Previously on Skandalon

About Mark Ryden :

“Mark Ryden came to preeminence in the 1990’s during a time when many artists, critics and collectors were quietly championing a return to the art of painting. With his masterful technique and disquieting content, Ryden quickly became one of the leaders of this movement on the West Coast.

Upon first glance Ryden’s work seems to mirror the Surrealists’ fascination with the subconscious and collective memories. However, Ryden transcends the initial Surrealists’ strategies by consciously choosing subject matter loaded with cultural connotation. His dewy vixens, cuddly plush pets, alchemical symbols, religious emblems, primordial landscapes and slabs of meat challenge his audience not necessarily with their own oddity but with the introduction of their soothing cultural familiarity into unsettling circumstances. (more)

Artist Statement - “The Meat Show” - October 1998 :

“I believe to get ideas you have to nourish the spirit. I stuff myself full of the things I like: pictures of bugs, paintings by Bouguereau and David, books about Pheneous T. Barnum, films by Ray Harryhausen, old photographs of strange people, children’s books about space and science, medical illustrations, music by Frank Sinatra and Debussy, magazines, T.V., Jung and Freud, Ren and Stimpy, Joseph Campbell and Nostradamus, Ken and Barbie, Alchemy, Freemasonary, Buddhism. At night my head is so full of ideas I can’t sleep. I mix it all together and create my own doctrine of life and the universe.” (more)

Previously on Skandalon: meat

If you like this one be sure to check his other paintings and all of his work on paper. It’s interesting to find a link to Damian Loeb’s website in his “links” section.

Strange tales of silent destruction and partial fragmentation in Grasso’s work. Here’s what Ed Schad (curator and independant writer working over at ArtSlant) had to say about it:

“Ben Grasso, like many contemporary painters, takes decay as his subject matter, but unlike those painters (often eager to watch the world burn), Grasso seems to follow the enthusiasm of his brushstrokes and the buoyancy of his color into realms laced with whimsy and imagination. His houses are in shreds and crumbling, you see a white flag of surrender, he dashes off a couple of shacks in the jungle, but Grasso doesn’t believe that these ruins denote the end of things — flickers of light shimmer and whirls of white burst into the air.” (read more)

Previously on Skandalon

This is a woodblock print by Kunisada depicting a Scene from a Kabuki play (c. 1850). I scanned it from the excellent book The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore. Here’s Shore’s comments about the illustration:

“Japanese woodblock prints use the frame in a way that is more reminiscent of photographs than of Western painting. It has been suggested that it was a result of the Eastern scroll tradition ― seeing the infinitly variable croppings that occur when viewing a scroll as it rolled from hand to hand. Perhaps by examining what it gives these prints their sense of photographic framing we canclarify what photographic framing is.

Notice how, in the upper right of the picture, the frame gives emphasis to the angel’s hand staying the sword. The angel is described with the greatest economy: the artist has given the least information needed for us to read this being as an angel. There is something slyly wonderful about our ability to make an interpretation based on this minimal description.

Now, notice the leg jutting into the image from the lower right. It is really amazing that the artist chose to add this. It doesn’t relate to any of the action in the picture. It is entirely extraneous. It typifies the sort of seemingly arbitrary cropping that occurs when the frame of a photograph slices through the world. While it doesn’t relate to the unfolding drama of the picture, it does imply that this drama is a part of a larger world.”

From The Nature of Photographs, 2nd edition, New York: Phaidon, 2007, p. 64-64 (Amazon).

About Kunisada:

“Utagawa Kunisada (1786 - 1865) (also known as Utagawa Toyokuni III) was the most popular, prolific and financially successful designer of ukiyo-e woodblock prints in 19th-century Japan. In his own time, his reputation far exceeded that of his contemporaries, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi.” (Wikipedia)

“Charcot worked under the aegis of Fleury’s painting, which exhibits, in the foreground, the fetters and tools that tell the tale of the enchaining of the madwomen and their ‘liberation’ by Pinel; what is depicted is the turning point, or rather the decisive chiasmus, which Pinel is said to have effected in the mythology of madness. This chiasmus was, in the first place, the concept of madness that Hegel formulated, declaring himself wholly indebted to Pinel; madness was not supposed to be an abstract loss of reason, but a simple disorder, ‘a simple contradiction within reason’. This means that, in principle, a madwoman should be supposed, or presupposed, writes Hegel, to be quite simply a reasonable being.” (Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière by Georges Didi-Huberman, tr. by Alisa Hartz, The MIT Press, [1982]2003, p. 4)

Wikipedia entries for Tony Robert-Fleury and Philippe Pinel

“Damian Loeb (born May 9, 1970 in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American painter. Self-taught, he moved to New York City in the early 1990s. Discovered by Jeffrey Deitch, Loeb had his first solo in 1999. Since then, he has had international solo and group shows at galleries and museums, including the Mary Boone Gallery in New York, White Cube in London, the Jablonka Galerie in Cologne, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, and a 2006 retrospective of his work at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art[1] in Connecticut. His work is featured in several prestigious private collections, including Douglas Cramer, Michael Lynne, and the Rubell Family Collection, and has attracted the attention of a number of collectors. He is currently represented by the Acquavella Gallery.” (Wikipedia). Visit his unofficial website.

Previously on Skandalon

“Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was a 20th century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States, where Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over more than four decades. (Wikipedia)

Read “The History Behind Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post Covers” over at the Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont website.