Thank you

So I abandoned this blog when life got hectic, but I happened to check it today and found that a lot of people view and follow it.  More in fact than when I was regularly updating.  So thank you for looking and following, I hope to continue posting artists of interest

Nikolai Blokhin

Nikolai/Nikolay Blokhin is a wonderfully sensitive draftsman, who was professor of drawing at St Petersburg Academy of Art.  He paints too, but it’s his drawings which I really like.

I’ve only recently started exploring the Russian art scene, and I really feel like I’ve been missing out, there’s some extraordinary talent there.

Blokhin’s website

Carolyn Pyfrom

I’m always intrigued to see how artists develop having left the traditional ateliers and studios.  Carolyn Pyfrom finished at the Florence Academy of Art in 2002, and it’s fascinating to see what she has kept from that training, and what she has left behind to find her own direction.

I recommend browsing her website to look at her progression

Daniela Astone

Website

Golucho

Website

…and we’re back!

Apologies for the long break.  I had to priorities other commitments for a while.  I’m encouraged and grateful that so many people still come here despite the lack of recent updates.  I shall continue to post more artists, and I’ll probably write less, allowing this to be a simple repository of noteworthy contemporary artists.  Hopefully it’s not overly biased towards my own taste, though I will only post artists whose work I find in some way compelling  or inspiring.

Donald Jurney

Donald Jurney’s landscapes show a very clear reverence for the work of the Barbizon and Hudson River Schools.  Some of his compositions are much like Daubigny’s, with solid design drawing one’s eye between feathery trees, gently rippling water and skies heavy with atmosphere.

His wonderfully muted colours have a brilliant but subtle vibration that keeps his work from ever looking dull as many low-chroma landscapes do.  Instead one feels the thickness of the air and the trickling flow of light.

There’s a great sense of focus in his work too.  Often it is a tiny detail, a small area of strongly contrasting colour or value, that rings out clear like the triangle in an orchestra, bringing a touch of poetry to the broader areas.

Website

Alejandro Decinti

Alejandro Decinti is a Chilean painter whose work I’m undecided about, but still want to post.  His paintings from a few years ago display a similar approach and tonality as the work of Antonio Lopez Garcia, as can be seen in works like this one:

Then his paintings show an increased interest in paint for paint’s sake.  The still life below of materials seems to play with the tension between materials and representation, with the blue of the bucket merging into the flat blue wall, thereby flattening the image.  This sort of thing is reminiscent of Manet’s work, and a tribute to the Bar at the Folies-Bergere shows Decinti’s interest in him.

Thereafter his work becomes more involved with its own material qualities, with abstract marks breaking contours.  His compositions have also become increasingly unsettling and often creepy.

Love his early work. Undecided about his later stuff. Opinions? Check out his website and see what you think.

Travis Schlaht

Travis Schlaht is an instructor at the Grand Central Academy, married to Kate Lehman, studied at Water Street Atelier and has a show coming up at John Pence Gallery, so as the ‘classical realism’ scene goes, he’s got the credentials.  Oh and his paintings are pretty nice too.

I must admit, as far as subject matter goes, i’m not particularly excited.  It’s his paint quality that fascinates me, his marks having their own independent interest, yet never disrupting the illusionism, always subservient to representation but present enought for one to enjoy the interaction between surface and subject.  That may not be the most revolutionary thing ever, but I don’t mind at all, I’d rather quality and sincerity to ‘originality’.

Gallery

Brett Amory

Another compelling painter of urban life today, Brett Amory.

There’s something of Kanevsky about some of his marks, but his compositions feel a bit more illustrational with their clear opposition of figure and (often white) ground.

I can’t say I know anything about him, but I like his work, and if you like it too you should go to his show in San Francisco.

Website