Who I've Been Looking at Lately
I look at a lot of art. It's just something that, as an artist, I feel I need to do in order to find inspiration and determine trends. You cannot be an artist without knowing how to look at things; literally or metaphorically, with eyes, ears, or hands. This post will be one of many that feature, well, whose art I've been looking at lately.
Betye Saar
Betye Saar is 90 years old and cooler than I will ever be. She does many different things, but my favorites are her assemblage and collage pieces. She calls herself a conjurer; a fitting word for someone whose aesthetic can veer into mystical territories-- dreamy colors, surrealist imagery, and celestial motifs. Her work would not look out of place in an occult shop window display, and that is precisely what drew me in. The fact that her work discusses her identity as an American woman of color with a graceful frankness is even better.
Vanessa Stockard
Current painting crush object of mine. Dogs that look longingly at cupcakes. A naked man standing, nonchalant, in a pink bathroom. Patterned Persian rugs. Candelabras. Period gowns that stand on their own. These paintings are incredible! I love everything from their weird color schemes to the texture of the paint itself to the bizarre narratives these paintings create. Highly recommend checking her work out and reading about her inspiration for the Derek Milkwood character, who makes frequent appearances in her work.
Nicole Chaffey
Grandmother's Bones is a series of thick, loose-handed paintings of broken dolls, game pieces, rosaries, and china fragments. Everything is a little weird and broken, and everything is isolated.
Heather Sundquist
Her paintings are nostalgic, warm, weird, and colorful; they are still versions of something you'd see in Moonrise Kingdom, one of my favorite movies.