Beverly Buchanan

Born 1940 in Fuquay, NC; died 2015 in Ann Arbor, MI

Born in Fuquay, North Carolina, Beverly Buchanan grew up in South Carolina & subsequently earned several university degrees in the sciences before beginning her professional career in New York as a health-care educator. However, about two years later, in 1971, she enrolled at the Art Students League, where she studied with renowned painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979). From that time on, Buchanan devoted her time to making art, eventually moving back to the South. It was here that she developed her practice exploring Southern vernacular architecture. 

Buchanan used found wood scraps or sometimes foam core to build her “shacks,” a term she bestowed upon the sculptures. Whether inhabited or abandoned, her structures were meant to embody the spirit of those who lived there, what she referred to as “emotional groundings.

Ana Mendieta

The Silueta Series (1973–1980) involved Mendieta creating female silhouettes in nature—in mud, sand, and grass—with natural materials ranging from leaves and twigs to blood, and making body prints or painting her outline or silhouette onto a wall.^[23]

In a 1981 artist statement, Mendieta said: I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape & the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.^[24]

                           

  

Ana Mendieta died on September 8, 1985, in New York City, after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village at 300 Mercer Street. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, who may have pushed her out the window.^[51] She fell 33 stories onto the roof of a deli.^[52] Just prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently.^[34] The neighbors heard Mendieta scream out no and right before her death Andre had scratches all over his face. ^[53] There were no eyewitnesses to the events that led up to Mendieta's death.^[54] A recording of Andre's 911 call showed him saying: "My wife is an artist, and I'm an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window."^[55] During three years of legal proceedings,^[54] Andre's lawyer described Mendieta's death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988.^[55]The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial to this day.

Do Not Be Dismayed

                                          Lake in the Bois de Boulogne, Henri Edmond Cross

 

“Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world.

All things break. And all things can be mended.

Not with time, as they say, but with intention. 

So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally.

The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.”

L.R. Knost

(I’m reading about the history of Paris & the Dictator Napoleon is mentioned. What a spiteful, inhumane little man. But, do you know what he loved? Green spaces, wide streets, flowers everywhere. He even finished the languishing Louvre. Acres of parks don’t cancel out horrific acts against protestors. However, they do co-exist in our historical record, with thousands of examples of this dichotomy.) 

Speaking of Black Lives Matter

Speaking of Black Lives Matter: 

Romare Bearden (1911–1988) 

Considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, Romare Bearden’s artwork depicted the African American culture experience in creative & thought provoking ways. Born in North Carolina, Bearden spent much of his career in New York City. Virtually self-taught, his early works were realistic images, often with religious themes. He later transitioned to abstract & Cubist style paintings in oil & watercolor. He is best known for his photomontage compositions made from torn images of popular magazines & assembled into visually powerful statements on African American life. 

The Worlds Most Expensive Photograph

Andreas Gursky’s photograph Rhein II sold at auction for a ground-breaking $4.3 million. The print is Plexiglas-mounted, signed & gigantic (it’s nearly 12 feet wide), but the price had many people scratching their heads. Thankfully, there has been no shortage of articles written since to explain things to uncultured folk who don’t understand the astronomical prices paid for fine art.

‘It is valuable because it is art, not just a photo. Rules are worthless. If he was just a photographer instead of an artist, he would have been crippled by the nonexistent “rule of thirds” myth, and put the horizon someplace else.’

 

Vincent Salvo Butterflies

 Vincent (“Vin”) Salvo is a self-taught painter and sculptor living on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. 

Olga Suvorova

Olga Suvorova is a very well-known & internationally acclaimed Russian Master.

Olga was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1966. She studied monumental composition at the famous St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. Her career has been greatly influenced by her parents, both highly praised artists in St. Petersburg.

Other sources of influence include Gustav Klimt, Piero Della Francesca, and traditional Russian icons. Olga's talent & overwhelming response to her work led & was rewarded with a unique solo exhibition in St. Petersburg Art Academy in the spring of 1990 where her paintings were received with great enthusiasm and praise; in 1993 she was awarded the first prize of the year. She also was honored with President’s Yeltsin's Artist prize from a competition among more than 3,000 artists. 

Nowadays Olga is an accomplished artist, a well recognized master, possessing her own inimitable, easily recognizable style, and a member of the Union of Artists of Russia. 

It is for her stirring portraits that Olga first gained her reputation in Russia, and then abroad. These paintings have a startling vitality. Filled with warmth and harmony, the paintings of Olga make the viewer’s soul kinder and more compassionate. Her paintings of the players in "Comedia dell’arte" have a lasting quality. Her style can be more realistic in the historical depictions but it is strongly impressionistic in other scenes. In her paintings Olga sometimes uses silk fabrics for costume details. Recently she has produced a series of magnificently detailed screens which have been widely praised and collected. 

She exhibits regularly in Paris and London. Olga has also exhibited in Italy, Germany, Sweden, Finland, France, Britain, Ireland, China, and the USA. Her work is highly regarded and acquired by galleries and serious art collectors around the globe.  

312 Artists & Their Studios

https://www.boredpanda.com/famous-artists-and-their-muses-in-their-studios/

Casorati

In 1925, Raffaello Giolli summarized the disconcerting aspects of Casorati's art—"The volumes have no weight in them, and the colors no body. Everything is fictitious: even the living lack all nervous vitality. The sun seems to be the moon ... nothing is fixed or definite"—and argued that these very qualities give his work its originality, and connect him to the metaphysical painters.”

 Casorati himself wrote, in 1931: "In taking up, against me, the old polemic of classicism and romanticism, people rail against intellectualized and scholastic order, accuse my art of being insincere, and wilfully academic—in a word, of being neoclassical. ... since my art is born, so to speak, from within, and never has its source in changing "impressions", it is quite natural that ... static forms, and not the fluid images of passion, should be reflected in my works".^[5]

Hello Fall

HELLO FALL!
Love, Georgia

Grey Scale Online Coloring

Over the past few years, I have been intrigued with online coloring with a grayscale photo template. I haven’t been in the mood for Shadow Boxes, Icons, or the kind of emotional energy it takes to create a live piece. This example is done on an iPad. 

Andrea Kowch

Andrea Kowch’s paintings are real & magical narratives that provoke dreamlike musings. Past & present intersect, merging references in equal measure to Renaissance & Baroque painting, Depression-era photography, antique fabrics & lace, vintage clothing & the rural farmlands & interiors of the artist’s native Michigan. Silent figures move through finely detailed settings seemingly in slow motion, their actions both familiar & unexplained. A winner of numerous regional & national honors for her art, before turning 20 years old, Kowch has had work exhibited in such places as Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hill & Corcoran Gallery of Art, New York City’s Diane von Furstenberg Gallery & Miami’s Margulies Collection. She is also a 2005 award winner & alumnus of the National Young Arts Foundation.

Banksy Not For Sale

Banksy: The $20 Million Graffiti Artist 

(Who Doesn't Want His Art To Be Worth Anything)

On February 22, 2007, the day after Sotheby's London sold three Banksy works, all of which soared above their auction estimates & into the six figures, the elusive & anonymous British graffiti artist updated his website with an image of an auction house, the people in the room bidding on picture with the written words:

I can’t believe you morons buy this shit”

In the years since, Banksy has continued to make his feeling on the commercialism of his art exceedingly clear. He calls galleries that sell his work "unauthorized", and is represented instead by The Pest Control Office, which is, in effect, another extension of the artist's darkly humorous manifesto. The simple website informs owners, anxious to authenticate and sell their freshly excavated and exceedingly valuable Banksy treasures, that the authentication process is "lengthy and challenging", as many pieces "are created in an advanced state of intoxication." As for legitimately buying a work from the artist - forget about it. Pest Control states that there is currently "something/nothing available."

Jean-Michel Basquiat Hmmmmm

THE MOST EXPENSIVE WORK OF ART by an American artist ever sold at auction was painted by a black man. A large-scale canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was the top lot at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction last week. It shattered expectations, selling for an astronomic $110.5 million (including fees), an artist record and a groundbreaking auction moment. 

Basquiat’s “Untitled” image of a skull on a turquoise blue background was the headliner at the May 18 Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Sotheby’s New York. 

The painting achieved the highest auction price in history for a work by an American artist and reached a number of other milestones:

• Most expensive work by an American artist sold at auction
• Most expensive work by an artist of African descent sold at auction
• Most expensive work made since 1980 sold at auction
• Sixth most expensive work ever sold at auction
• One of only 10 paintings in auction history to surpass $100 million

Only 21-years-old when he made the painting, Basquiat is also the youngest artist to eclipse the $100 million mark. (In 1905, Picasso was 24 when he painted “Garçon à la Pipe” (Boy With a Pipe),” which sold for $104.1 million at Sotheby’s in 2004.) 

“Tonight, Jean-Michel Basquiat entered the pantheon of artists whose works have commanded prices over $100 million, including Picasso, Giacometti, Bacon, and Warhol,” said Grégoire Billault, head of the Contemporary Art Department at Sotheby’s New York. “This extraordinary canvas from 1982 has broken so many benchmarks …but those of us lucky enough to have been in its presence will only remember it’s awesome power. To think that it was created by a virtually-unknown 21-year old is humbling.”

Aleah Chapin

Listening in the Dark 

Oil on Board

Born in 1986, Aleah Chapin grew up on an island north of Seattle, Washington. She received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2009 and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2012. Aleah has attended residencies at the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany and the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Recent exhibitions have included the 2016 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; The Ingram Collection: Bodies, Woking, UK and a solo show, Within Wilds at Flowers Gallery, London. She has been a recipient of the Willard L. Metcalf Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Posey Foundation Scholarship, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, a Postgraduate Fellowship from the New York Academy of Art, and won the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2012. 

Aleah now lives and paints in the Pacific Northwest, where the people and place of her home are the foundation of her work. 

Louise Crow

Louise Crow (1890-1968) Born in Seattle,Washington
Crow traveled and studied in Santa Fe, New Mexico from 1918-1921. From a prominent Seattle family, Crow began exhibiting in California and Seattle as early as 1915, however, when she opened a studio in Santa Fe in 1918, her career began to soar. The harshly critical modernist painter, poet, and essayist, Marsden Hartley, reviewed her 1919 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe with a positive comment: "The indication in her works is as clear as a clearly sounding bell, it has the  feel of warm metal.’ 

By.1938 Crow’s circumstances had changed. Her family’s fortune had been lost during the Depression. Although she had experienced significant success early in life, her painting career had become stifled by mental illness in later years, As her mental health deteriorated, she felt compelled to destroy many of the paintings that were once so high acclaimed. Fewer that twenty of her works are known to exist today. Louise Crow died destitute in 1968 in San Mateo, California. 

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Add cEagle Dance, San Ildenfonso, 1919, oil on canvas, 6 X 8 feetaption

Peggy Guggenheim ART ADDICT

Add

Artist	Giacomo Balla
Year	1913–14
Type	oil paint on millboard

caption

Giacomo Balla

1913–14

oil paint on millboard

Following World War II Peggy closed The Art of This Century Gallery, Chicago, in 1947, & returned to Europe; deciding to live in Venice, Italy. In 1948, she was invited to exhibit her collection in the disused Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennaleand in 1949 & established herself in the Palazzo Venier dei Leone on the Grand Canal.^[4]

Her collection became one of the few European collections of modern art to promote a significant number of works by Americans. In the 1950s she promoted the art of two local painters, Edmondo Bacci & Tancredi Parmeggiani. By the early 1960s, Guggenheim had almost stopped collecting art & began to concentrate on presenting what she already owned. She loaned out her collection to museums in Europe & in 1969 to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which was named after her uncle. Eventually, she decided to donate her home & collection in Venice to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a gift which was concluded inter vivos in 1976, before her death in 1979.

Grave of Peggy Guggenheim, next to a plaque remembering her Lhasa Apsos (dogs).

Stanislaw Szukalski

This documentary film looks at the life of the Polish artist Stanislaw Szukalski, an obscure figure whose work was subject to persecution by the Nazis. As a young man, he split time between Poland and Chicago and earned a reputation as his native country’s greatest living artist. There was even a museum dedicated to his work. But when the Germans invaded in 1939, much of his art was destroyed, and he then feld back to the United States and settled in Los Angeles. It was in America that he eventually met George DiCaprio (father of Leonardo), who, along with his son, financed this film. Available on Netflix.

Anna Schuleit Installation Artist

Anna Schuleit

Artist

New York, New York

Anna Schuleit is a young artist who brings back to life historic sites & structures through her original interpretations.  In much of her work to date, she has honored the lives lived within mental health institutions by transforming abandoned facilities into moving, site-specific memorials. Employing such ephemeral elements as choral pieces & seas of flowers, her powerful public works are designed to endure not as objects, but as vivid memories for those who experience the multisensory events she orchestrates.  For Habeas Corpus (2000), Schuleit filled Massachusetts’ historic Northampton State Hospital with music; from speakers installed throughout the dilapidated building, a recording of J. S. Bach’s Magnificat poured through windows & doors, stirring a rapt audience of former patients, caregivers & hundreds of others assembled below. 

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