Category Archives: Drawing

Maggie Haas’ Everyday Impermanence

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Maggie Haas Maggie Haas Maggie Haas

Finding its forms in a combination of drawing, object-making and installation, the work of artist Maggie Haas investigates the lives of unfinished and discarded objects, with a particular interest in construction materials. She was recently awarded a residency at The Lab, in San Francisco, CA—where she has been working primarily with materials she has found at the space. Working with what she is given, Haas uses her transformational powers to great effect: expanding upon everyday materials with her acute sense of color and composition.

Since beginning her residency, Haas has been creating work both from and in the gallery, she has created a series of ever-shifting structures. Using the gallery as both a medium and a platform to create, Haas has used her most recent body of work to explore flux, transition and our relationship to the idea of impermanence. Hovering between blueprint-style drawing and abstraction, her drawings of imagined structures and patterns explore the materiality of paper and ink—while her propped-up structures and object-based art elegantly underline the thesis that everything is in flux, everything can be moved, shifted, collapsed and/or carried away.

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Amber Fawn Keig Draws From Real Life

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Bay Area-based printmaker Amber Fawn Keig‘s works on paper are a collection of colored pencil, gouache and lithographic prints—pulled together under the cohesive investigation of memory. The likenesses scratched out in her careful, stylistic black-and-white prints have the visually-loaded tinge of early 1990′s Americana. Keig usually works with imagery of her friends and family to create these works, although the narratives expressed are somewhat vague and seemingly fictional.

If anything, the litho prints pull the viewer in for a moment of intense technical examination, to look closely at Keig’s tiny, expert strokes, and to take in her careful thematic twists and turns, often embedded in the layered images she pulls together. While the black-and-white works stand well on their own, they’re complimented perfectly by the fluid, intuitive colorwork of her painted and pencil-drawn works. THe moments where the two mediums intersect are the most interesting, but each part of Keig’s current series seems to feed well into the same conceptual vein. While the scale is small, the subject matter is quite curious, and these works carry a kind of welcome, yet weary hominess in their portrayal of contemporary American experience.

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Watercolor Paintings of Imagined Epic Proportions

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Rob Sato - Watercolors Rob Sato - WatercolorsRob Sato - WatercolorsRob Sato’s watercolor paintings are whimsical clashes of documented history and personal dreaming: a magpie pictorial narrative of his own internal processing system or as he says, an “extension of writing” and “sifting through garbage. Getting a lot of trash out of my head.” His ability to condense worlds, communities, and landscapes into one surreal solid depiction, interestingly enough, conceptually harkens back to Vincent VanGogh’s statement on the watercolor medium itself as “a splendid thing” to “express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.”

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East Meets West When Sculpture Meets Drawing

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Ya Ya Chou - Sculpture and Drawings Ya Ya Chou - Sculpture and DrawingsYa Ya Chou - Sculpture and Drawings Self-taught artist YaYa Chou grew up in Taiwan, but has lived in Los Angeles since 1997. Her Soft Tissue series, collected here, combine glass sculptures with drawn schematics on paper, both of which strive to explore the protected anatomy of people, plants, and animals on a conceptual and figurative level.

Especially when juxtaposed, these pieces indicate an interesting study of the body: where eastern ideas of emotional organ frequencies meet western philosophies of organism functionality. Chou’s work playfully dialogues with our own creation and confinement of thought.

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Made With Color Presents: Benjamin Grossblat’s Twisted Celebrity Illustrations

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Benjamin GrossblattBenjamin GrossblattBenjamin Grossblatt

We’re keeping the steady stream of amazing artwork coming as a part of our partnership with premiere website building platform Made With Color. Each week we bring you some of the most exciting artists and designers working today who are using Made With Color to create clean and sleek websites. Made With Color sites aren’t just good looking, they are extremely easy to set up with no coding involved and an intuitive user interface that makes building a site a breeze. This week we are delighted to bring you the kooky and humorous  celebrity illustrations of Benjamin Grossblat!

Benjamin Grossblat’s illustrations are fanciful, innocent and twisted at the same time. And no more is this evident than in his celebrity portraits. In his portraits Morgan Freeman is almost boyish with his curly lashes, freckles and sparkly eyes while Kim Jong Il is an endlessly wrinkly amorphous blob with mustard yellow teeth.  The faces of these famous figures are instantly recognizable, by distorting them, Benjamin manages to capture their essence; the portraits have a certain vulnerability and humor that makes even the scowling Trump more likeable.

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Dad’s Illustrates With Each Day’s Lunch for Five Years

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It’s difficult to not get nostalgic seeing these little lunches.  Graphic designer David Laferriere had already been making lunch for his children.  One morning he found a permanent marker near the sandwiches.  Five years later, Laferriere has drawn illustrations on nearly 1,100 of his children’s lunch bags.  Depending on his morning inspiration, Laferriere will draw a different image each morning – animals, robots, monsters, even images that play with the shape of the sandwich.  [via]

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The Calm But Powerful Swimming Pool Works Of Kristen Martincic

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Kristen Martincic‘s swimming pool works on paper are enchanting as they are crisp, clean, and inspiring.  She encompasses the feeling of calmness associated with empty swimming pools but adds character and surreal beauty by making them appear to be almost prizes to be won that you want to pick up and haul home.  These pieces are “a hybrid of print, drawing, and painting on panel,” as stated by Kristen.  Monotype, acrylic, and matsuo kozo paper are used.  Their simplicity allows the viewer to realize the provocative nature of each pool’s space and surfaces.  The layered effects she creates with her media builds added textured qualities raising the feelings of mystery, tension, and intimacy.

Her swimming pool works on paper SURFACE TENSION, will be on display at Wonder Fair Gallery starting April 26 and will remain on view through May 26th.

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Leah Wolff’s Impossible Shapes

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Leah Wolff Leah Wolff Leah Wolff

Playing with the viewer’s sense of spatial perception, artist Leah Wolff‘s works quietly pique curiosity and bend the mind. Wolff explores visual paradox through several small series of medium-specific artistic investigations. By giving her mind-bending drawings, sculptures and relief works the element of visual confusion, Wolff’s creations cause the mind to try to connect the dots over and over again—creating a mental feedback loop that’s hard to ignore. The immediate presence of the artist’s hand in these works is at times the most interesting part of the series, how she chooses expressive movement when most artists would strive for complete, flat, graphic perfection. Her use of each medium is intuitive, yet raw, leaving a curious series of entry points for the viewer to tackle each small, imaginary space.

From the artist: “Discoveries in modern science have lead the individual to a space of intellectual disconnect from their surroundings. I want my practice to resist this, as a new method of research where I find meaning through making. However, If our universe is truly infinite, then how can we possibly understand it? It is important to remember that this is a spatial concern that can be addressed and worked out intuitively through the physical act of creation. For me, this is the point and ultimate goal of my practice.”

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