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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Zach Hyman’s Vulnerably Relatable Portraits – NSFW

June 4, 2013 by Jené Gutierrez

Zach Hyman’s photographs are concerned with the idea of bodies and boundaries and the spaces they occupy. Often, the bodies he captures are nude and placed in an environment that illuminates the boundaries of nature and culture. Something wonderfully vulnerable is evoked by the placement of these bodies. His subjects, though placed in settings seemingly incongruent with the exposition of their bodies, appear naturally comfortable. The way he captures light and contextualizes these bodies lend his work a universal quality that is at once identifiable and particular.

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Bernard Roig’s Sculptures Capture The Destructive Potential Of Light

June 4, 2013 by Jené Gutierrez

Bernard Roig’s light sculptures capture a particular strain of ennui. While the idea of light tends to evoke a positive or uplifting feeling, Roig recontextualizes this element as a burden to his sculptures’ human subjects. Sometimes light crushes or imprisons this man, or seems to be a goal that will never be reached. The man is usually sculpted in white, brightening the effect of his subjects’ dissolution. Roig’s work addresses the boundary between the connect/disconnect of our culture’s relationship to light. “Today we are living in an atmosphere saturated with images, but the experience that they produce has a low intensity. Now it is ever more difficult to give meaning to an image. We are subjected to light, a light that dissolves the outlines of things, a white light within which everything fluctuates.”

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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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Paper Animal Insides by Wendy Wallin Malinow

June 4, 2013 by Danny Olda

Wendy Wallin Malinow paper5

The paper cut pieces of Wendy Wallin Malinow reveal the deeper goings-on of animals. Malinow’s pieces are cut to expose an x-ray type view of various forest and ocean animals. In addition to the bone structure, a meal is visible inside each animal. While playful, there is also a sad quality to her work. Malinow’s work reveals the nourishment and effort to needed to survive as well as the violence at times inherent in that. A squirrel has ingested some acorn’s while a wolf seems to be filled with the ghost of a red riding hood.

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The Lustrous Language Of Ben Skinner

June 4, 2013 by Larissa Erin Greer

It’s a tricky thing, viewing the work of artist Ben Skinner—you catch yourself reading, absorbing, appreciating and simultaneously fighting the urge to snap a photo and immediately re-appropriate his multimedia text works to your own blog/Instagram/Twitter. Using an intriguing selection of materials (ranging from gold foil to neon to sprinkles), Skinner elegantly spells out heartbreaking phrases ripped from the Zeitgeist, with a little extra flair. The witty, multicolored multimedia works tow the line between design and art, with a little extra emphasis on drawing, craft and the making of an actual object. Many of his works could easily find a life as a piece of printed design, but it’s Skinner’s willingness to experiment with materials that allows his flat, graphic works to go one step further into the realm of something more substantial.

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Stunning, Abstract Aerial Photos Of A Beta Carotene Farm In Western Australia

June 3, 2013 by Russ Crest

Steve Back Photography

As part of our ongoing partnership with Feature Shoot, Beautiful/Decay is sharing this article by Carolyn Rauch on Steve Back.

The most intriguing part of Australian photographer Steve Back’s gorgeously graphic series Hutt Lagoon is that the bright pink-colored water is all natural. “The images are not manipulated for color,” said Back. “I was commissioned to shoot some abstract landscape shots of Western Australia for a big Perth hotel. I chartered a light aircraft to explore shooting some islands off the coast of Northern WA. I had noticed these lakes on the map and Google Earth, and decided that they were worth a look. From the ground, the pink coloring is not so evident and a bit unimpressive, yet from the air, it looks fantastic. These are natural landscapes but the coloring is out of this world. And at first sight it is not easy to tell whether they are close up or far away.”

Hutt Lagoon is the world’s largest Beta Carotene farm (produced by naturally occurring algae in the water). In the middle of the lagoon are a series of manmade ponds that form the fundamental composition elements of Back’s images.

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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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