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Tuesday, March 31st

The Art of Creating Art from Art

My earliest recollections are of an elaborate grate that covered an air shaft in the house where I was raised in Brooklyn. The pattern of swirls-the positive and negative space-the completeness of the Victorian design captivated me. The vent went out into a back yard and because the brass plate so fascinated me, I created elaborate visual images in my mind that incorporated the polished plate, shadowy shaft and the leafy garden beyond. I sketched the grate and used black Crayola crayons to block out the negative space. One day, I discovered a way of looking at the plate and my sketches through the viewfinder of my Dad's Kodak Brownie. It was magic! So began my passion for architectural elements that define and augment visual space and my desire to create own art from these masterworks of stone, metal, glass and wood.

Ellen Fisch on 03.31.09 @ 09:05 AM EST [more..] [No Comments]

Thursday, March 26th

At Sharjah Biennale 9

The United Arab Emirates’ enthusiastic embrace of all things cultural in recent years has resulted in a lot of attention being paid to Dubai and Abu Dhabi - both now host commercial art fairs and both have cultural mega-projects on the way. Less attention has been paid to the smaller Emirate of Sharjah which is doing neither of these things but remains quietly confident about its status as the real cultural capital of the UAE.
There is justification in this claim. Sharjah is the founder and home of the Emirates Fine Arts Society, was the UNESCO capital of Arab culture in 1998 and is currently home to more museums than Abu Dhabi and Dubai combined. However, perhaps the greatest evidence of Sharjah’s pioneering role in cultural development is the fact that since 1993 it has hosted its own biennale, the 9th edition of which opened on March 19th and will run until May 19th.

Valerie Grove on 03.26.09 @ 11:38 AM EST [more..] [8 Comments]

Monday, March 23rd

The artist’s Journey.

It seems as though my best results are achieved through the continually mediated presence of an awareness and appreciation of an existence in which all the possible artifice of narration has lost its significance.

I represent apparently everyday situations, but which are actually suffused by a mysterious atmosphere, penetrating and refuting any semblance of normality.
Consequently, a man smoking or a woman lying on a bed are no longer representations of ordinary gestures or habits, but become enigmatic representations, tending towards other possibilities. So the background may no longer be a bar, a bedroom, or a road, but time, space, or death.
Even painting, in its way, tries to measure itself against aspects that continually evade us.

Alberto Sughi on 03.23.09 @ 11:22 AM EST [more..] [4 Comments]

Tuesday, March 10th

Vincent Testard, visual and plastic artist

Vincent Testard, a 24 year-old visual artist, lives and works in Bordeaux. His research is centred on the different representations of the individual and their link to society. His work uses drawings, paintings, installations and video.
This interview is an opportunity to get some information on his exhibition planned at the Galerie Tinbox in Bordeaux, in June 2009.

Hi Vincent. Thanks for the interview. Can you introduce yourself a little bit?
Vincent Testard, visual and plastic artist, Bordeaux. I’m 24 years old, born in 1984. I spent two years at the Fine Arts School in Lyon before moving to Bordeaux five years ago.

Tell me a little bit about your next exhibition…
It’s an exhibition at the Galerie Tinbox in Bordeaux, in June. It’s in two stages, first of all Vital Architecture and secondly Proxemic System. They are two conceptually close ideas, but they will be presented differently.
The base of this work is the sociological notion called Proxemics, defined in 1969 by the American sociologist Edward Hall. Proxemics is the study of distances that people put between themselves in a given space, and in a given culture. For example, in a North-American culture, a European culture or an Asian culture, the distances that come between people are not the same. Edward Hall worked on this theory, putting it into diagrams and schematics.
Based on this theory, I am working on the notion of the first sphere of intimacy, the one that protects the individual. This is the sphere that we often sense in a crowded subway, when we feel uncomfortable. These invisible spheres bang into one another and create a loss of intimacy.

Alice Cavender on 03.10.09 @ 11:03 AM EST [more..] [4 Comments]

Monday, March 2nd

A mad junky in the name of art (Part 1 of 2)

Should being an "artist" automatically excuse for immorality and capriciousness?

Triggering questions
Who said that art must gush from misery, struggle with God and misanthropy until the inevitable conclusion of insanity, catatonic apathy or a lonesome death in some filthy one-room apartment filled with dirty needles? Who said that art is a spring of all that which is incomplete, conflicted and chaotic? What is the value of art created by such artists? Is an artist who walks around whole and happy in the street of Berlin (or Cairo for that matter) will create shallower art than one who sits all day long and occupies himself with forcefully finding reasons to cut off his ear, or one that lives a wild and hallucinative lifestyle, consequent of a morally unrestrained mind, swept away blindly by destructive instincts and urges?

Must an artist destroy himself in order to create art? And what's the relationship between art and the essence of life? And who even said that art is a means for the realization of this essence?

findigart on 03.02.09 @ 03:11 AM EST [more..] [52 Comments]