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Volume 19
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Artist Profiles -
Volume 19
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The Well Hatted Ladies’ Coffee Circle Acrylic on Canvas Board 15''x 19''
If the work of German-born artist Irene Brandt seems familiar, perhaps that is because her paintings have graced dozens of calendars and were chosen two years running as UNICEF’s holiday greeting card. Self-taught, Brandt’s style is best described as naive or folk art. Specializing in acrylic paint since 1996, Brandt produces vividly whimsical scenes with the intent of disseminating a positive view of the world. Her fanciful depictions host recurring themes including clowns, bubbles, stylized mountains, overly exaggerated fish, and paper boats. Inspiration for her scenarios comes from Brandt’s imagination, and never ceases to amuse her viewers. Commenting on her pieces, Brandt has said she rarely finishes one painting without it sparking the idea for her next. To maintain variation within her work Brandt eschews dimension creating the comical illustrations that have come to characterize her oeuvre. Brandt matches the hilarity of her pictures with the name she applies to each piece. Titles like, “Bubbles on the Beach,” and “The Well Hatted Ladies' Coffee Circle” immediately conjure humorous imagery within the mind that is no less entertaining when experienced through Brandt’s design, something she extends beyond the canvas to the frame.
The art world has responded to Irene Brandt’s work with rapt attention. Her work is on display around the world, in galleries from China to the United States, Japan and Europe and can be found within the permanent collections of 11 international museums including The Museu Internacional de Arte Naif do Brasi,l Rio de Janeiro, Musée International d'Art Naif de Magog, Magog-Quebec/Canada , Musée International d'Art Naif, Vicq, France, as well as many private collections. She currently resides in Hürth, Germany. www.irenebrandt.de |
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Artist Profiles -
Volume 19
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T. Mikey Working in his Studio
The remarkable vision and technical skill of artist T. Mikey converge to stunning and mesmerizing effect in the medium he calls 3DUV, or Three-Dimensional Ultraviolet. Using a patented process that creates three-dimensional images using ultraviolet light, phosphorescent paint, and multiple layers of transparent film, T. Mikey taps directly into our brain's image- and sense-making centers, and presents an audacious revelation for the future of the visual arts and high technology.
As a hybrid of painting, photography, collage, lighting design, and sculpture, these multidimensional rough guides to T. Mikey's world take their inspiration from a multiverse of sources. The arrangements of forms at times suggest the pantheons of Hindu deities, as well as Middle Eastern and Christian church images. Figures from popular Western culture, science both macro and micro, ancient icons, nature, surreal symbolism, subconscious imagery and psychedelic abstraction are merged in T. Mikey's fantastic realm.
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Read more... [T. Mikey]
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Artist Profiles -
Volume 19
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Ricardo in His Studio
Gleaning artistic influence from an amalgam of art history’s greatest painters, Ricardo Lowenberg transforms the canvas with his skillful manipulation of shape, color, texture and rhythm. In his portrayal of the everyday world, Lowenberg transforms scenes of the mundane, be they the knowing glance of a young woman, a basket of lemons atop a table, or a quiet country landscape, into a spiritually infused piece of art for a decidedly modern audience.
Strongly influenced by the work of Mexican Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, Ricardo Lowenberg uses dreamlike colors, symbolic props, and textural paint application to produce a modern surrealism relevant to contemporary life in Mexico City. In much of his figurative work, Lowenberg concentrates on the human face to capture the emotions and thoughts portrayed within the telling eyes of the subject. In masterfully capturing the subtle nuances of the gaze, Lowenberg displays his own innate and sophisticated understanding of the soul.
Where his portrait paintings draw a strong comparison to the psychologically stirring self portraits Kahlo produced in the mid-20th Century, Lowenberg’s still life and landscape paintings portray a post-Impressionist sensibility reminiscent of those late 19th Century masters of hue and light including Cézanne and Gauguin. Using a refined and muted color palette, Lowenberg carefully models the form, to create a surprising canvas that is dually flat and three dimensional.
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Read more... [Ricardo Lowenberg]
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Artist Profiles -
Volume 19
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Il Due Oil and Digital Art on Canvas 43''x 51''
Italian artist Maria Pia Taverna deploys an expressive – often surreal, even – style and imagery to explore concepts and symbols of femininity. She addresses the place of woman and the variety of female experience, as they are defined against other notions of femininity, and within a broader male-dominated society. Her canvases are an intricate and seamlessly integrated mix of digital and oil imagery. She bridges these two media – one contemporary the other traditional – through a similarly dual palette. Certain areas and elements of Maria Pia’s works are portrayed in sleek tones of gray, while others feature dynamic swaths of bold colors. These two elements of her work seem to play out a kind of duel across canvases. Her artworks are alternately dominated by vibrant colors and photographic monochromes.
This interplay of Maria Pia’s two dominant artistic styles also informs her imagery. She engages femininity on both a universal and a personal level. Her bold oil colors often address widely-held ideas regarding femininity: emotional expression, sexuality, fertility, passion. The digital artwork incorporated into her canvases portrays more individuated and idiosyncratic experiences of female identity, which aren’t always in harmony with more universal ideas. Maria Pia’s doubled palettes and media, then, play out an ongoing dialogue between socialized notions of femininity, and individual female experience. www.mariapiataverna.it
www.Art-Mine.com/ArtistPage/Maria_Pia_Taverna.aspx |
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Artist Profiles -
Volume 19
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Tel-Aviv Acrylic on Canvas 51”x 39”
Karin Perez invites a dialogue between artist and audience, with subtle, strong ideas about urbanism and the boldness of the city in her work. With paintings of metropolitan landscapes, some denoted as Tel-Aviv or New York, others that ask "where?" within the painting itself, the viewer is transported into a cityscape that is at once familiar and alien. The buildings and negative space between them is both welcoming and forbidding. Angles, lines, and shapes are juxtaposed in surprising ways. Lines cohere in a puzzle the viewer must piece together. Her architectural landscapes play out as both the foreign and the universal-city. The hard angles of her cityscapes come to life with bold, rusty reds, yellows and grays. The reds and golds are reminiscent of wartime advertising, yet the industrial images are profoundly modern.
The Israeli born artist's foundation in dance and music is evident in her acrylic paintings; each geometric block of color has a beat to it. For Perez, the transition from dancing to visual art was absolutely natural, the next step in her artistic expression. Her experience in graphic design is apparent, but more importantly, it is clear she took her professional training and made of it something new and challenging. In her paintings Perez embraces the elements of her current residence, Paris. Like Paris, the lines of Perez's cities are timeless. Their skylines, jagged and parched, are impressed upon us as the exemplars of architecture and eons of ageless rock. www.Art-Mine.com/ArtistPage/Karin_Perez.aspx |
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Artist Profiles - Volume 19
Feature Articles - Volume 19
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