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.