Wood cut party

The amazing things Mike Houston can do with wood cuts...the details and rhythms of the objects...defining intimate spaces with intense line and cut...the ideas and imagery are not traditional, they cover contemporary ideas, social identity, indulgence and characters...the black in the work move the eye around and act as a respite for all the visual activity...

The women's dress and heels in the lower left...the arms, legs and fingers acting like arrows to move you over to the lower right, black dress and then up the pants to the top of the beer bong (never thought that word would enter this blog!), across the hair of the man and women, down to the man's shirt and back again to the lower left...visual association creating cohesion and unity...

Beauty and the beasts

Long horizontal narratives, exploring ideas of man verses nature...these collaged images by Josh Dorman are subtle and layered...many of his works incorporate maps and contemporary collage materials...but the context is often ancient, aged and worn...setting up a juxtaposition between those elements we recognize and a time that feels foreign.

This uneasiness plays on the viewers emotions and sets up the imagery nicely....this piece explores the mass exodus of birds and animals from an every encroaching environment dominated by machines and man...scale is important in this work, extending the horizontal picture plane, pushing space back through tiny elements, gradually getting larger as they move forward into the space.

Pig Tattoo Taxidermy

Okay, these are some tough works to wrap your mind around...which is the main reason I decided to write about the work of Wim Delvoye, a Belgium artist...These were tattooed, live pigs that became art...the emotional relationship between a live animal and the owner...a decision to kill this animal for its skin or stuff the animal for its value...

Choosing to make art on an animal that is used as food, complicates for some, the idea of cruelty and making something beautiful but accomplishing this in a painful/cruel way...a unique concept and a challenging work, even for the most open of art connoisseurs...pushing the lines of acceptable forms of creation

Decoration stand

I really like the works where the figure becomes mutilated by decoration, as if the human form splits and color explodes from the waste...I want to see little or no remnants of the individual...these figurative/organic works use the leg shapes as stands for the mountain of objects and materials.

Faceless and ambiguous in structure, these pieces are visually interesting through contrasting color, texture and scale...some are delicate, some are cleaner in presentation with more similar objects adorning the armature...these beautiful works by Chicago artist, Nick Cave hit the visual and emotional sweet spot!

Animal subtleties

Traditional context in the Renaissance and Audubon tradition...the long, extended background space...low horizon line...a defining of a region to give clues into the central figures background and class...The exploration of animals in a scientific way, detailed and illustrated to articulate its visual genus, species and phylum.

The work of Walton Ford plays in these traditions but something darker is also present...the noble qualities are pushed aside for the more aggressive...the disharmony between species and the dominance of the turkey to the weaker, bird...taking advantage of its scale and weight...this relationship is subtle and represents only a small portion of the picture plane...this is purposeful and calculated.

Densely put

More and more intense patterns...they follow a landscape format and create areas of visual rest utilizing repetition of forms and large swaths of color...the amazing details in the collage work, each element carrying its own individual identity but connected through a conceptual and visual relationship.

The idea of proximity and human manipulation plays out in these works by Simmons & Burke...I once read, "we must take a closer look at works by artists who have invested their entire life exploring ideas." I think about this when I see stretched conceptual relationships. The "whys" of the work, there must be reasons for these choices, experience has taken over to create something unique and full of possibilities.

Soft and light

Unique combinations of repetitive forms and relationships, the work by Bruce Conner...soft and layered, using shadow and objects to carry the eye around the picture plane and provide contrast to the white ground...objective and recognizable imagery combined with monochromatic shapes and texture tie this beautiful collage piece together.

The Christ and crucifix are separated and pulled apart...Jesus balancing on the wire...segmented, narrow, long rectangle on the top and large vertical rectangle on the bottom create individual segments of interest...these areas have their own dynamic, but are interesting in total...the artist breaks the picture plane with texture and fabric...flowing down the sides and softening the hard edges of the picture plane.