To make a long story short, I saw a brief article on Hi-Fructose about an artist I was unfamiliar with, KiSung Koh. Koh is originally from Seoul but moved to Canada in 2006, & recently graduated from Sheridan College. He has technical skills (in spades) & well-developed themes; pretty impressive work for a recent grad! I enjoy the mixture of representational realism with fantastic elements and patterning. There’s something very Princess Mononoke about it all that appeals to me. Edit (June 12): I just saw this raven piece on BOOOOOM, and feel compelled to include it here – in no small part because the raven is my favourite bird.
Koh is very much into nature and has a pretty spiritual relationship going on in that regard.
I was walking in a forest myself one day. It was early morning and very silent, calm. And I saw a deer family very close. I can’t explain how I felt at the time because it’s unspeakable. It was just truly amazing. It’s probably easier to say that I saw not only deers but also beautiful spirits around them. There is nothing more beautiful than when you actually see a wild animal in the nature. However, we rarely see them from where they are supposed to be and just don’t know how amazing they are to be alive.
– from Hi-Fructose
All in all, I’m very impressed with Koh’s work and I look forward to seeing more of it. It’s always great to find a new artist to follow, hopefully for many years to come.
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Born in India, raised in Canada, famous all over the place: Gary Taxali. He’s won a Grammy, and his work has been in Time, Newsweek, and Fortune. He’s even designed a series of quarters for Canada’s national mint. One of the most recognizable illustrator/ artists out there, Taxali has repurposed the look and feel of Great Depression-era styles like Nancy or the original Bazooka Joe comic strips and turned it into a personal iconography that quite simply just works. Faux nostalgia filtered through a quirky sense of humour? Sure, that sounds about right.
Taxali has a new show on at The Outsiders in London for another week, “My Feelings Like You” :
Gary celebrates the everyday, reminding the viewer that they can find elegance in the simplest matters. “I just want people to appreciate the banal: things that are accidentally beautiful,” he says. Gary’s graphic and textured works use oils and a variety of techniques including screenprinting, drawing and inks, often on found media and used surfaces. In My Feelings Like You there’ll be a mixture of medias and collage on old book covers and paintings, in varying sizes including his largest pieces yet at 152 x 203 cm.
– from The Outsiders
If you aren’t planning on being in dear old Blighty before the 9th, you can always check out Taxali’s Drawger blog or his personal website for more information and (lots more) imagery.
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Ever notice how people that like to draw are incessantly doodling on whatever’s at hand – paper napkins, beer coasters, scraps of paper, even matchbooks? Well, Jason D’Aquino brings that to a whole new level. He creates tiny drawings on repurposed paper ephemera, mostly matchbooks. There is an undeniable charm to miniatures, and these wee gems are no exception.
Apparently D’Aquino gets his materials from estate sales, flea markets and outdoor sales, or simply finds them in places like abandoned buildings. He works from his tattoo shop in Buffalo NY; Blue Moon Tattoo. Hi-Fructose notes that “The miniaturist Jason D’Aquino’s new “Phillumeny” show is opening Friday, June 1st at La Luz de Jesus Gallery.”
If you’d like to see more of D’Aquino’s work and don’t think you can make it to Los Angeles to check out his upcoming show, you can check out his website (warning: flash) or you can peruse the many examples included with this article on inhabitat.com.
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No article today, just me playing around with a collage/ digital painting idea…
Ian Rogers – The Colonel Transformed
See some of my finished work here, should you be so inclined.
I’ve had a couple of people ask me about the Hebrew character, I got the idea from reading Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler, one of my favourite writers. He’s from Montreal, I live in Montreal, you get the idea. In the story one of the main characters had gimel inscribed on his hunting spear, which struck me as quite poetic, as gimel is a transformative letter that implies both punishment and reward; choices between good and evil. I’m not Jewish but I am especially interested in anything related to symbology or cultural beliefs around design elements, and this kind of interstitial quality is a very powerful idea. The shape of the character also reminds me of the bowstring tie. Lots of reasons, in any case.
Kentucky Fried Chicken is certainly a guilty pleasure for me, so it seems fitting not only as the gimel but also as the monkey on my back; the base nature that leads us towards unhealthy but delicious choices… also, the 1970s KFC branding is a classic example of the 70s golden age of mascot design, which is another of my personal interests. The winged monkey, of course, is straight up Wizard of Oz.
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Hey, do you like taking photos through rainy windows? Me too.
But wait… these aren’t photos – they’re oil paintings.
Okay, paintings of photos, but still: mind=blown.
These paintings are part of an ongoing series, “Under the Unminding Sky” by Gregory Thielker, a US artist / art instructor / lecturer/ world traveller / raconteur. All are oil on linen, and are mostly 3×4′. There’s something reminiscent of Gerhard Richter about them in a strictly visual sense, but the American obsession with automobile culture & the open road seems to be more of an underpinning theme than anything Richter covers. Not that I’m complaining, this series resonates with me a lot – and not just because I like to take pictures through rainy windows.
These paintings reflect my interest in the way that the road delineates and controls how we experience landscape. From the roadway perspective, we not only travel from one place to another, we see landscape in a varied and complex manner. I use water on the windshield to create a shifting lens for the way we see the environment: it both highlights and obscures our viewing. Perspectives slip and compress, while shapes and colors merge into one another. I also work with relationships between surface and depth, between flatness and illusion. These images are born out of real experience and have a close relationship with the medium of painting: its fluidity, transparency, and capacity for layering, mixing, and blending.
– from gregorythielker.com
