Lee Price graduated from the Moore College of Art in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Painting. It’s interesting to note that he (she?) took private studies with Alyssa Monk.
Jean-Gabriel Domergue: “Modèle aux seins nus”, oil on canvas, 85 x 65,5 cm.
Jean-Gabriel Domergue was born in Bordeaux, France on March 4th, 1889.
An extremely talented and precocious painter, Domergue exhibited works at the Salon Des Artistes Français (the French Artists Exhibition) in 1906 at the young age of seventeen. In 1913, he was awarded the Second Prize of Rome and went on to win the gold medal award in the 1920 show. He then began showing outside the exhibition.
Having first been recognized for his landscapes which he painted with great ease, his career took a decisive turn during the 1920’s. At this time he became the painter of the “Parisian lady”.
Domergue invented a new type of woman : thin, airy, elegant, with a swanlike neck and wide seductive eyes which gaze upon the world with longing.
“I invented the pin-up” he later claimed. (more)
Vittorio Giardino (born December 24, 1946), is an Italian comic artist. Giardino was born in Bologna, where he graduated in electrical engineering in 1969. At the age of 30, he decided to leave his job and devote himself to comics. Two years later his first short story Pax Romana was published in La Città Futura, a weekly magazine published by the Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana and edited by Luigi Bernardi. […] Starting in 1984, Giardino produced a number of short stories for the Italian magazine Comic Art, where he introduced Little Ego, a young and sexy girl inspired by Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo who stars in one-page dreamy erotic stories. (wikipedia)
Milo Manara meets Little Nemo
About Aaron Romine:
In Aaron Romine’s recent paintings his characters have become stand-ins for something larger. Although obviously recognizable as specific people (they are all actually his friends), the work is contemplative and the scenes are a commentary on current culture. His painstaking paintings have become psychological allegories. He has looked past pure sexuality into how his subjects relate to each other, pushing their relationships to a level of intimacy. While influenced by such artists as Manet, Piazetta, Gaugin, Sargent, and Velazquez, his work has recently veered away from (strictly) historical references. (PragueBiennale.org).
First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness.
Artnet: Beautiful Girl Lying Down by Euan Uglow, 1958-1959, oil on canvas, 23,5” x 36,5”
Euan Uglow (10 March 1932 – 31 August 2000) was an English figurative painter. […] [He] is best known as a painter of the figure, particularly of female nudes, as well as portraits, still lifes and landscapes. His ostensibly simple compositions usually consist of a single figure in a setting emptied of extraneous detail; a typical still life may feature a single piece of fruit on a plain tabletop. With a meticulous method of painting directly from life, Uglow frequently took months or years to complete a painting. Planes are articulated very precisely, edges are sharply defined, and colours are differentiated with great subtlety. (wikipedia)
Artist statement:
“I got involved in looking at and describing the human form through watching war films. It occurred to me, after a while, that their images were pornographic in nature – both alluring, seductive and repulsive. That got me into looking at porn films. I began to think that they were like life drawings, only with all the rules broken. They have very limited narrative: often no script, virtually no dialogue, just the hovering gaze. I described these films moment by moment, in my own words, and made very big pictures from them. They take something very private and domestic, and make it heroic. After that, I worked with a striptease artist. She came to my studio and undressed, and I began describing her act verbally. It became a kind of striptease in words.” (more)
About Fiona Banner:
“Fiona Banner was born in Merseyside and now lives in London. She studied at Kingston University and completed her MA at Goldsmiths College in 1993. The next year she held her first solo show at City Racing. Following her shows at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein,and Dundee Contemporary Arts, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. More recent shows include at The Power Plant, Toronto, and Live/Work, at MOMA, New York.” (wikipedia)
Ariel Levy wrote about McGinley:
“People fall in love with McGinley’s work because it tells a story about liberation and hedonism: Where Goldin and Larry Clark were saying something painful and anxiety-producing about Kids and what happens when they take drugs and have sex in an ungoverned urban underworld, McGinley started out announcing that “The Kids Are Alright,” fantastic, really, and suggested that a gleeful, unfettered subculture was just around the corner—still—if only you knew where to look.”
“That show, “The Kids Are Alright,” depicted a downtown neverland where people are thrilled and naked, leaping in front of graffiti on the street, sacked out in heaps of flannel shirts—everything very debauched and drug-addled and decadent, like Nan Goldin hit with a happy wand.” (New York Magazine)
I think it’s an inexact account of both McGinley and Clark works. Kids are happy from time to time in Larry Clark’s Kids. And young naked people seems to be a little fucked up in some on McGinley photographs. I would certainly not opposed those two artist that quickly.
Artist statement:
“I use photos as references for my drawings but I am not after a perfect reproduction at all. I use a photo very loosely once the proportions are established. I usually work as if I were drawing from a live model actually. I work with movement and expression, working fast on larger, more unimportant areas, and slowing down on parts that need more attention. I am actually improvising a lot. My main concern is to capture the essence and substance of forms in order to get close to a perceptible presence of the subject.” (more)
Check Dirk Dzimirsky’s blog.
Rodgers late paintings are somehow reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis novel Glamorama.
About Terry Rodgers:
“Rodgers’ current work focuses on portraying contemporary body politics. His rendering of the upper-class leisure life stands as an iconic vision of today’s society. The resulting paintings are not snapshots or slices of life, not verite records of actual moments in actual party or family situations, or diaristic records of his life, but carefully constructed and composited fictions, designed to elicit the most meaning and sustain the maximum amount of ambiguity.
Terry Rodgers attended Amherst College, with a major in the Fine Arts. His strong interest in film and photography influenced his style in the direction of representational realism in art.” (more)
Artist statement:
“Importantly, however, is that nothing I create is meant to judge or criticize. I am merely looking closely at who we are, the density of influences upon us, the choices we make, and the recognitions that occur in trying to comprehend a universe with no signposts.” (more)
First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness.
About Mona Kuhn:
“Mona Kuhn was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1969, of German descent. She earned her degree in the United States from Ohio State University. Since 1998, she has been an independent studies scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited, and is included in public and private collections, internationally and in the United States. Kuhn’s first monograph, Photographs, was debut by Steidl in 2004; immediately followed by, Evidence, published by Steidl and released in Spring 2007. The images appearing in Evidence were photographed entirely in France, where she resides each summer.” (more)
Interesting comments about Kuhn’s work by Joerg Colberg (from his Conscientious’ blog):
“It’s probably not surprising that this kind of photography looks just like advertizing (minus the clothes) and that it usually is described as bringing back “youth” and “freedom” to photography when it is “discovered”. (more)
Colberg is quoting Alexander Adams’ analysis of Ryan McGinley’s work:
“It is here, ever more specifically, that the work continues its travel into the collective Spectacle – the domain of Guy Debord’s societal criticism – it joins product advertising in creating the image of an unattainable lifestyle – the “world vision which has become objectified [17].” McGinley shoots thousands of rolls of film, creates elaborate situations, to attain what he expresses as “the life I wish I was living.” If even he – young, hip, white, famous, and increasingly wealthy – cannot actually attain this lifestyle, it is hard to comprehend it as existing for anyone outside of the shallow frame of his camera.” (much more)
In McGinley’s case, I think it’s really hard to say if this is a weakness or a quality : his work is a symptom of its time. I find the reflexive quality in Kuhn’s work to be less evocative. Some of McGinley’s photos could offer great illustrations for Bret Easton Ellis’ novels. Just like Terry Rogers decadent photorealist paintings.
About Aaron Nagel:
“Aaron Nagel is a figurative painter living in Oakland CA. Having received no formal training, he is entirely self-taught; a fact at odds with his seemingly classical approach to surrealism. In his current work, he explores specific themes of guilt and power, always associated with his views on the perils of organized religion and theism” (more).
About the “Marks” exhibition:
“Marks is Aaron Nagel’s largest and most cohesive body of work to date. The eleven oil paintings in this series use imagery of youthful women in the nude, often impaled by archery arrows. These figures embody Catholic martyrs such as St. Sebastian, offering atheists and skeptics an alternative to traditional religious symbolism. As Aaron is inspired by the contrast between power and the fragility of the human body, Marks is infused with imagery that is at once calm and violent.” (more)
Visit Aaron’s blog.
Emily Burns has a BFA in painting and photography. On her resume, we learn that she’s (or was) an artist assistant over at the Jeff Koons Studio in New York.
First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness.
