Scott Lickstein Paints Pop Culture With A Collagist’s Eye And Wit

June 10, 2013 by Jené Gutierrez

LicksteinPainting4

Scott Lickstein’s surrealist pop culture infused paintings are ethereal and witty. He combines seemingly disparate imagery into one canvas evoking both a sardonic and dreamy aesthetic. The layers of reference are reminiscent of collage work, something he also dabbles in, in addition to photography and video. Lickstein: “Robert Motherwell declared collage as the most important discovery of the twentieth century. He wasn’t referring to the idea of cut and paste. He was pondering the exploration of infinite potential. Contemporary life is ocular bombardment. Content is overlapped beyond the veil of the conscious mind. Control and manipulation of this data is the game for now and for the foreseeable future for this artist.”

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David Marc Grant’s Painted Collisions Of Pattern And Color

June 10, 2013 by Larissa Erin Greer

Painter David Marc Grant‘s fantastical, somewhat neo-surrealist paintings on panel showcase a sophisticated sense of both color and composition. The layers of each piece seem to prop up the next, leaving plenty of corners and pockets for Grant to explore his interest in small detail and pattern. Although the compositions are mostly abstract collisions of geometric shapes and thick, viscous liquids—the artist positions the work as a mirror for the collapse of contemporary society. Grant’s inclination for abstraction disguises these artistic intentions in an attractive blend of quirkiness and color, leaving the viewer with a candy-coated version of dystopian landcape.

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Watercolor Drawings Infused With Psychedelic Tendencies

June 5, 2013 by Stacy Dacheux

Kyle Field - Painting

Kyle Field, an Alabama native living in San Francisco, was born in the 1970s– and his artwork tends to reflect the mood of not only these two places, but also that era. Each craftily drawn watercolor depicts a folk narrative infused and confused with melodious psychedelic tendencies. It’s all so playful and harmonious. We find it challenging not to think of Field’s work in any other way but musical.

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Made With Color Presents: Asad Faulwell’s Ornate Political Paintings

June 4, 2013 by Russ Crest

asad faulwell painting

Beautiful/Decay has partnered 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 clean and sleek 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’re happy to bring you the work and site of Los Angeles painter Asad Faulwell.

At first glance, Asad Faulwell’s heavily embellished and ornate works may call to mind middle eastern tapestries but upon deeper inspection you discover that in fact they are deeply rooted in both politics and art history. His current body of work depicts female combatants from the Algerian War of Independence. Inspired by Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” these pieces attempt to show how these women were both aggressors and victims, victimized by both their French adversaries and their male Algerian comrades. All works in this series are titled “Les Femmes D’Alger” in reference to the series by Delacroix and Picasso. While the anonymous women in the Delacroix and Picasso works were depicted as sexual objects in an Orientalist scene, the women in Faulwell’s work defy simple classification and are depicted as saints, criminals, aggressors and victims.

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Paintings That Depict Emotionality And Restraint

June 4, 2013 by Stacy Dacheux

Margaret Nomentana’s nonrepresentational art demonstrates a fascinating balance between emotionality and restraint. Often working in a spontaneous manner, and sometimes working on several paintings simultaneously, her imagery reflects moments of clarity, caught in the act of vision and revision. Whether it’s collage or acrylic painting, her gestures evoke “abstract landscapes of the mind” or terse conversations with color and movement.

Of her own artistic desires, Nomentana states, “My strong minimalist impulse is tempered with a dry sense of humor, irony, and in spite of everything, a powerful sense of hope. Alma Thomas is my hero.”

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Studio Visit: The Paintings Of David Hornung

June 3, 2013 by Bill

David Hornung makes paintings from both oil and gouache. He paints quiet simple, small houses located in fenced fields, bucolic scenes of nature, solitary women and men, memento mori, snakes and birds, paths and walls. Objects in his paintings seem to be a distillation of universal human experiences with the world and among each other. Some objects are singled out as being important by a kind of twin cloud, the direction of light, or glowing patches of color. The paintings are beautiful executions of color theory, which makes sense because David wrote the book on color theory “Color: A Workshop Approach.” His subject matter hovers between observation and the symbolic, and he refers to Philip Guston’s Alphabet series with plain respect, and like Guston, David was reluctant to talk about image-based thinking. We walked through Brooklyn on the way get some lunch, and David said that painting is hard to talk about because the ideas come out of working with images, that the process gives painters their ideas, which is a kind of reversal, because for most people who work with ideas – the ideas generate the process.

You can see David Hornung’s work at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson NY from May 23rd to June 16th.

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The Gouache Colored Collages Of Fabienne Rivory

June 3, 2013 by Danny Olda

Artist Fabienne Rivory combines photography, collage, and painting in her work. She often blends two images of landscapes or scenes by bisecting and combining them as if they were reflections of one another. A touch of gouache paint is then digitally added to the photos and completes each of her pieces. The effect on the landscapes is a bit disorienting but familiar. Her work doesn’t seem to document places or times as much as it documents a feeling. The bold color of the gouache contrasts against the black and white landscapes, each pulling something out of the scene, each evoking something different. [via]

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Photographed Portraits And Painted Animal Masks By Charlotte Caron

May 31, 2013 by Danny Olda

The paintings of artist Charlotte Caron explores both the ancient tendency to humanize animals and the dreams of humans to transform into animals. Caron’s acrylic paintings of animal faces are set on the photographed portraits of people as if they were masks. The people of the photographs not only assume the appearance of the animals, but nearly seem to exude corresponding personalities. The hawk seems harsh, the fox mischievous the deer gentle. The literal anthropomorphizing of animals in the paintings emphasizes how this figuratively takes place. Caron also underscores the contrast between human and animal, and perhaps by extension civilized and animalistic, by also contrasting photography and painting.

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