http://www.dianebest.net/landscape/index.html#19

Diane Best was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied in the San Francisco area (Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute), before moving south to Los Angeles. There, she did commercial artwork for the entertainment industry and commissioned portraits, while pursuing and showing her original work.

The high desert wilderness was her home for 8 years, where she worked freelance for Los Angeles animation studios (background painting) , but over time shifted the focus of her talent to capturing the intense drama of the desert landscape that surrounded her. Now living in Joshua Tree, California, Diane has focused her talent exclusively on capturing the dramatic imagery of various desert landscapes.

http://dicksonartwork.com/

My friend Andrew Dickson has passion for landscape and all the beauty it contains. He finds interest in most unusual places, empty parking lots, backyards, underneath the bridges. He pays great consideration to his compositions, and he has a great ability in color mixing and drawing draftsmanship.

This artist was braught to my attention and i am inspired by her work. With a background in puppetry theater Susan Clinard could not could not have dole work. She sculpts in a variety of materials and i like it all.




http://clinard.org/index.html

Bill Viola: James Cohan Gallery

Bill Viola
James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street New York NY 10001

October 23 - December 19, 2009

This was hands-down the best show I saw last night, and at least in the last couple weeks.  I don't usually like video art, but Long Beach native Bill Viola has managed to contemporize the space and role traditionally filled by painting with video in a manner that is both beautiful and meaningful. In 2006 I was lucky enough to stumble upon his installation at the Church of San Gallo in Venice and found the slow-motion videos of people emerging and re-submerging from a wall of water really powerful. Some of his work from that body were present in the gallery as well as what seem to be other bodies of work. One especially noteworthy piece was a large (three-projecter) black and white projection piece that took advantage of the noise of low-light video recording to create some haunting, close to home yet otherworldly images that emerged and re-submerged into the flickering digital noise.

http://www.jamescohan.com/

Hugo Crosthwaite: Pierogi

Escape Rates Escaparates
16 October - 15 November 2009
Opening Reception: Friday 16 October 2009 7 - 9 pm

Hugo Crosthwaite is a California trained artist (BA from San Diego State University's School of Art, though lives and works in NYC). He has a complex mix of photo-realistic yet expressive characters that reside in spaces that are themselves a mix of specific localities (taken from photo-references no doubt), icons, abstraction, and just as often empty fields. It looks like he works with charcoal and/or graphite to model the figures and black acrylic paint to fill in the large zones of dark tones, though on reading his materials it seems he accomplishes it all with charcoal and graphite. I wouldn't be surprised if he painted a powdered charcoal for the blacks, as they are very intense.

The characters seem to be involved in different corporeal actions with one another. A reaccuring motif was of one grown character emerging from the crotch of another. This pseudo-birth, reminded me of Odd Nerdrums use of shock imagery, but also of Jenny Saville's tortured portraiture of women. He claims a major influence to be the Tijuana bibles from his birthplace of Mexico (short, often crude and sexually explicit comics). Sexuality and violence do seem to figure strongly in many of his images, though often the images are just juxtaposed in unsettling combinations.


http://www.pierogi2000.com/index.html

PIEROGI | 177 North 9th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211 T. 718.599.2144

Figure sculpture

Large collection of figure sculpture images from around the world

http://ilovefiguresculpture.com/

Kevin Francis Gray

http://www.goffandrosenthal.com/display/ShowGallery?moduleId=1550353&galleryId=68129

Kevin Francis Gray makes sculptures of adolescents. Artsy ones. The tight black dress worn by the figure in "Goth Girl" and the unlaced shoes "Ghost Boy" are knowing markers of a subculture. But these are not the fashion cues of the slick hipster culture that surrounds contemporary art. Gray's figures are too self-conscious, ungainly even. Something ofthe awkwardness of childhood still hovers around them. These are adolescents who might aspire to be artists, attracted by the glamorous status of professional outsiders, but right now they are only outcasts in the proper sense of the word.

Leipzig Calling at the New York Academy of Art

Leipzig Calling at the New York Academy of Art. Sept 18th -Oct 18th 2009
"The 'New' New Leipzig School and its next generation
Curated by Anna-Louise Kratzsch, Director, Leipzig International Art Programme"

This was a group exhibition showcasing some "new" Leipzig artists. Leipzig is a city in what was once East Germany. This isolated and insulated the group of artists working around the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst school--A traditional school where they learned composition and perspective while painting from nude models. They have since become incredibly popular and well-bought artists due in part to the quirkiness of their imagery but also to their position as figurative painters in an art world dominated by works that have felt increasingly trite and/or esoteric in their lack of recognizable skills visible in the works.

I didn't get all the names of the participating artists, and they weren't listed on the website but Stephen Black had the most compelling paintings. Very similar to Vladimir Gorychevs color pallet and use of empty space but with more Lucian Freud-like application of paint to the subjects faces.

Leipzig School artists:

Eitel, Tim

Fabritius, Tom

Gogel, Sebastian

Loy, Rosa

Rauch, Neo

Rink, Arno

Ruckhaberle, Christoph

Schnell, David

Weischer, Matthias

 

http://www.nyaa.edu/nyaa/home.html

I love figure sculpture .com

www.ilovefiguresculpture.com is a collection of traditional figurative sculptures form around the world.

Blane De St Croix

Blane De St Croix is sculptor who makes sections of landscapes out of various non-traditional materials such as building materials, model trees, foam, flocking, etc.

A large work at Smack-Mellon, a more than one hundred foot scale model Mexican/American border fence snaked through the gallery space, has brought him to the attention of various other project spaces. He is currently working on multiple projects including a giant upside down strip-mined mountain at the Black and White project space down the street from my studio. I have been helping him occasionally on his current project as it is, like any good project, more than you can realistically do in the time allotted.

Blane sees himself coming out the tradition of landscape painters. Formally he uses shape, color, and texture to imply greater space.

He has an impressively short statement which I would like to emulate:
My work utilizes sculptural object, installation and drawing. Employing a combination of natural and industrial materials. I am interested in articulating humankind’s desire to take command over the earth --alluding to conflicts with ecology, politics, ourselves and the level of human absence and/or presence in industry. I often borrow from man-made elements and architectural environments and adjoin them with natural habitats, asking us to reflect on our precarious relationship with our surroundings.

http://blanedestcroix.blogspot.com/
http://www.blackandwhiteprojectspace.org/

Joshua Been Website

Joshua Been is a Colorado landscape and figurative artist. He also offers helpful material for artist. Here is his educational section that talks about studio setup and color mixing.

http://www.joshuabeen.com/educational/

Alex Kanevski

One of the most visually satisfying painters out there. Love him!

http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/6/berlinde-de-bruyckere/images-clips/

BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE

http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/6/berlinde-de-bruyckere/images-clips/

Another brilliant artist i just discovered. Check it out!

Ilya Repin

Ilya Repin 1844 - 1930 is the most prominent painter in the XVIII century Russian realism. He is one of my most admired painters.

Wecome to LA Art space Blog

I live by idea that we are here to express ourselves in one way or the other. I would like to use this blog to gather and share the amazing findings of brilliant artists and creators i admire or find worth noting, and any resources to help artists in there quest of making art.