We are all Trayvon Martin
Rudy Shepherd 1708 Gallery At what point does messiness push art into an area that is too 'crude' or 'unrefined'? Well, I don't think there is such a thing as too crude or unrefined in art, but it certainly limits the audience of the art and who is attracted to the art. Although Shepherd certainly has extremely relevant and important social commentary in his pieces, I don't like how they are aesthetically constructed. His watercolor paintings provoked a sense of unease in me rather than conveying his message because his aesthetic just doesn't sit with me well. However, I can still find elements of his work such as texture and line that may be applicable to mine. The blocks of color and sharp transitions in color seemed good for defining shapes and forms. For his sculpture, I liked the idea behind them of spontaneity and creativity, and because they were, for the most part, not figurative, I enjoyed them more than the drawings actually.
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http://www.jacobdhein.com Jacob Dhein is a contemporary painter who mainly works with oil. Most of his pieces have a messy and almost digitized feel to them because of his blocky mark that always appears at right angles. At the same time he manages to use this mark effectively while still achieving a sense of depth in his scenes or energy in his more figure oriented work. His pieces are some of my favorite from contemporary artists, and I definitely want to incorporate some of the flow and energy that his work has into my own. I'll probably try to work just slightly larger in future paintings to get more room to paint like this. http://www.josefkotefineart.com
Joseph Kote works with acrylic, and his paintings are much brighter and vibrant than Dhein's. However, both of them have a similar abstract mark at times, and both often have dripping paints in their pieces. Kote works more as an impressionist painter where he consistently tries to emphasize the light in a scene. This gets to a point where all of his paintings look as if they were in the hottest, brightest days possible. The light in his work makes everything extremely vibrant and saturated. I like the mark he makes, but only some of his works have real sense of depth to them due to the way he plays with the light. Even so, I think his pieces give good examples of how to approach lighting and how to really make something feel like it's under a strong source of light. Public Art is a very broad genre of art because it's just art that's somewhere out in public. It's almost always funded by the local government, and it generally is either permanent or an installation. There's technically no limits on aesthetics, form, function, and many other attributes. The only things that limits any form of public art are the resources and the community.
This brings up several debatable topics because anything community driven will have no singular direction. More daring and perhaps offensive pieces of art may draw the ire of several conservative branches of a community, and even more historical monuments and sculptures oftentimes can draw attention due to the history they represent. We know the issues surrounding Monument Ave and its depiction of historical figures in our community. These issues further extend to many other instances of public art. Another example can be found just a few miles away in the Columbus statue at Byrd Park. The first issue of daring and more provocative pieces of work are more nuanced. They are usually more disliked due to aesthetic reasons. One of the articles mentioned many park-goers disliking the orange tarps hanging over the paths. Here is one of the biggest challenges facing more public art driven by artistic intent rather than memorial based public works. Public art which is driven by an artist's aesthetic choices usually does not accommodate everyone in the community. For this issue, the solution is to strike a balance between differences within a community on public works. Memorials and statues don't face nearly the same controversy over aesthetics. Public art is one of the most difficult forms of art due to its end goal of catering to an entire community. Carefully built frame, although not completely perfect
White acrylic ground, several layers, no sanding Oil applied without medium, attempting to keep color intensity Very rough brush strokes, not much attention to small details, just overall feeling of the scene Find stopping point at the moment |