17 thoughts on “WEEK TEN – CONTEMPORARY MALE PAINTER (POST-1970)”
Artist: Zao Wou-Ki
Zao Wou-Ki was a Chinese contemporary painter. He began studying oil painting in Hangzhou as a teenager. He later moved to Paris and had his first solo exhibition. He attained his French citizenship and was very influenced by European modernism. However, he continuously traveled back to China and continued to keep in touch with his Chinese traditions through ink paintings. His dramatic work was so famous, he was once called “arguably China’s most important living artist” by the New York Times.
This piece is titled 10.1.68. It was sold for $8,985,431 and now hangs at the Marlborough Gallery. I like this piece because through its abstract style, I can still feel like I can identify a scenic snapshot of nature. He uses complementary colors exceptionally well, and the piece becomes chaotic and harmonious simultaneously.
Artist: Chuck Close
Charles Thomas “Chuck” Close was born July 5, 1940 in Monroe, Washington. He is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits.Close suffers from prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, in which he is unable to recognize faces. By painting portraits, he is better able to recognize and remember faces. On the subject, Close has said, “I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty in recognizing faces.” Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors.
Birch is a multimedia artist and painter who was born in Brighton, England, but currently resides in Hong Kong. He wasn’t very successful with academics, and did random jobs for the majority of his early life. He starting getting into art after he moved to Hong Kong in 1997. He claims that the work he did on the Tsing Ma bridge as a construction worker inspired him to do art and helped him learn how to work as a team and put your energy towards a common goal. He was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer and was given 6 months to live, but survived it. He often uses palette knives to add texture to his paintings. His paintings are focused on energy and movement, featuring people falling and flying, “trying to protect themselves from the future barreling inevitably towards them.”
van den Boog was born in 1951 in Amsterdam, where he still lives and works today. He is influenced by Dutch painters including Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer. I like his portrait paintings because he brings in all these new textures and colors. His visible brushstroke techniques give literal texture to different parts of the painting but still look almost realistic. Along with the brushstrokes and texture he also randomly color blocks pieces out of the figure in the painting. I think it all makes for very interesting and beautiful portraits.
David Cambria is a contemporary Italian painter who was born in Messina, Italy in 1986. He is a self-taught painter, and he received his MA in Architecture in 2011. Despite his lack of formal training, Cambria has pieces entered in private collections all over the globe, including collections in Europe, USA, Asia, and Australia. The majority of his paintings are portraits created with a palette knife and thick layering of oil paint. His portraits are often set on cool-colored backgrounds such as grey, green, or teal. He is a relatively new artist, so he doesn’t have much information available online about his inspiration, but I think his pieces evoke a lot of emotion because of the expressions of his subjects. In some of his paintings, it looks like the faces are fading away or falling apart, and they make me think of memories or nostalgia. His pieces “Questo lato della verità,” “Despite Everything I’m Still Human,” and “Ich will ein Garten sein” are pictured below.
Nick Lepard (1983- )
Lepard is both a Canadian and an U.K. citizen, but was raised in Vancouver. He studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2008. He uses paintings to explore the physical aspects of painting, through both its application and dependency on space. Lepard uses color, scale, and gesture to create images bright in color, but often grotesque in other aspects. His style mirrors in some aspects those that he admires such as Charles Bukowski, and Jenny Saville. He says, “In an increasingly digital world, painting is an evermore engaging art form,” and he hopes to show this through his work.
From Milan to Vienna, 2006
The Event, 2009
I Wanna Love, 2011
Every Ghost Story, 2013
Born in Baja, Mexico but later raised and educated in Los Angeles, this contemporary painter captures the viewer’s attention with rich color and graphic-like designs. Many of his works have been featured or used in films by Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino. Most notably “Yepes moved to Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas, and worked with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino on their double feature ‘Grind House 2007′. Among other artworks for the “Grind House” series, Yepes created a 20 foot long Machete Crucifix for Rodriguez’ movie “Machete 2010″ which starred Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Lyndsay Lohan, Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin.” He also made works on commission for a hotel in Dubai. His paintings, mostly acrylic, feature religious figures as well as popular culture articles that grab attention through its use of rich (again, I know but they are!) color and uses of cultural influences that show/feature in his works. He has continued to capture diverse audiences through his diverse images that include social and hisotrical subjects.
Guy Denning was born in North Somerset in 1965. He became fascinated with the arts at a young age. Denning applied to numerous art schools and was repeatedly denied acceptance. Due to this unfortunate situation, Denning began to formally teach himself. His early work was inspired by Franz Kline, using the technique of expressive, abstract brush strokes. As time progressed, so did Denning style of painting. He began to use a more figurative technique. Most recently, Denning has been interested in the human figure. He goes as far as scratching the paint off his work to gain a deeper feeling of emotion.
Martin Kippenberger (25 February 1953 – 7 March 1997)
He was a German painter known as one of the most talented artists of his generation. He used a variety of styles and media in his artwork. He refused to chose just one style. Some of his work deals with the struggle and inability to produce any work that can be considered “original,” which I find very interesting. So much of art is about taking from others and getting inspired and revising it in your own way. Kippenberger’s art focuses on a variety of themes and subjects that reflect the changing culture of the 90s. The top painting reflects the irony of consumerism and his other works give other testaments of social commentary.
Howard Tangye
Tangye was born in Australia and always dreamed of going to Europe to study fashion and art. His parents always encouraged him to keep up his drawing, especially his older brother who drew cartoons. He ended up at St Martins School of Art in London and graduated in 1974 and then went on to Parsons School of Design in New York where he focused on drawing. Over the years he has worked on some very impressive collections, including designs for Dior and Galliano. He focused his drawings on character and movement within the body, which translates to his designs for clothing. Tangye is quoted as saying “I draw for myself and f not I am not doing it physically I am mentally casting a line.” His portraits are known for twisted lines and careful use of color with some of the imagination left up to the viewer to finish the portrait.
Artist: Chris Slabber
Chris Slabber considers himself a surrealist painter. He grew up in a small South African town called Oudtshoorn at the heart of the Klein Karoo. There, he began painting and gained a love for Surrealism and similar genres. He studied fine art from a young age and began to apply this training in a more design-based way. In 2014, he won a design award for photography and photo manipulation. He owns CS Design & Illustration in South Africa, is a junior designer at Lunch in Cape Town, and a photo composite artist at Gloo Digital Design, also in Cape Town.
Paul Wright is a contemporary male artist who has devoted his career to painting portraits. His goal is to show the audience a glimpse of the subject, without fully exposing them. He uses large, rich brush strokes with many vibrant colors that, up close may be confusing, but far away enables visual mixing, similar to alla prima from class. He uses very large scaled canvases and medias, but what is always consistent is his colorful palette. The atmosphere and ground of most of his works are psychological and ambiguous, combining an abstract and realistic feel that is very interesting to the viewer.
His paintings are spontaneous, containing bright colors and forms. Some of his prints use sheets combined together in a printing process to create a final piece that appears to be painted. His work has been called “semi-abstract’ and compared to Henri Matisse during his early years as a painter. I like the feeling that his paintings evoke. They make me feel happy and peaceful as opposed to some of the other work I’ve seen or even pieces that I’ve done myself. It has been said of Hodgkin’s work that it helps people express their emotion to others; he has been heralded as one of the 100 most influential gay people in Britain by The Independent likely for this reason.
Poons was born in 1937 in Tokyo, Japan. Although he intended to be a professional musician, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music and then transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His work features vibrant, glittering colors that surround abstracted shapes – often circles – but he also worked with optical art. Much of his work is either very simple or brilliantly abstracted, almost Impressionistic flurries of wide and layered strokes of paint. His Impressionistic pieces often recall works by Cezanne or Matisse. In his paintings, he seeks a nuance and order which goes beyond just subtlety. His paintings have been described as being “unified but concentrated” and like “everything and nothing.” His work is pioneering in that is challenges viewers’ notions of looking at a painting to understand it.
Luqman Reza, better known as “jongkie,” is an Indonesian artist and illustrator who mostly works in watercolor paint. He has done many works depicting wildlife, but he adds his characteristic signature style that he calls a “magic effect,” that is a wispy, smoky look. He uses beautiful rainbow colors rather than the actual realistic colors of the animals he paints, which is his way of adding his own imagination to the reference pictures he is painting. He calls his works a “fantasy world” and greatly enjoys sharing his vision and inspirations through his illustrations. He has gained a large following on social media and now works on a global basis corresponding with many other people around the world.
painting 202 
Artist: Zao Wou-Ki
Zao Wou-Ki was a Chinese contemporary painter. He began studying oil painting in Hangzhou as a teenager. He later moved to Paris and had his first solo exhibition. He attained his French citizenship and was very influenced by European modernism. However, he continuously traveled back to China and continued to keep in touch with his Chinese traditions through ink paintings. His dramatic work was so famous, he was once called “arguably China’s most important living artist” by the New York Times.
This piece is titled 10.1.68. It was sold for $8,985,431 and now hangs at the Marlborough Gallery. I like this piece because through its abstract style, I can still feel like I can identify a scenic snapshot of nature. He uses complementary colors exceptionally well, and the piece becomes chaotic and harmonious simultaneously.
LikeLike
Artist: Chuck Close
Charles Thomas “Chuck” Close was born July 5, 1940 in Monroe, Washington. He is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits.Close suffers from prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, in which he is unable to recognize faces. By painting portraits, he is better able to recognize and remember faces. On the subject, Close has said, “I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty in recognizing faces.” Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors.
LikeLike
Artist: Simon Birch
Birch is a multimedia artist and painter who was born in Brighton, England, but currently resides in Hong Kong. He wasn’t very successful with academics, and did random jobs for the majority of his early life. He starting getting into art after he moved to Hong Kong in 1997. He claims that the work he did on the Tsing Ma bridge as a construction worker inspired him to do art and helped him learn how to work as a team and put your energy towards a common goal. He was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer and was given 6 months to live, but survived it. He often uses palette knives to add texture to his paintings. His paintings are focused on energy and movement, featuring people falling and flying, “trying to protect themselves from the future barreling inevitably towards them.”
Here is his TED talk, it’s pretty cool: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/art-life-made-me-do-it-|-Simon
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Artist: Piet van den Boog
van den Boog was born in 1951 in Amsterdam, where he still lives and works today. He is influenced by Dutch painters including Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer. I like his portrait paintings because he brings in all these new textures and colors. His visible brushstroke techniques give literal texture to different parts of the painting but still look almost realistic. Along with the brushstrokes and texture he also randomly color blocks pieces out of the figure in the painting. I think it all makes for very interesting and beautiful portraits.
self portrait
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David Cambria is a contemporary Italian painter who was born in Messina, Italy in 1986. He is a self-taught painter, and he received his MA in Architecture in 2011. Despite his lack of formal training, Cambria has pieces entered in private collections all over the globe, including collections in Europe, USA, Asia, and Australia. The majority of his paintings are portraits created with a palette knife and thick layering of oil paint. His portraits are often set on cool-colored backgrounds such as grey, green, or teal. He is a relatively new artist, so he doesn’t have much information available online about his inspiration, but I think his pieces evoke a lot of emotion because of the expressions of his subjects. In some of his paintings, it looks like the faces are fading away or falling apart, and they make me think of memories or nostalgia. His pieces “Questo lato della verità,” “Despite Everything I’m Still Human,” and “Ich will ein Garten sein” are pictured below.
Questo lato della verità
Despite Everything I’m Still Human
Ich will ein Garten sein
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Nick Lepard (1983- )
Lepard is both a Canadian and an U.K. citizen, but was raised in Vancouver. He studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2008. He uses paintings to explore the physical aspects of painting, through both its application and dependency on space. Lepard uses color, scale, and gesture to create images bright in color, but often grotesque in other aspects. His style mirrors in some aspects those that he admires such as Charles Bukowski, and Jenny Saville. He says, “In an increasingly digital world, painting is an evermore engaging art form,” and he hopes to show this through his work.
From Milan to Vienna, 2006
The Event, 2009
I Wanna Love, 2011
Every Ghost Story, 2013
LikeLike
Artist: George Yepes
Born in Baja, Mexico but later raised and educated in Los Angeles, this contemporary painter captures the viewer’s attention with rich color and graphic-like designs. Many of his works have been featured or used in films by Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino. Most notably “Yepes moved to Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas, and worked with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino on their double feature ‘Grind House 2007′. Among other artworks for the “Grind House” series, Yepes created a 20 foot long Machete Crucifix for Rodriguez’ movie “Machete 2010″ which starred Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Lyndsay Lohan, Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin.” He also made works on commission for a hotel in Dubai. His paintings, mostly acrylic, feature religious figures as well as popular culture articles that grab attention through its use of rich (again, I know but they are!) color and uses of cultural influences that show/feature in his works. He has continued to capture diverse audiences through his diverse images that include social and hisotrical subjects.
LikeLike
Guy Denning
Guy Denning was born in North Somerset in 1965. He became fascinated with the arts at a young age. Denning applied to numerous art schools and was repeatedly denied acceptance. Due to this unfortunate situation, Denning began to formally teach himself. His early work was inspired by Franz Kline, using the technique of expressive, abstract brush strokes. As time progressed, so did Denning style of painting. He began to use a more figurative technique. Most recently, Denning has been interested in the human figure. He goes as far as scratching the paint off his work to gain a deeper feeling of emotion.
LikeLike
Martin Kippenberger (25 February 1953 – 7 March 1997)
He was a German painter known as one of the most talented artists of his generation. He used a variety of styles and media in his artwork. He refused to chose just one style. Some of his work deals with the struggle and inability to produce any work that can be considered “original,” which I find very interesting. So much of art is about taking from others and getting inspired and revising it in your own way. Kippenberger’s art focuses on a variety of themes and subjects that reflect the changing culture of the 90s. The top painting reflects the irony of consumerism and his other works give other testaments of social commentary.
LikeLike
Howard Tangye
Tangye was born in Australia and always dreamed of going to Europe to study fashion and art. His parents always encouraged him to keep up his drawing, especially his older brother who drew cartoons. He ended up at St Martins School of Art in London and graduated in 1974 and then went on to Parsons School of Design in New York where he focused on drawing. Over the years he has worked on some very impressive collections, including designs for Dior and Galliano. He focused his drawings on character and movement within the body, which translates to his designs for clothing. Tangye is quoted as saying “I draw for myself and f not I am not doing it physically I am mentally casting a line.” His portraits are known for twisted lines and careful use of color with some of the imagination left up to the viewer to finish the portrait.
LikeLike
Artist: Chris Slabber
Chris Slabber considers himself a surrealist painter. He grew up in a small South African town called Oudtshoorn at the heart of the Klein Karoo. There, he began painting and gained a love for Surrealism and similar genres. He studied fine art from a young age and began to apply this training in a more design-based way. In 2014, he won a design award for photography and photo manipulation. He owns CS Design & Illustration in South Africa, is a junior designer at Lunch in Cape Town, and a photo composite artist at Gloo Digital Design, also in Cape Town.
LikeLike
Paul Wright is a contemporary male artist who has devoted his career to painting portraits. His goal is to show the audience a glimpse of the subject, without fully exposing them. He uses large, rich brush strokes with many vibrant colors that, up close may be confusing, but far away enables visual mixing, similar to alla prima from class. He uses very large scaled canvases and medias, but what is always consistent is his colorful palette. The atmosphere and ground of most of his works are psychological and ambiguous, combining an abstract and realistic feel that is very interesting to the viewer.
LikeLike
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Howard Hodgkin
His paintings are spontaneous, containing bright colors and forms. Some of his prints use sheets combined together in a printing process to create a final piece that appears to be painted. His work has been called “semi-abstract’ and compared to Henri Matisse during his early years as a painter. I like the feeling that his paintings evoke. They make me feel happy and peaceful as opposed to some of the other work I’ve seen or even pieces that I’ve done myself. It has been said of Hodgkin’s work that it helps people express their emotion to others; he has been heralded as one of the 100 most influential gay people in Britain by The Independent likely for this reason.
http://images.tate.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/grid-normal-8-cols/public/images/howard%20hodgkin%20waking%20up%20in%20naples_0.jpg?itok=rorsSK66
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Artist: Larry Poons
Poons was born in 1937 in Tokyo, Japan. Although he intended to be a professional musician, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music and then transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His work features vibrant, glittering colors that surround abstracted shapes – often circles – but he also worked with optical art. Much of his work is either very simple or brilliantly abstracted, almost Impressionistic flurries of wide and layered strokes of paint. His Impressionistic pieces often recall works by Cezanne or Matisse. In his paintings, he seeks a nuance and order which goes beyond just subtlety. His paintings have been described as being “unified but concentrated” and like “everything and nothing.” His work is pioneering in that is challenges viewers’ notions of looking at a painting to understand it.
Untitled, 1964
Duetto, 2007
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Artist: Luqman Reza
Luqman Reza, better known as “jongkie,” is an Indonesian artist and illustrator who mostly works in watercolor paint. He has done many works depicting wildlife, but he adds his characteristic signature style that he calls a “magic effect,” that is a wispy, smoky look. He uses beautiful rainbow colors rather than the actual realistic colors of the animals he paints, which is his way of adding his own imagination to the reference pictures he is painting. He calls his works a “fantasy world” and greatly enjoys sharing his vision and inspirations through his illustrations. He has gained a large following on social media and now works on a global basis corresponding with many other people around the world.
LikeLike