Sculpture time...

This gorilla is made out of coat hangers...

Theodoru, I love you

Working on making this in Photoshop. Theodoru provides free tutorials on his website if you want to learn how to make this kind of stuff.


More Theodoru to come.



<3

Pessoli (a modern day Francis Bacon) & Cake: "Fragile Portraits"

Before we get into the new Swoon-- CAKE ...

The Chelsea art galleries had their openings this past Thursday; it was a night of free wine, champagne, beer; drunkenly dodging taxis while crossing from 10th to 11th, between W. 19th and 27th. It was a good night, although I was unfortunately only able to hit up a few galleries on 19th and 20th (I didn't even get halfway through-- had to go to a floor meeting at 8pm.)

It was also Fashion Week, so running back across 6 avenues with suitemate Alex was difficult seeing as I stopped at nearly every department store along the way. They were giving away free cucumber/mint cocktails and gay men kept complimenting me on my neon-orange coat. How could I resist?

Among the 4 or 5 galleries we had time to squeeze in, two artists stood out the most. The first was Alessandro Pessoli, born in Cervia, Italy, whose large-scale oil paintings of deformed figures popped in brilliant, clashing colors and Francis-Bacon style nightmarish forms.

One enormous painting ( I love big canvases that overwhelm viewers with their voracious size) was of Jesus Christ on a cross, smudged, yellow, pink, looming, with a factory pipe sticking out from the cross. Hmm. Unfortunately I couldn't find the painting online to show you.

Here are some more examples of Pessoli's work:





The influences of Francis Bacon are apparent in Pessoli's work. Here are a few of Bacon's paintings.

Francis Bacon:









Man, this guy is just as ghoulish as his art.


Pessoli's creepy figure paintings are even reminiscent of yet another familiar figure painter...a woman this time. Enter Marlene Dumas:




Kinda cool how they're all linked and influenced by one another. Anyway, enough of this mad jumping around and time to zoom in on the feature: CAKE (no, not the band, you damn hipsters).


I haven't had the chance to make it out to Brooklyn too often in the past year, although I plan on heading out tomorrow to the PERFORM WILLIAMSBURG ( uh oh, hipster alert) arts and music fest with Taelor and possibly Yonad. Hopefully we'll be able to make it to the Brooklyn art museum as I haven't been there yet. I'm assuming most of Cake's pieces are located in Brooklyn, as are a lot of other street artists... the world of Brooklyn lies to be explored this year (I know Manhattan like the back of my hand--that's probably a lie, but it sounds cool, doesn't it?)

Brooklyn IS the home of street art at this point, perhaps next to London. Manhattan just doesn't have its shit together anymore.

And here we are with some Cake, another female street artist with killer skillz.


I admire her simple (yet cunningly disturbing) portraits, their graceful contours; these are like my contour drawings from freshman year of high school, except twisted and demented, colorful, more expressive.






...Is that a fist punching a baby?





all hand drawn carbon print & acrylic.

Aha! Now I remember!
I HAVE seen one of Cake's pieces in real life. I saw it painted on a wall at 112 Greene Street at a street art exhibit last year in SoHo:


^ And here is the masterpiece in process.

Speto

v Not afraid to get paint on his pants.


Speto is a Brazilian artist whose graffiti and street art works are highly influenced by hip hop and new wave. Starting out in the mid-80s with mostly graffiti, Speto has expanded to illustrations, cartoons and other forms of commercial art for Brazilian magazines.




During an interview:
If you could have one superpower what would it be?
I’d have rubber body parts. Then I could stretch my arms to reach up to high walls where I want to spray.




What is unique about Speto is that he doesn't care where his art is produced/shown: whether it's for paid & commercial purposes, on the street, or in a gallery. According to him, all that matters is "wherever you go you are yourself" (Hell yes). He doesn't believe that art should be an egocentric exercise for the artist to produce only "for himself"; but rather it is to be shared with others and have meaning for the world around him.



As so-called graffiti muses into what is now known as "street art", simultaneously street/graffiti artists ease their way into the "normal" art world-- getting their work up in fine art galleries and into advertising/commercial/popular media. While today's graffiti world is nothing compared to the underground, illegal, raw freshness of the 80's and early 90's (just do it!), there's nothing wrong with making de money, and getting stuff up in galleries... I guess (heh).

Maybe modern street art is just a milquetoast, washed-down version of the old school shit. But even though times change, bringing fine arts to the streets and turned into fine "freet" art (free+street = freet, a term I just made up as I write this) is something that ought to continue growing in my opinion. As a now somewhat commercial artist, Speto manages to keep it real:

“I try not to adapt too much to the client but to adapt the client to me.”



And that's how it is.





http://www.speto.com.br/

Return of Wheatpaste

I'm sure you all missed Wheatpaste just as much as Wheatpaste missed you...