REALIST PAINTINGS

Realist Paintings by David Kassan As an expression of his own calculated observation and visual consumption of surrounding environment, introspective glimpses of reality imbue the art of David Jon Kassan. By immersing himself into his subject matter, Kassan is able to infuse his painting with life and realism. Kassan’s direction of realism follows the philosophies emplyed by the Ashcan School of American Realists.

Artist Statement

My work is a way of meditation, a way of slowing down time though the careful observation of overlooked slices of my environment. It is the subtlety of emotion in my acquaintances that inhabit the aforementioned environment which intrigues me. My paintings strive for reality, a chance to mimic life in both scale and complexity. The viewer is given an eye level perspective of the subject. A view that is unbiased and in its most raw condition. It is my intent to control the medium of oil paint so that it is not part of the viewer to subject equation. The image stands alone without evidence of the artist. I displace textures from their natural environment by moving them out of the context they exist in. Taking the abstract form from the streets where they get lost and moving them into the gallery space where they can be contemplated as accidental abstractions.
The technical aspect of my work is a means to an end; an end rooted in the viewer's experience. I am interested the concept of a painting's technical and transformative powers. By turning an ordinary painting surface into a textured trompe l'oeil documentation of the city or turning the surface into a life sized representation of a figure in space that transmits feeling this technical process allows for the viewer's experience to be altered.
The thoughts behind my chosen subject matter, the scale at which it is presented, my search for understanding what I observe, and my effort to constantly learn to document reality with a naturalistic, representational painting technique allows for pieces to be inherent contradictions; paintings that are both real and abstract. My influences are understandably just as contradictory as they have fed and connected my perspective on painting. I am constantly seeking out work that is congruent with my own which has led me to explore the work of life size old master paintings, urban stencil and graffiti street art, Marcel Duchamp's found objects, abstract paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, and finally the sheer conceptual and executed realism of Caravaggio.
Time is the most valuable thing that we all have, the one aspect of daily life that we can not get back once its gone. I want to use time while trying to understand the world around me. Painting is my notebook, my sounding board.

Sculpture Artists

Pencil Carving Art By Dalton Getty

What do you see in this picture? Pencils? Look again. They’re sculptures. Dalton Getty has been patiently carving sculptures from pencils for 25 years. He creates amazing miniature pieces of art, including linked hearts, keys, and an alphabet project completed over a steady 2.5 year period. Incredible.Dalton Getty is a 45-year-old resident of Bridgeport who turns ordinary pencils into miniature sculptures, without using a magnifying glass
He works very slowly and does not use any special tools: for he needed only a blade, a sewing needle and a very bright light. To protect their vision, the author works for one and half hours a day. One tiny sculpture may take several months, and one creation may take Dalton 2 and a 1/2 years.Dalton believes that his sculptures are forcing people to stay for at least a few moments to escape from the mad rhythm of modern life and see the beauty in miniature detail.

Performance and Installation art

MEET : Rebecca Belmore

Born in Upsala, Ontario, Rebecca Belmore is an artist currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She attended the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and is internationally recognized for her performance and installation art. Since 1987, her multi-disciplinary work has addressed history, place and identity through the media of sculpture, installation, video and performance. Belmore was Canada’s official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale.Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally including two solo touring exhibitions, The Named and the Unnamed, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2002); and 33 Pieces, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto at Mississauga (2001). Her group exhibitions include Houseguests, Art Gallery of Ontario (2001); Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico (1995); Land, Spirit, Power, National Gallery of Canada (1992); and Creation or Death: We Will Win, at the Havana Biennial, Havana Cuba (1991).

NEW ART:Photo realistic artwork

Paul Roberts

Paul Roberts was brought up by artist parents in Wales. Gaining early recognition in the 1970s, his career as a painter was interrupted when he had worldwide success with the rock band, Sniff ’n’ The Tears, in 1978 (whose cover artworks were all his creation). In 1988, he moved with his family to Somerset, where he has continued to paint and make music. His work can currently be seen at the Plus One Gallery London.
Paul Roberts (born in Tiverton, Devon, 1948) is the former lead singer and songwriter of Sniff 'n' the Tears. He is also known for his work as a photorealistic painter. He recorded a number of albums under his own name, with music very similar to that of Sniff 'n' Tears. The key albums were City Without Walls (1985) and Kettle Drum Blues (1987). The album Slowdown (1992) is a mainly a compilation of the two albums stated before.

Roberts was brought up in Wales by his parents, both themselves artists. Having studied at Newport College of Art, Cardiff College of Art and Goldsmiths College of Art, he gained early recognition as a painter in the 1970s before his career was interrupted by worldwide success with the rock band Sniff 'n' the Tears in 1978. Around 1980 he was exhibited by Nicholas Treadwell, who then wrote:

"Paul's work explores and parodies the glamorous way of life with seductive and dramatic effect, accentuated by an excellent sense of colour and powerful abstract values. The influence of cinema can clearly be seen in his paintings and his appreciation of Visconti and Hitchcock is often apparent".In 1988 he moved with his family to Somerset. Until 2000, his music commitments limited the time he had available to develop as a painter.

Art Issue

Criticisms of modernism

The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition. Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in surrealism or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.

After the rise of Stalin, the Soviet Communist government rejected modernism on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed futurism and constructivism. The Nazi government of Germany deemed modernism narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as "Jewish" and "Negro" (see Anti-semitism). The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled Degenerate Art. Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the "canary in the coal mine", whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence.

In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, high modernism began to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. In Britain, a youth sub-culture emerged calling itself "modernist" (usually shortened to Mod), following such representative music groups as The Who and The Kinks. The likes of Bob Dylan, Serge Gainsbourg and The Rolling Stones combined popular musical traditions with modernist verse, adopting literary devices derived from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, James Thurber, T. S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, Allen Ginsberg, and others. The Beatles developed along similar lines, creating various modernist musical effects on several albums, while musicians such as Frank Zappa, Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart proved even more experimental. Modernist devices also started to appear in popular cinema, and later on in music videos. Modernist design also began to enter the mainstream of popular culture, as simplified and stylized forms became popular, often associated with dreams of a space age high-tech future.

This merging of consumer and high versions of modernist culture led to a radical transformation of the meaning of "modernism". First, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Second, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Some writers[who?] declared that modernism had become so institutionalized that it was now "post avant-garde", indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement. Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as postmodernism. For others, such as art critic Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism.

"Anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements seek to emphasize holism, connection and spirituality as remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to an inability to see systemic and emergent effects. Many modernists came to this viewpoint, for example Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, in The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (2000), Fredrick Turner in A Culture of Hope and Lester Brown in Plan B, have articulated a critique of the basic idea of modernism itself — that individual creative expression should conform to the realities of technology. Instead, they argue, individual creativity should make everyday life more emotionally acceptable.

In some fields the effects of modernism have remained stronger and more persistent than in others. Visual art has made the most complete break with its past. Most major capital cities have museums devoted to 'Modern Art' as distinct from post-Renaissance art (circa 1400 to circa 1900). Examples include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. These galleries make no distinction between modernist and postmodernist phases, seeing both as developments within 'Modern Art'.

Sculpture Artists

Martin Puryear



Martin Puryear was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941. In his youth, he studied crafts and learned how to build guitars, furniture, and canoes through practical training and instruction. After earning his BA from Catholic University in Washington D.C., Puryear joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, and later attended the Swedish Royal Academy of Art. He received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1971. Puryear’s objects and public installations—in wood, stone, tar, wire, and various metals—are a marriage of Minimalist logic with traditional ways of making.

Puryear’s evocative, dreamlike explorations in abstract forms retain vestigial elements of utility from everyday objects found in the world. In “Ladder for Booker T. Washington,” Puryear built a spindly, meandering ladder out of jointed ash wood. More than thirty-five feet tall, the ladder narrows toward the top, creating a distorted sense of perspective that evokes an unattainable or illusionary goal. In the massive stone piece, “Untitled,” Puryear enlisted a local stonemason to help him construct a building-like structure on a ranch in Northern California. On one side of the work is an eighteen-foot-high wall—on the other side, an inexplicable stone bulge.

A favorite form that occurs in Puryear’s work, the thick-looking stone bulge is surprisingly hollow, coloring the otherwise sturdy shape with qualities of uncertainty, emptiness, and loss. Martin Puryear represented the United States at the São Paolo Bienal in 1989, where his exhibition won the Grand Prize. Puryear is the recipient of numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. Puryear was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1992 and received an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1994. Martin Puryear lives and works in the Hudson Valley region of New York.



"Desire" 1981
Pine, red cedar, poplar, and Sitka spruce, 116 x 240 x 288 inches
Collection of Panza di Buono, Varese, Italy
Courtesy Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York



"Vessel"
1997-2002
Pine, mesh and tar, 18 1/2 x 84 x 68 inches
Collection of the artist
Courtesy Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

"The most precise work is generally done by hand, with hand tools. Some people rely on machines for their precision, and my way of working is backwards. I rely on the machines for doing the gross stock removal and then, when it comes to the final refinements and fitting of joints and things, making things work together, I rely more on sharp-edged tools that I push by hand."