in his works by layering and he singes, sands, and bleaches the papers into brilliantly hued structures in his works.  These works seem to swirl and move right before your eyes.  Bradford’s works seem to lean towards and reflect his interest in the formal traditions of modernist abstraction.  They also seem to reference the areas and communities from which he gathers his materials for his massive works of art.  In his work you can see glimpses of text and actual imagery, but they are barely seen or legible.  These works seem to represent maps, cities, and townscapes.  This is seen from his use of colors, lines and what little imagery he puts into his works.

Bradford is developing a visually arresting or appealing means of representing in two dimensions the depth and relationships of the sites and streets he gathers his materials.  His work’s also inform us of his personal background of living in downtown Los Angeles, with the map-like structures to his work.  His works show us images of crowds and other instances throughout time.  Mark Bradford’s work gives us an abstract view of life.       

Method Man 1992

Portable Water 2005

Smokey 2003

Scorched Earth 2006

Strawberry 2002

Wear the Bracelet 2008

Untitled 2003