Made With Color Presents: Scott Anderson’s Paintings Walk The Fine Line Between Abstraction And Representation

June 18, 2013 by Russ Crest

Once again we’ve teamed up with premiere website building platform Made With Color to bring you exclusive artist features. Each week we join forces to bring you some of the most exciting artists and designers who use Made With Color to create their beautifully designed and user friendly websites. Made With Color doesn’t just help artists create gorgeous websites but allows them to do so in a few minutes without having to touch a line of code. This week we are excited to bring you the work of midwest painter Scott Anderson whose work balances on the fine line between representation and abstraction.

The source material for Scott Anderson’s paintings are preexisting images – found photographs, his own snap shots, drawings or collages – that fall within broad archetypal categories such as portraiture, landscape, iconography, and still life. The common denominator of these source images is distance, either due to authorship, such as in the found photographs, or time, as in the source imagery of Anderson’s own making. The act of making new paintings from these images allows Anderson to understand them in new ways and to develop a idiosyncratic visual vocabulary. In this sense, Scott Anderson is a translator. What is foregrounded in his work is the way he perceives, organizes, scrambles, and prioritizes the images he makes the paintings from. The delivery of the message IS the message. Scott Anderson’s paintings establish an alternate reality in which they are safe to exist as ordinary illuminations of their surroundings.

Although relatively abstract, Anderson’s paintings have their origins in representational imagery. This dependence on the objective along with his overall motivations put him in dialogue with early Modern art movements, particularly Dada, Surrealism, and Cubism. Scott Anderson is interested in the continuation of this art historical conversation as a means to change the rules of the game as it were. Where Modernists of all stripes were largely interested in winning the game by ending it (to paraphrase the critic, Jan Verwoert), Anderson sees this mode of objective / non-objective hybridity as one way among many in which to view the world.

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Sculptures On Colonialism And Globalization By Yinka Shonibare, MBE

June 18, 2013 by Danny Olda

The work of Yinka Shonibare, MBE is filled with the complexity and ambiguity that make art endlessly exciting. Born in London, Shonibare moved to Nigeria when he was three years old and later returned to London to attend college. In a way, his work reflects this personal dynamic between Europe and Africa. However, Shonibare’s work makes it clear that his scope is much larger than that. He skillfully blends traditional textiles, costume, and symbolism from various European and African cultures and times. Through his distinctive work, Shonibare has a way of exploring issues of colonialism in an increasingly shrinking world without taking away any of its complexity. Thus, his work doesn’t inspire political reactionism, but rather sincere thought and deep consideration.

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Daniel Canogar’s Mesmerizing Projections

June 18, 2013 by Jené Gutierrez

“My most recent sculptural installations are constructed with discarded electronic materials: computer, telephone and electric cables, thousands of burnt-out bulbs, meters of videotape, old slot machines, celluloid, DVDs, etc. The installations explore the short life expectancy of the technologies we cast off and their relationship to organic mortality.

These installations also seek to reanimate the lifeless. Light animations projected onto the installations appear to free the energy stored in the electronic waste, awakening in it memories of its past.

Through my work I try to bring dead materials back to life, reveal their secrets, revive the collective memory they contain to construct an accurate portrait of a society and an age.” – Daniel Canogar.

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Mesmerizing Kinetic Sculptures Of Anthony Howe

June 18, 2013 by Danny Olda

A Kinetic Mind from Elizabeth Rudge on Vimeo.

The sculptures of Anthony Howe intriguing as they are – gleaming in the yard of his rural home. However, when a breeze picks up and flows through his work, the sculptures take on new life. These kinetic sculptures unfold in the wind with mesmerizing movement. He says of his work:

“I attempt, with an economy of means, to construct objects whose visual references range from lo-tech sci-fi paraphernalia to microbiological or astronomical models. Utilizing primarily stainless steel armatures that are driven either by hammered curvilinear shapes or flat fiberglass covered discs, I hope the pieces assume a spare, linear elegance when conditions are still, mutating to raucous animation when the wind picks up.” [via]

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Chocolate Nikes, Golden Sewer Grates, And Leather Park Benches By Joost Goudriaan

June 18, 2013 by Danny Olda

Joost Goudriaan installation1

Often it seems the most useful objects are the most overlooked. Much of the work of artist and designer Joost Goudriaan is set upon changing our relationship with such items. A park bench, an object whose aesthetic is nearly entirely defined by its use, is transformed with traditional craftsmanship. Goudrian uses leather and walnut wood to turn a typically stark bench into luxuriant public seating. Also pictured, is a replica of the classic Nike Air Max made from chocolate. While the original may be prized and collected, Goudriaan compelled anyone who bought his chocolate replica to sign a contract stipulating that they would eat the shoe.

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Documenting Ephemeral Underwater Ink Sculptures

June 18, 2013 by Stacy Dacheux

Alberto Seveso’s high speed photographs of ink mixing with water are hypnotic and fascinating. Each shot depicts pushes of color twisting and bending with an emotive cadence, lulling itself into an ephemeral sculpture, documented with sharp visceral attention.

Although such imagery is not new, per se, this specific collection feels intrinsically magnetic due to the captive nature of submerged color naturally bonding or relating before diluting. It’s more about documenting the ease of abstraction then pushing a forced abstract agenda.

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Joel Rea’s Paintings Collide Natures Wrath With Human Relationships

June 17, 2013 by Russ Crest

Joel Rea painting

Joel Rea painting Fascinated by the natural world, Joel Rea paints the pulsing elemental forces of our planet interplaying with human relationships formed in our society and consciousness. Driven to explore universal meanings around the human condition, Joel is also interested in depicting the underlying inner forces which drive human behaviour. He presents these narratives visually through the use of vivid surreal landscapes, seascapes, animals and self portraiture. Joel also harvests ideas from his dreams and draws subject matter from his life journey and his own personal struggle to become a professional painter, a life long ambition which was many times nearly derailed by the unpredictable turmoil of his years coming of age as a young man. (via)

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Photographs Of Reconstructed Flowers

June 17, 2013 by Stacy Dacheux

Pawel Bownik meticulously pulls each flower apart: disconnecting the leaf from the stem or the petal from the pistil, taking involved notes all the while, so he can, eventually, reassemble each piece back to its original state. His photography, collected here, documents such reconstructions. From far away, each image blooms and seethes with life. However, with a steadier eye, up close, we see pencil marks, bits of string, tape, and pins holding it all together. Like some strange sort of floral Frankenstein, the dead is regenerated.

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