Rom Isichei was born in Asaba, Delta State, Nigeria in the year 1966. Isichei attended the Yaba College of Technology located in Lagos, Nigeria. He studied fine art with an emphasis on painting. After college he spent some time working for advertising agencies before striking out on his own and full time studio painting.
As an artist he usually sticks with painting the figure using a highly textured surface. Isichei works with oils and acrylics.
Here a brief interview with Rom Isichei:
Isichei is still based out of Lagos, Nigeria.
Price range information: Works range from $6,000 to $40,000.
Jason Middlebrook was born in Jackson, Michigan in the year 1966. Middlebrook attended the University of California at Santa Cruz where he earned a B.F.A. The artist went on to earn a M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. He also studied at the Whitney Museum and abroad in Sweden. Middlebrook is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker.
One of the artist’s goals with his work is to help to preserve nature and to make the viewer aware of the impact they have on planet earth.
Below a link to the website of Jason Middlebrook. This home page has a wonderful piece of art by Middlebrook that mixes the organic shape of a slice of a tree with the straight lines of a rectangle:
In this clip we view works exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art located in Chicago, Illinois:
Many of his works with trees include spray paint and acrylics. The artist also used colored pencil.
Below we see a time lapse of a very large wall painting by Middlebrook at the Museum of Fine Arts located in Boston, MA:
The artist is based out of Hudson, New York.
Price range information: A wonderfully designed candle can be had for $120 from the artist. A sculpture can reach as much as $30,000.
What a wonderful sense of design employed the artist. Middlebrook’s work has a great deal of movement without overwhelming the viewers senses. The interaction of organic lines of the wood grain and geometric shapes make for a wonderful piece of abstract work.
Michael Staniak is a wonderful contemporary artist who reminds one of colorists painters and artists including Mark Rothko. In fact his paintings are similar to Rothko’s work, but contain much more variety in surface.
Michael Staniak was born in Melbourne, Australia in the year 1982. The artist attended college and graduate school in Melbourne earning a M.F.A. from the Victorian College of the Arts.
Price range information: Sorry none available.
In this clip we visit a show from 2014:
In this clip a brief interview with the artist telling us why he paints:
McArthur Binion is an African- American painter renown for his abstract style. Of his abstract works, I myself prefer the unique works done on a circular base usually birch wood. These works remind me most of the abstract painter who passed away in 2012 , Karl Benjamin. Below an example of art by Karl Benjamin.
Another great medium he enjoys using is crayon. He often builds up surface texture with crayon.
In this clip we visit a show given for McArthur Binion.
A portrait of the artist.
Lives and works out of Chicago, Illinois.
Has been a full time professor of art at Columbia College located in Chicago, Illinois since 1983.
Included in many prominent museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art located in New York City.
Binion’s first solo museum show was in 2012.
One way he gets such wonderful diverse textures is the very unique combinations of materials. For instance wax crayons on aluminum or birch wood panels. Most likely collage and wax crayon build up will also be included in the work.
price range information: Sorry none available.
Binion is a great abstract painter. The use of many different textures and mediums gives his work a vibrant and the layering of paint and crayon always leaves to viewer to find another color in which appeared at first to be a flat mono tone shape.
Nabil Nahas was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1949. He is renown for his abstract works as well as painting the landscape.
In this clip we visit a show given for the artist and Nahas tells us about some series he has been working on.
Nahas is also known for his unique finished work. Many times the work of art goes beyond the border and has a very unique texture. These works are done in acrylics. His art is a mixture of eastern and western cultures, a great sense of design, and the artist enjoys using repeating shapes in his work also.
Has a brother that left Lebanon for Brazil with fifty million dollars. Eventually he was accused of breaking the stock market of Brazil. The stock exchange hasn’t the same rules as the New York Stock Exchange and his brother was sometimes responsible for 80% of the volume of trades on the exchange. His brother obtained Brazilian citizenship and still lives in the country.
Price range information: He works in acrylics and mixed media. Most works start at $40,000 with up to the low six figures.
Nahas is a master artist when it comes to incorporating a variety of textures in his work. Especially enjoyable are the pieces that seem like sculptures, as they work goes beyond the borders of the picture plane.
Jules Olitski was an American painter and sculptor that was born in Snovsk which was located in the old U.S.S.R. in the year 1922. His birth name was Jevel Demikovski and his father was a high ranking Communist Party member. His father was executed by government officials months before the birth of the artist. In 1923 Olitski took off for the United States with his grandmother and mother. The family chose to settle down in Brooklyn and his mother got a new husband in 1926.
As the artist was a teenager he showed an interest and a great skill for drawing. His parents enrolled the artist in drawing classes and after graduating from high school the artist enrolled in Pratt Institute which is located in Brooklyn. Olitski also studied at the National Academy of Design and the Beaux Arts Institute which are both located in New York city.
Olitski was off to the Army for World War II in the early 1940s. After he got out Olitski got married. He continued to study art and moved to Paris. In Paris the artist found much to inspire him. He even made some paintings while he was blindfolded just to concentrate on the process of painting.
Due to the war Olitski never finished his degree. He went to New York Univeristy earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
First one person show in 1951 in Paris, France.
First one person show in New York is in 1958.
1950s bring Olitski and divorce and he remarries. At this time period he experimented with various surface textures.
Was part of teaching faculty at Bennington College located in Bennington, Vermont in the 1960s.
After his experiments with surface texture Olitski started to emphasize color in his works. By the mid 1960s he had evolved to using spray paint on metallic surfaces for his art. He was the first living American artist to have a one person show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. These works have very subtle color changes with no visable edges.
The 1970s he returns to emphasizing texture over color. New technologies brought him more vivid color choices to use with acrylic paints.
His latter works, lets say those made in the last decade of his life, remind me of dreams. You can remember the feeling, but not necessarily the shapes that appear in your dreams. In this regard I consider his landscapes similar to Robert Kipniss. Kipniss is a master printmaker who does a great job in setting mood in his art. Below is an example of Kipniss’ landscape style.
Technologies have brought many changes in the art world. For an artist that does a great job taking advantage of the Golden line of art supplies please check out Josep Cisquella. He uses a medium that is ground pumice stone. It has a texture similar to an old stone wall. He then paints a picture as if you are looking at a wall behind the main subject. Incredible texture and he wants people to TOUCH HIS CANVAS. Below is an example of Cisquella’s style of painting.
Try an abstract painting today to loosen up!
Jules Olitski passed away in 2007 from cancer at the age of eighty four years old.
In the gallery the only painting not done by Qadri is the last one which was painted by Richard Mayhew.
The artist came from India and was a great figure in the movement of contemporary art in India. He was best known for painting the metaphysical, the spiritual side of painting on canvas.
A brief clip featuring the artist’s work at a gallery in India. A collector talks about the Indian Art market.
Sohan Qadri was born in Chachoki, India in 1932. His family owned a very large farm and was quite wealthy. From some servants that lived on the farm Qadri learned of meditation and dance when he was around seven years old. Qadri liked to make scupture works out of the mud that was in his village.
As he grew older his mother wanted him to take over the duties of the family farm. Though outside he showed no emotion, inside it tore him up. He couldn’t handle the stress and ran away from home. Not like many of us who ran away for a few hours, he took off and lived in monastaries and with other people that shared his spiritual path and followings.
Eventually he returned and told him mother he would not take over the family farm and instead would start learning about art. He became an apprentice to a local photographer.
He then moved onto Bombay. The artist wanted to become an artist with a modern view, and he needed to leave smaller cities and villages behind in order accomplish his goals and dreams.
For college he attended the Simla College of Art. He received a degree, then went on to study teaching. As fate would have it, a publisher of a regional art magazine saw Qadri’s work and became his first major patron. His patron was similar to Howard Tullman, the Famed Chicago Art Collector, who really are passionate about buying works of art from up and coming artists.
A simple time line about the style of his evolution would be figure work, abstract work, landscape, meditative work…
A few notes about the artist’s process. He saw colors either dark and light, and warm or cool. Dark colors reprsented the earth and were used in the bottom works of the art. Warm or cold colors could be used to denote the energy passing through space. Light colors would be used in the upper third or upper levels of the art.
Qadri made his first break into the art world by having a wonderful sell out show in Africa.
Qadri lived abroad much of his life in places such as London, Paris, and for more than thirty years in Denmark.
The artist’s process includes getting into a meditative state, and then using colors that are familiar to his native country of India, and letting loose. Many paintings could be reflections of a quiet coastal scene. The viewer is given the structure and framework of a realism work, but with many details left out.
Qadri was very diverse in his mediums working with ink, oils, paper, and acrylics.
Price ranges: Works done with paper, many are collages some are paintings, are available from two twenty five thousand dollars. Ink works can be found from ten thousand to forty seven thousand. Works done in oils can range from two thousand to twenty five thousand. Acrylics can be found around ten thousand dollars.
The artist had quite a few celebrity friends. One was a winner of the Nobel Prize for his writings named Heinrich Boll. Boll enjoyed the meditation that was apparent to him in the artists’ work.
I enjoy this artist for his bold use of color and for his blend of abstraction and realism in his meditation paintings. If I was to compare his work to another artist it would be Richard Mayhew. Mayhew was an African American Indian artist that is still alive today and at his peak would take a landscape or seascape and reduce to brilliant fields of color. Below is an example of a Mayhew landscape. All forms are reduced to flat shapes of color with no concentration on form or structure, all feelings are centered on emotion.
This artist is known for creating texture on his canvases using a variety of mixed media.
A clip with the artist showing us his New York studio.
Section two of the interview, the artist shows us some of his portfolio.
The last section of the interview. The artist talks about another work comparing it to the Op-Art movement with artists like Vasserely and Bridget Riley. Movement, but also with a great deal of texture.
Augustus Goertz was born in 1958.
The artist is very creative when it comes to using unusual materials in his artwork. His main theme is to exaggerate the textures that he sees. On the work above that is painted green and titled “putting green” the artist used G.I. figures in the background. Using various methods he not only creates different textures, but uses creates a lot of depth. In addition to the great texture created for the viewer, the viewer also gets the sense of motion from the many objects on the surface that change the reflection of light as the viewer dances about the painting.
Goertz is very in tune with nature. Recreating everyday items for the viewer such as dirt, mud, rocks, grass, and sometimes even the beach.
Goertz also uses photography in his work from time to time. He became interested in the medium whilst living in San Francisco. He develops these type of works by including layer upon layer of special dark chemicals. These works don’t include much if any color and give a real sense of moodiness to the viewer. To compare it to another artist his Goertz photography paintings remind of the paintings two to three years ago produced by Geoffrey Johnson. With the lack of color and the striking contrast between dark and light shapes, these photograph based images turn out to be something you might imagine from the Victorian era. Goertz uses many applications of paint from spattering, dripping, and pouring the paint. He attacks the surface somewhat like Jackson Pollack, but Goertz is looking to make more of a sculptural type of painting that a flat surface.
The artist works mainly on canvas but from time to time uses paper.
If you like this artist be sure and check out Josep Cisquillop. He is based in Europe and uses texture mediums to recreate items such as a cement sidewalk or path and then he paints shadows on them.
For his art education Goertz went to Carnegie Mellon Univeristy in Pennsylvania as wel as the San Francisco Art Institute.
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