If I Had a Time Machine

No, Dido...


(Dido: Andrea Sacci, 1599-1661)

Don't do it.

Red - Good as Gold

Seeing the documentary Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time two nights ago has deepened my long held appreciation of Goldsworthy's work beyond measure.

Beyond Resuscitation

Resuscitation: What I yearn for.

Resuscitation. Installation. Sumer Erek.


Split: I, too, feel like this sometimes.

Split. Installation - Performance. Sumer Erek.


........................................

About conceptual artist Sumer Erek:

"... His work owes its strength and appeal to the impression of its being on the threshold, hovering between the material and the spiritual, the physical and the metaphysical, the factual and the fantastic reality of dreams."

www.cypnet.co.uk
www.sumererek.com

Igor Melnikov - Hidden In Plain Sight - Where You Find Me, You Still Find Me Not

"When people weep in the presence of Melnikov’s paintings, it is not from pathos but from recognition of a forgotten part of themselves."

One of my favorite artists is Igor Melnikov.

In his own words... "For me, these are not portraits of children, but portraits of human souls... The face of an adult is biography; the face of a child is metaphysics."

Hide and Seek

In and Old Doll's Dream

Examination

"I don't like poetic generalizations, particularly about my own work. But, if I can dare to qualify the subject that interests me most of all, it is this: the little, weak human beings coming into this huge, brutal, senseless world, and being unwanted, uninteresting, and unloved by anyone. Ultimately, the existential conflict is expressed most clearly as the awakening conscience of the little human being in the face of the cosmos."

One of my favorite paintings by Melnikov is titled "Julia and Universe." I can't find an image of it anywhere on the web. If you happen to find one, contact me.


For more insight into this highly sensitive, perceptive artist, I recommend downloading and reading this pdf: Hidden In Plain Sight - The Art of Igor Melnikov

Ben Strawn - Good For The Gods

I am excited to announce that my friend, local artist Ben Strawn, is artistaday.com's ARTIST OF THE DAY!

(Good on ya, Ben.)


Stereographic painting. Ben Strawn. 2007

You can learn more by visiting: www.artistaday.com
Leave him a comment and a rating if you stop by!

(To see more of his work, click the "Ben Strawn" link just below the image posted above. It will take you to his website.)

Lives of The Artists - Charles Wright

4

Jaundicing down from their purity, the plum blossoms

Snowfall out of the two trees

And spread like a sheet of mayflies

                                soundlessly, thick underfoot -

I am the silence that is incomprehensible,

First snow stars drifting from the sky,

                                late fall in the other world;

I am the utterance of my name.



Belief in transcendence,

                         belief in something beyond belief,

Is what the blossoms solidify

In their fall through the two worlds -

The imagining of the invisible, the slow dream of metaphor,

Sanction our going up and our going down, our days

And the lives we infold inside them,

                                    our yes and yes.



Good to get that said, tongue of cold air

Licking the landscape,

                        Snuffing the flame in the green fuse.

I am the speech that cannot be grasped.

I am the substance and the thing that has no substance,

Cast forth upon the face of the earth,

Whose margins we write in,

                  whose one story we tell, and keep on telling.

-Charles Wright, Black Zodiac

Art, Meaning, and Power

"The production of meaning is inseparable from the production of power."

- Lisa Tickner

Pablo Picasso. Crucifixion. 1930. Oil on wood.


Andres Serrano. Piss Christ.


Alma Lopez. Our Lady. 1999. Iris print on canvas.