Posts Tagged ‘figure painter’

Artist of the moment….Philip Pearlstein….

{ November 10, 2012 @ 8:38 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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Philip Perlstein was born in 1924 in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was a close friend of my favorite artist of all time, Andy Warhol.

For his education the artist went to the Carnigie Institute of Technology. He earned a masters degree in art history from New York University.

How he met Warhol was that both were from Pittsburgh and moved to Manhattan. The two leased an apartment that was infested with roaches and the normal bachelor pad sqaulor!

As was the fad, Pearlstein experimented with painted abstract landscapes in the 1950s. In the late fifties he started working with the figure, attending weekly classes. He then progressed to painting nude couples and loved it! He found that he wanted to be a realist painter.

Many critics said his style was realistic in the fact he didn’t idealize any body parts or paint the person prettier than they appeared. Some critics say they think of his painting as “pure.”  For me the purest painter, the artist who didn’t “beautify” anybody was Lucien Freud. The great British painter who worked with hogs hair brushes and very thick juicy paint similar. Below is a picture of Freud, I think he drew and painted the body purer than anyone. And from very different angles than we usually see people.

A clip showing  an interview with the artist.

A great selection of figure works of the artist.

I enjoy looking at his sculpture like drawings and paintings of body parts. A painting or drawing of just legs or hands.

More than sixty museums own works by the artist. The Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of Art, and the Musuem of Modern art are just a few of the museums owning a Pearlstein.

Member and Past President of the American Society of Arts and Letters. This is a 250 person society that supports and encourages artists of all types. From poets, to books, to painters the group was made to help artists along their path.

Price range info:  Lithographs are the most affordable product by the artist available from less than one thousand to five thousand dollars. Many etchings can be found for a few hundred dollars. An original oil is between $15,000 to $110,000. Many watercolors between $10,000 and $40,000.

I enjoy looking at Pearlstein’s figure work. It seems very easy and flowing. Not saying too much or too little about the subject. I think its very neat that he shared some apartments with Andy Warhol!

Keep painting!

D

Artist of the moment……..Isaac Snowman….

{ September 8, 2012 @ 11:11 am } · { Uncategorized }
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The artist hails from the London, England and was born in 1874.

For his education he attended the City of London School.  Snowman went on the Royal Academy of Art. For his subject matter, he painted the figure and portraits and loved to paint themes having to do with Judaism. The artist was able to paint awesome flesh tones. Especiallly intriguing are the scenes of women under trees. The artist was great at dappling the sun over the women.

In 1897 the artist formed a group with English jews called Maccabean.  The group travelled to Palestine.

In 1898, the artist got married at the North London Synagogue. The marriage lasted only a few years. Snowman thought his wife should do whatever he asked with no questions asked. The couple had a son that died as an infant and they adopted a girl. In 1907, when the artist headed to Africa to paint a portrait of the King of Dahomey, his wife filed for divorce claiming adultery.

Snowman eventually moved to Jerusalem and had a studio over the Damascus gate.

In 1921, Jerusalem had some riots. The artist tried to get through the mob with some friends and ended up getting stabbed.

With World War II starting up the artist ended up staying in England whilst on a visit. He was also in poor health.

Isaac Snowman died in 1947.

Has some paintings of royalty in the National Portrait Gallery of the United Kingdom.

High price range:  Oil painting titled “A Summer Afternoon in the Garden,” sold for $72,000.

Low price range:   Two oils sold in 2011 for less than one thousand U.S. dollars.

I enjoy this artist and believe he was a true master of art because he was excellent at using color, making compositions, and making the subjects highly engaged with each other on the canvas. When I see his mother and child paintings it reminds me of Mary Cassatt. Somtimes the playfullness and happiness of the characters is similar to Frans Hals. Hals was the best painter of smiles in the art world. His smiles were even more incredible when you consider he wasn’t working from a photograph, he was painting a smiles WITH TEETH totally from life.  I find the same liveliness in Hals work that I find in Snowmans.

My favorite painting of his is the woman sitting under a tree. The lighting and edge quality of this painting is fantastic.

This artist is certainly one of the best painters to have other come from United Kingdom and other than J.M.W. Turner the artist I would most like to see.

D

Artist of the moment……Actress and artist Delia Brown…

{ September 6, 2012 @ 5:36 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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The artist isn’t a full time actress, but played herself attending a gallery opening on the television day time drama Young and the Restless.

Hear in the artist’s own words about how she goes about creating her artwork.

Delia Brown was born in 1969 Berkeley, California. The artist now lives and works out of New York City.

High price range:  Oil painting went for $78,000. Watercolor for $10,800.

Other prices:  Graphite works from $1,000 to $5,000. Acrylics between $1,000 to $6,000. Most watercolors are around $10,000.

She has attended a few colleges in her art education. She studied at the University London, Goldsmith’s College.  Bachelors of art degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Masters from UCLA. Stepped into the national spotlight when the art world paid homage to the graduating class of UCLA in 2000.

Delia Brown is a very versatile artist working with watercolor, gouache, acrylics, and oils.

This artist certainly maximizes her skills and creativity. She got to play herself on a soap opera ( Young and Restless the clip is above!) And her character was going to an gallery opening. And her paintings, she is similar to Rembrandt in that she has painted numerous amounts of self portraits over the years. She enjoys painting herself and her friends hanging out and partying in well known places such as Beverly Hills, California.

She tries to portray an upper class lifestyle, perhaps similar to all of the reality television shows such as Housewives of Orange County or Housewives of Beverly Hills. This artist had the idea to portray this lifestyle long before it came to television. She should collect a royalty perhaps!

She is very creative and for quite sometime pursued a singing and entertainment career in the hip hop music world.

She also studied a type of acting called the  “Stanislavsky Method” of acting. It involves pouring your emotions into acting. This helps her to create her scenes and paintings with her friends. She has also done performance art, both live and thru video.

Another example of her creativity, she collaborated with actress Hollis Witherspoon and invented a fictional woman named Chelsey Green. Delia Brown makes the paintings and than Hollis acts them out.  Here is a short clip producted by Delia Brown with Hollis playing Chelsey Green.  This was  made in 2006.

This artist is so creative, I hope it inspires someone out there to try a different form of a creativity such as ceramics or better yet performance art. Other painters who also have made great performance and video works would be Kara Walker and of course Robert Kushner.

Try a different creative outlet today!

D

Artists working with the face and figure….Su Zihan…

{ June 15, 2012 @ 3:37 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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This artist is fantastic for painting the mood of a person and their surroundings.

The artist was born in 1978.

The artist is a master at painting someone who doesn’t mind to be looked at, and most of the time the subject is a woman that is looking to be alluring and sexy.  Sometimes holding a cigarette and lingering in the shadows.

The artist mainly works with the female figure. His areas of interest are fashion, the lips, the tongue, and the waist. He seldom paints the nude figure and strives for the sexuality of his characters to remain somewhat hidden, that is what makes them alluring. The idea of wanting to see more!

The artist also likes to portray the change that has taken place in China in the twenty years following the incident in Tienemen Square. Sex is much more out in the open in this society.  Not only are the young people in his paintings trying to look alluring, they appear to be intoxicated.  Be the subjects smoking some cigarettes or having some cocktails, its important that the viewer sees the subjects are chasing eternal bliss, trying to remain in this happy and excited state of mind.

Su Zihan attended college at the Chu Zhou College of Art, an Hui Province.

 

He has even done a series titled “occupational lover,” that deals with women working in the sex industry.

mediums used: oils on canvas

low priced range: $2500

high priced range: $15000 for a large double figure work measuring nearly eighty inches for both height and width.

on line and land based galleries: Soemo Fine Arts in Beijing, China and the Netherlands       http://soemo-fine-arts.com/artist?id=798

The artist loves to push boundaries and the idea of a changing cultural China which old ideas and thoughts about sex have been forgotten and pushed by the wayside.

The artist, being born in 1978, grew up at an odd time in the culture. The Socialist market of China and the capitalist markets of the west were at odds against each other. The youth were forced to see the weakness of their political and structured society. Why try and be great all the time if you won’t see the benefits of your hard labor. The youth became angry at their political leaders.

I enjoy the artist for his focus on opposites. Complimentary colors for one, in the paintings which is use color. And also the many contrasting ideas in works.  A very beautiful young woman, who is also dangerous or might be in a dangerous situation to some. Very striking and beautiful on the outside, but how about the inside of the person.

This artist is surely one to watch in the next few years. It will be interesting to see the new direction he takes his work.

Try a black and white painting today!

Create!

D

Artists working with the face and figure….Andre Kohn…

{ June 13, 2012 @ 4:14 am } · { Uncategorized }
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A clip showing a portfolio of the artist’s figure paintings.

Another collection showing the artist’s figure works. Please notice the texture and thick appearance of the paint.

The artist was born into a family of artisans in 1972 in Stalingrad of the former Soviet Union. As a child he was exposed to every form of arts and crafts that you could imagine. He grew up living close to the Caspian Sea. Attended college at the University of Moscow where he was influenced by Russian Masters of Impressionism. He loved many different Impressionist painters such as Fechin, Serov, Degas, and Sargent.

The artist moved to the United States in 1993.It took very little time for the artist to establish himself in the U.S. His mother was a fantastic violin player playing in a professional symphony. His father was a linguist as well as a writer and sculptor. Both parents were educators and both were trained in psychology. As a  the family lived in a small one room flat. He was taught that art and being creative was all one needed to happy. A bohemian lifestyle of sorts. The artist was even allowed to draw on the wallpaper, in fact his parents encouraged this.

At the tender age of fifteen the artist was allowed to be an apprentice to a Russian Master Artist.

The artist’s father ended up to be a colonel in the Russian army.  He became the first person to receive asylum in the United States after defecting  from Russia in 1992. His dad came for a visit to the United States and ended up defecting to the U.S.

mediums used: oils on canvas, graphite pencil on paper.

on line and land based galleries:   Waterhouse Gallery in Santa Barbara, California.   http://www.waterhousegallery.com/Andre%20Kohn.html

Hward/Mandeville Gallery in Kirkland, Washington.    http://www.howardmandville.com/Pages/Artist%20pages/kohn.html

low price range: oil paintings  $1,200

high price range: oil paintings  $5,000

I enjoy the artist’s style for compositions. His works that have two people are well designed. The characters are lively and moving, the viewer has is able to read the emotion of the figure from the position of the body rather than looking at the face. He also makes fun designs with the umbrella shape and colors.  After watching tennis  in Paris it was easy to observe that Europeans use umbrellas not only to keep the rain away, but also as  fashion accessory.

The artist lives in Arizona but still travels frequently to Europe mainly to visit France.

 

Artists working with the face and figure…. Norman Rockwell…..

{ June 3, 2012 @ 4:59 am } · { Uncategorized }
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For sure this is one of America’s most beloved artists. He was a highly productive painter and and produced more than four thousand works over his lifetime.

From a design stand point I enjoy the interaction of the figures he paints. Be it a young child whose face is red from playing tag or an old person in a barber’s chair getting a haircut the artist was great at portraying expression. Most interesting for me are his self portraits and in fact in one painting he portrayed himself three times in the picture.

Some works by the artist and the last picture is the image where the artist has portrayed himself three times in the painting.

A museum piece made in 2007 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts where the artist lived from 1953 until his death in 1978.

Part two of the Stockbridge, MA museum interview.

Part three of the interview.

The artist was born in 1894 in New York City.

He painted his first commission at sixteen years of age.  Illustrated his first book  only one year later at seventeen years of age.  He created many illustrations and some of his most famous work was done as the lead illustrator of the Saturday Evening Post. He worked at this position for more than forty years. He also did illustrations for Boy Scouts of America and Boys’ Life. Illustrated forty books in his lifetime.

As an illustrator he designed calenders, greeting cards, posters, books, sheet music, stamps, and even painted murals. The artist was well schooled in a variety of mediums working in charcoal, watercolor, gouache, and oils.

low price range: many lithograph prints sell in the hundreds of dollars. Sometimes great prints can be found for five hundred dollars.

high price range: $15. 4 million for a painting titled Breaking Home Ties.

Many art critics didn’t take the artist seriously as a fine artist for all his illustration work. Some critics thought the work was too sweet or had too much kitsch, the same problem that plagued Thomas Kinkade. For me Rockwell was far better at designing and painting than Kinkade. At least with Rockwell you don’t have paintings with light coming from all directions.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg each own some of the artist’s work. Spielberg owns a sketch of the triple portrait work.  Both men have the artist’s work in their offices and where they work daily. Norman Rockwell is even a character in the Chronicles of Young Indiana Jones.

Attended college at the National Academy of Design as well as the Art Students League of New York.

Passed away in 1978 aged 84 years old.

I encourage you to look at the many great figurative works made by the artist. Check out or purchase a book of his art, its fantastic!

Dan

 

 

 

 

 

Artists working with the face and figure…Tom Wesselmann….

{ May 13, 2012 @ 2:05 am } · { Uncategorized }
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Below is a clip showing some of the artist’s fantastic cut out paintings made with steel and paint.

A great clip showing some works done by various contemporary artists of the 1960s. They were to paint their ideas about a centerfold. Wesselmann’s was different in the fact he focused on only one body part, the lips.

low price range: silkscreens around $5,000

high price range: original oil for $504,000

This artist was known for painting sleek female nudes on a variety of surfaces. Among my favorite are steel cut outs of the female figure.

mediums used: oils, steel cut outs (the artist called the works steel drawings), collage, graphite pencil, oil, acrylic, serigraph, cardboard

The artist was born in 1931 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Cooper Union  in New York City. When he first went to college he was a psychology major at Hiram College.  After studying art in college the artist found some success selling cartoons to 1000 Jokes and Truth magazines.

In 1957 the artist met his soon to be wife, Claire Selley, she became his friend, lover, model, friend, and for a short while became his wife. In 1958 he decided to abandon cartoons and concentrate on painting.

Was known for mixing the female form with food for a different and unique take on the pop art world.

The artist would specialize on a certain body part for much of his nude series. A sexy mouth, a firm buttock, or a red breast all painted with wonderful eye for color.

After the 1970s the artist worked on sculptures only attempting very few drawings and paintings.

The artist died in 2004, aged 73 years old in Manhattan, New York.

Has work in several museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is in nine collection as of the writing of this article.

The artist exerting the most influence on Wesselmann was Henri Matisse.

Founding member of the Judson Gallery in New York City. In some of his still life assemblage works he has a television set turned on in the piece. Very creative in his methods of assemblage.In the 1960s he started to paint wonderful seascapes in oils of his vacation hot spots.

The artist had many problems with his heart and died after a failed surgery to correct his heart.

I enjoy the artist’s work. For me its quite similar to Roy Lichtenstein, but more lifelike. Very clean feminine lines, the steel drawings are fantastic just for the fact no one produces a similar item in the art market now.

Artists working with the face and figure…Stephen Scott Young….

{ May 6, 2012 @ 3:08 am } · { Uncategorized }
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Below is a brief clip about the artist produced by American Artist magazine.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6188107649713762042

online and land based galleries: Adelson Galleries in New York City.      http://www.adelsongalleries.com/artists/stephen-scott-young/

John Suvorek Gallery in Palm Beach, Florida.   http://www.surovekgallery.com/youngssPrints.html

Both of these websites show the true variety of mediums the artist uses from graphite, to silverpoint etching, from oil painting to gouache painting.

This artist I would consider a modern day Homer or Sargent when it comes to painting people in the Caribbean be it at work or play.

He uses a variety of mediums from oils to watercolor to gouache. He paints the watercolors on twinrocker handmade paper, many other well known artists recommend this company for their high quality papers, another famous artist who loves the brand is Jamie Wyeth.

The artist was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1957.

Another great aspect about the artist is that he claims his favorite medium to be etching. When you consider all of those great master artists who learned etching before hand such as Durer or Rembrandt, it seems to be a lost art indeed. He as an artist himself studied such artists as Vermeer, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Whistler.

Collected by major museums such as the Kemper Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

He started out making copies as a young boy of Vermeer and Caravaggio thanks to his mother, who bought him the books. Went to college at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. The artist won a huge amount of confidence he could make it as an artist by winning a contest that was held by American Artist magazine.

His wife is from the Bahamas and while living there he spends much of his time on his bicycle! Awesome lifestyle choice of going back and forth between Florida and the Bahamas.

low price range: $5,000

high priced range: $348,000  (it was titled the red bow)

mediums used: graphite, watercolor, gouache, oils, silverpoint etchings

The artist does a great job at capturing the light of the caribbean. Among his series of watercolors fetching more than 100,000 dollars was a series showing a group of island boys playing stickball and shooting marbles. The  artist has a keen sense of color mixing warm earth skin tones with bright floral and colorful patterns found in the Caribbean.

 

From this artist we can learn to always try new materials as it might open up our eyes to seeing something different. Also we can learn to paint with very light coats of paint in watercolors, gouache, and oils. This is the key to the artist’s work, many many light layers of paint!

Try a new medium today!

Happy painting!

D

 

Awesome Acrylic Artist series…….A.D. Cook…

{ February 28, 2012 @ 1:19 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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The last picture shown above in the gallery has the artist on the viewer’s left. The artist works with many of the world’s most beautiful women taken loads of photographs and then making a design of his choosing to paint.

 

Clip showing the artist painting a figure on a metal surface. The reflection of light on these works is fantastic.

Clip of the artist working with a Playmate model. It shows him taking photographs, preparing the metal, and working on the piece.

Low price range: $2,000

High price range: $50,000

This artist is a tremendously skilled figure painter.

Mediums used: acrylics, color changing urethane

Surfaces: metal, canvas

Artist was born in Phoenix in 1961. While growing up the family moved frequently, sometimes the artist would attend three different schools in one years time. One constant was art, so he became focused and developed a great work ethic from an early age. When the artist was 14, the family settled in Portland, Oregon. Here he learned to use the airbrush and improve his drawing and photography skills.

Back in the 1980s when the home video rental boom was just beginning, long before Netflix was even a thought, the artist worked with Hollywood Video Rental chains. He was the creative director and painted several hollywood mural scenes for some of the larger retail stores. He even helped develop the corporate brand of the large chain.

In the mid 1990s he left this job to pursue his own fine art dream where he could paint whatever he wanted. The artist made series featuring American motorcycles, nude figure works, and abstract pieces.

In 2004 he started using metals as a surface. In the youtube clip you can see how much different the surface is than canvas even before any paint is used.

The artist lives and works out of Las Vegas, Nevada.  He now sells mainly from his website, also accepting clients for commercial work and additional skills such as body painting. He started his own gallery in 2008 on Fremont Street in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was located in Neonopolis, which was to revitalize the downtown area but soon after opening ran into financial troubles.

I enjoy this master of acrylic medium for his sense of design. Some of his figure paintings remind me of another acrylic artist, Bernardo Torrens who I wrote about previously, as they both can paint wonderful figures by using one color and white.  My favorite works of the artist are his blueish female figures, one color and white. I recommend anyone looking to become a better painter of the figure should also learn how to render it tonally and with one color plus white to make your own grey scale. At first use only 5 tones, then if you are satisfied with that break it down to 10 tones. He is also a great business person and I imagine him to try opening up a gallery again.

If you are in Las Vegas he sometimes has work showing at the Grape Vegas, a wonderful restaurant specializing in great food and wine.

Please visit the artist’s website below.

http://www.adcook.com/

Finish an old project today!

D