Paige Smith is an American graphic designer and street artist. Her street art installations are sculptures made of resin and paper. Her first big project was to install these pieces all over the city of Los Angeles, California.
As a graphic designer the artist has been very successful working with international brands including PayPal, MTV, and Cisco.
With the help of a partner Smith recently launched a fashion line. The duo produce leather handbags that can switch from a backpack to a handbag.
Below a brief interview with the artist talking about what inspires her:
Some places to find her installations include old and worn buildings and phone booths.
Below a link to the website of Smith. Here you can see more of her street art installations:
Paige Smith is a diversified artist and designer. Her small sculptures are wonderful as they remind me of being a child and being exposed to the wonderful shapes and colors found when you sliced open a rock such as quartz.
NohJColey is a American street artist and illustrator renown for his work with the face, figure, and text. The artist creates prints, wheat paste ups, and interactive sculptures around the city of New York.
In this clip we view a wonderful work of street art that pays homage to previous graffiti artists who have passed on:
Price range information: Sorry none available
Below an awesome moving piece of street art created by NohJColey:
Price range information: Sorry none available.
NohJColey’s work tries to capture the emotions of humans. The artist tries to portray what effects the current Pop culture, such as music, has on the individual.
Ron Van Der Ende is a Dutch artist who makes bas reliefs out of found wood. Ron Van Der Ende was born in Delft, the Netherlands in 1965. The artist attended what is now called the Willem De Kooning Academie based out of Rotterdam.
Van Der Ende is based out of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
In this clip we visit a show featuring Ron Van Der Ende. The views from this clip show how dimensional his work appears:
Below a link to the website of Van Der Ende. Its a great website with many large sized images:
My favorite aspect of the artists work is the incredible feeling of three dimensions I find in his art. Another great aspect that comes from using found wood his automobiles looked worn and aged.
If you enjoy this style of work as much as I do be sure and check out another Dutch artist renown for producing the same type of wall reliefs out of salvaged wood that use shoes as the main subject matter, Diederick Kraaijeveld.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster met in college and at that moment began working on collaborative works that show amazing talent and creativity. Tim Noble was born in England in the year 1966. Sue Weston was born in 1967 also in England.
Noble attended Cheltenham Art School. Webster attended Leicaster Polytechnic Both artists first met whilst attending Nottingham Trent University and discovering they enjoyed the same musical acts. Both artists went on to art residency at Dean Clough studios which would greatly help in building their art career.
The artists are part of the group known as the Y.B.A., the Young British Artists Group was supported and shown in the famed Saatchi Galleries of England.
The duo are part of prominent museum collections in Europe and the United States.
Price range information: Works range from $100,000 to $600,000.
In this clip we take a closer look at the shadow works made by the artists:
I enjoy their works with shadows the best. Very creative!
Ada Eyetoaq is a contemporary Inuit artist renowned for her sculptures, printmaking, and wall hangings. Ada Eyetoaq was born in the year 1934 near the Kazan River located in Canada. Eyetoaq often works with the figure and the mother and child theme.
Her family was among the last to leave the temporary settlement and move into the area of Baker Lake. Much of the artist’s work is involved with the traditional Inuit lifestyle of hunting and trapping. When her family first moved out of the temporary settlement to Baker Lake they had to live in a tent as there wasn’t enough housing for their family.
She married another trapper and artist named James Kingilik. The couple had hard times and food was very scarce. For four years they ate mainly fish as they could not find any caribou or seal to eat.
Her husband James Kingilik passed away in 1975.
Price range information: Works range from $500 to $3,000.
Liao Yibai is a modern art star born in the year 1971 in Jiang An, Sichuan, China renown for his own brand of “antiques.” The works are made of stainless steel. For his artistic education Yibai attended the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. In making his “fakes” or in some cases his own brand of luxury items, he tries to conquer a side that we know exists, but is new to me at least. Some of his own brands he has created deal with watches and handbags.
Other asian artists mix items like vases with coke imagery, but this artist chooses to concentrate on the fakes luxury brands people buy. In China so many people buy the fake brand they are assimilated into the mainstream culture.
Is a professor at Chongking University teaching design.
Splits his time amongs Beijing and Sichuan.
From this excerpt of a documentary about Liao Yibai he tells us about his story in his own words:
Mounir Fatmi is a contemporary artist born in Tangiers, Morocco in the year 1970. Fatmi is renown for using circles in his work. Sometimes the circles might be circular saws. Fatmi not only makes sculptures from found materials, but also includes Arabic writing in his work, adding an extra sense of culture to the work. ( I don’t speak Arabic but have studied calligraphy and find much of the line work extraordinary).
The artist is currently based out of Paris, France.
Price range information: Sorry none available.
Some other materials the artist uses are coaxial television cable, video cassette tapes, and records.
In this clip we see the artist using circles to invent some wildly creative machinery.
Mourni Fatmi’s most acclaimed work is a series done with the skyline of Manhattan, New York. The title of the series is “Save Manhattan.” The 911 attacks had a large impact on the artist and he made these works as a tribute to Manhattan using books and another using videotapes, and another using sound machines.
In this clip we see the version of the Manhattan skyline that used sound machines. Check out the shadows, very cool!
Subjects explored by Fatmi include religion and the consumer economy.
In this 40 second clip get a great grasp of the many works and moving installations the artist has created. Some of the circles he has worked on are records and when they are spinning its a new type of Op-Art illusion!
Johnny Inukpuk was another of the great Inuit tribe of Canadian artists. Inukpuk was born in the year 1911 in Kujjuarapik. He learned to carve whilst still living basically as a nomad, living off the land. The artist used the normal found materials such as steatite, antlers, and whalebones.
Saumik was the name the Inuit people gave to Jams Houston. Houston was a big promoter of the work of the Inuits and himself was a great artist working with the figure. He encouraged the Inuit people to learn art and promote their unique nomadic culture.
Inukpuk produced sculptures and produced one print that had to do with his life. That is the great thing that fascinates me with the work of the Inuits, its their everyday life that is portrayed so artistically. His print had to do with a hunting trip in which the Inukpuk was trapped inside an igloo with his rifle outside and three polar bears waiting outside. Much of his work as with most of the Inuits has to do with nomadic living and hunting, gathering, and riding in canoes. I love these works!
To any artist these works are fascinating alone for their mediums sometimes, the whalebone and antler pieces. Some other twists he used were portraying women with hare lips, his own wife had a hare lip. He even varied the eyes of his figures over time using soapstone, ivory, and melted vinyl records.
In this clip we see a wonderful sculpture by Johnny Inukpuk featured at Waddingtons auction house of Canada.
A work at actual auction. Get your paddle ready !
In 1973 was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Price range information: The sculptures very in size as the artist worked very small in the beginning of his career. The range is $1,000 to $40,000.
Included in the Toronto Dominion Bank Financial Group collection.
Had one son that become known as a great artist working in the same Inuit method named Johnny Inukpuk Junior who lived 1930 to 1984. A great example of his son’s artwork is below.
Here is a short clip featuring the works of the son Johnny Inukpuk junior.
Johnny Inukpuk passed away in 2007.
Gotta love these families that can pass on art as a career to multiple generations!
The artist was born on December 26 in Costa Rica in the year 1912. Zuniga studied the printmaking as well as drawing and painting at the School of Fine Arts in San Jose, Costa Rica. After this he went on to study sculpture and working with stone at La Esmeralda in Mexico City. He went on to teach at this institution until retirement in 1970. This institution is also known as the National School of Sculpture and Painting of Costa Rica.
His father ran a studio that produced sculptures for the local churches and convents around San Jose, Costa Rica. This is what got him excited about the world of sculture at a young age.
He worked with watercolor, pastels, crayons, charcoal, onyx, and marble. He mainly worked with the female figure.
Mexico City proved to be a grand destination for the artist. Due to its sheer size and amount of people good art and fantastic artists such as the muralists like Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco. When Zuniga moved to Mexico he was able to work with the painter Manual Lozano.
A great clip showing a great deal of art made by Zuniga. You can get a good feeling as to how much the artist loved painting and sculpting the female figure. For his sculptures he used bronze or carved them in onyx.
Over his long career the artist finished many public commissions. From 1960 on he mainly worked in his studio producing prints and sculptures and very prolific pace. From an artistic standpoint Zuniga reminds me of Mary Cassatt and Elizabeth Catlett. Catlett was born in America but moved to Mexico and was very important in getting those workers in the fields to better themselves by learning to read. In order to show the emotional connection between the subjects in his paintings on many occasionally, Zuniga tends to exaggerate certain bodyparts like the arms and hands.
He seemed to specialize on painting the local women and seems to have used a stereotype in that nearly every women had arms far larger than normal. Maybe to emphasize their importance to the world and the idea that they were pouring all of their hard work in order to improve their community. I will go deeper into some Mexican muralists because they were very important in uniting the country for a certain cause. In a time before many people were even able to listen to radio, many people were able to view the originals murals or see a print that the artists had produced.
I also enjoy his design of his models on his working surfaces. In many works no horizon line exists and the subject seems very peaceful in their poses, very relaxed and seemingly floating in space. Rather than drawing a face in profile and twisting the body to get a Reubens like feeling, the artist many times worked with the entire figure in a three quarters position. Its great to see a different approach being used with the figure. I find his renderings of the eyes to be the most impressive part of his figure paintings.
The artist passed away in 1998.
Average price ranges: Charcoals from $3,000 to $10,000. Bronzes less than $1,000 up to $411,000. Marbles up to $75,000. Crayon works from $5,000 to $15,000. Lithographs from $1,000. Drawings from $5,000 to $15,000. Watercolor from $4,000 to $15,000.
Francisco Zuniga is part of museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.
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