Browsing

On a lazy day, if I'm in town mooching around the museums and galleries I like to pop in to the art reference library and flip through some of the magazines. Out comes the camera to make take-home images, names, articles, which I then "research" at leisure. Here are a few of the highlights of yesterday's browsing -

Clicking on the image will enlarge it enough to see what's going on! At the moment my computer is having problems with Save for Web, a function I use with each and every photo that appears on this blog (after cropping etc) - photoshop needs opening up anew every time, and that gets, um, tedious. As a result, taking screen shots, especially composites, is a quicker way - not only do they have a size limit, but with the largest size of thumbnail, only two rows fit on the screen. Hmm, having written that (ie, really thought about it) I can see a way to improve this, to at least get a larger composite. Workarounds, workarounds........

ok, back to the magazine. At top left is an advert for Hermes scarves, quite a nice image (venetian canal with boat, the glamour of emerging from some palazzo or other...) but the reason I took it is because of the image at bottom right, seen earlier - it includes a Hermes scarf, in much the same way that Rauschenberg famously included a quilt in "Bed" (1955). Nadaleena Mirat Brettmann's show is called "Hermes Rags" and each work contains an "original Hermes scarf" as well as acrylic paint and house paint. So, works with an inherent monetary value - unlike the quilt in Rauschenberg's raggedy piece.

At top right is an article on Lauren Seiden - subtitled "a graphite-obsessed artist chases a new thread". Here, beautifully presented on her website, are some laboriously-made graphite pieces -

Her thready works are coated in resin and shaped; once they are dry, she takes the pencil to them -

At lower left in my composite photo is the advert of Matthew Satz's show. Who he, that his gallery pays for a double-page spread? Mind you, it does look good; and he's showing in Miami and Houston at the same time -

"Handsome paintings with lines and marks that are pleasing to a modernist eye," it's said. He has "taught himself to create conceptually-driven art." He is revisiting his tar-and-feathers technique and is also know for his smoke paintings, made by lighting hundreds of matches and capturing their smoke.

Which leave two images from my original compilation. Top right, "Phantom Bodies: the human aura in art" - photogram, Medusa, from the series Home and the World, by Adam Fuss. The tones are produced by the amount of light that gets through the layers of fabric. Bottom right, a painting that reminded me of Adrian Berg's "un-naturally" colourful landscapes.

So there we have it - threee hours of "leisure" spent satisfying my curiosity about not-quite-random contemporary artists. I hope one or other of them inspires you to seek out more of their work (online?) or read about how and why they do what they do.