New Student Art from fall 2009

Here are some recent paintings from the Advanced 2D Art class.


Taylor Wilder


Taylor Wilder


Taylor Wilder


Taylor Wilder


Sydney Wright


Noelle Willis


Iris McNitt


Rebecca Turner


Sydney Wright

Lowbrow Art / Pop Surrealism

Robert Williams

Lowbrow Art, also known as Pop Surrealism, is an art movement that has its origins in the 1960s and 1970s, coming originally from California hot rod / kustom car culture, underground comix, countercultures from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and other subcultures as well.

The term Lowbrow art came about as a reaction to the highbrow* art typically found in many art galleries and museums. Where the mainstream of much contemporary art places little emphasis on skill, artists in the lowbrow movement are typically highly skilled; many come from an illustration background.

*definition of highbrow: a person with intellectual or cultural pretensions; an intellectual snob. May also refer to pretentious art galleries and museums-- supposedly sophisticated, but maybe not!

One of the major promoters of lowbrow art is the magazine Juxtapoz, founded by lowbrow artist Robert Williams. Williams worked as an "underground comix" artist in the 1960's, appearing in Zap and other comic books as well. Prior to that he worked for Kustom Kar designer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, who was also the creator the the character Rat Fink.

Ed "Big Daddy" Roth






Robert Williams


Todd Schorr




Mark Ryden




A great place to see a lot of lowbrow art online is the website for the California gallery La Luz de Jesus.

Some lowbrow artist links:

Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mark Ryden

Mr. Jacobi at CPOP Gallery

The Opener of the Way, acrylic, 18" x 24", 2008.
(click on image for a larger view)

Mr. Jacobi's painting The Opener of the Way will be included in the show “It’s All About ©” at Detroit's CPOP gallery. The show opens on May 2, and runs through mid-June. For more details, see Mr. Jacobi's personal art blog by clicking here.

New student art from this year, fall/winter 2008-2009

Taylor Wilder


Duron Lawler


Holly Phelan


Artina Gomez


Aric Pasciak


Alex Roberts-Perazza


Taylor Wilder


Ramon Roberts-Perazza


Miles Martinez


Sydney Wright


Duron Lawler


Artina Gomez


Alex Aniol


Melissa Desrochers


Heather Bommarito


Carmel Liburdi


Alex Roberts-Perazza & Carmel Liburdi

Text Messenging can be Hazardous to Your Health

Hey, all you text messengers-- please read the article below. It's kind of funny, but actually, it is quite serious.

Hey, oblivious texters! Doctors want you to read this message

That edge of technology? You're teetering on it

By CLAIRE TRAGESER
P-I REPORTER

You see them everywhere: driving, crossing streets, buying groceries or ordering coffee.

Their heads bent over open cell phones as their fingers leap across their keypads, unaware of the world around them.

These "texters," who send and receive messages on their phones, are not just living on the edge of modern technology. They are also safety hazards.

Put moving while texting up there with skating on thin ice and playing with matches.

In an alert issued this week, the American College of Emergency Physicians warns of the danger of more serious accidents involving oblivious texters. These doctors cite rising reports from around the country of injuries involving text-messaging motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, even Rollerbladers. And ER doctors who responded to a recent informal query from the organization reported two deaths, both in California.

A San Francisco woman was killed by a pickup truck earlier this year when she stepped off a curb while texting, and a Bakersfield man was killed last year by a car while crossing the street and texting.

Harborview Medical Center has not knowingly treated anyone injured while texting, said spokeswoman Susan Gregg-Hanson. However, after a driver typing on a BlackBerry caused a five-car pileup on Interstate 5 in December 2006, the Legislature enacted a law that banned texting while driving. This year has seen one accident caused by texting and 18 tickets given to text-messaging drivers, said Freddy Williams, spokesman for the Washington State Patrol.

As ubiquitous as texters are on Seattle's streets, no one seems willing to fess up to texting-related injuries. But they do seem to have friends who have suffered such a fate.

"I'll stop for a second at a stoplight to look around and make sure I don't hit anything," said Katie Castro, 24, who was caught texting while walking Wednesday afternoon on Sixth Avenue at Pine Street. "But I text all the time, while I'm walking, driving, at work. I really don't even talk on the phone that much anymore."

Two other pedestrians, Sarah Polachek, 21, and Emily Crawford, 22, both said their friends walked into poles and swerved their cars while texting, but wouldn't admit to having any accidents themselves. In fact, both condemned continuous texters.

"They think they can sense everything around them while texting, but they're oblivious," Crawford said. "For them, texting takes priority over safety."

Polachek took her disapproval a step further.

"I think texting is impersonal and stupid," she said. "It gets on my nerves."

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has no national estimate on how common texting-related injuries are. But among the reports it has received were of a 15-year-old girl who fell off her horse while texting, suffering head and back injuries, and of a 13-year-old girl who received stomach, leg and arm burns after texting her boyfriend while cooking noodles.

Valerie Jarrett, an aide for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, lent the issue some political weight when she fell off a curb in Chicago several weeks ago while typing on her BlackBerry.

"I didn't see the sidewalk and I twisted my ankle," she said. "It was a nice wake-up call for me to be a lot more careful in the future, because I clearly wasn't paying attention and I should have."

Click here for original article.

2008 2D Art Graduating Seniors

Congratulations to all of the graduating seniors in 2D Art!


David Aniol, acrylic, 16" x 20"


Ricardo Balkcom, colored pencil, 16" x 20"


Emily Brush, acrylic, 16" x 20"


Jordan Hildwein, acrylic, 16" x 20"


Dominique Liichow, acrylic, 16" x 20"


Andrew Maslowsky, colored pencil, 12" x 16"


Kellen Miller, acrylic, 16" x 20"


Jeremy Rogers, acrylic with marker, 16" x 20"


London Rose, colored pencil, 16" x 20"


Nick Whateley, graphite pencil, 12" x 16"

It has been a real pleasure to work with these students-- most days, anyway. (Just kidding; they're a great bunch of kids!) I have had many of these students in my class for all four years, and it is amazing to see how they have grown as artists and as individuals.

My sincere best wishes to all of the2008 2D Art graduates!

RJ

Abstract Expressionism

I have not been on this page for a while-- it seemed as if nobody was even looking at it (see previous post). Although nobody has left a comment since then, I note that there have been a fair amount of hits on the page. Thusly, I think that I will post a few pictures.

We basically do not do abstract art in my classes, for a variety of reasons that I am not going to go into at the moment. Some of my students may assume that this is because I do not like abstract art. This is not necessarily true. While I find much of it to be questionable at best, I do actually like some of it.

Here are the two most important abstract painters of the mid-twentieth century, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. These two artists (with a handful of others), living and working in New York, basically defined what most people think of when they hear the term "abstract art".

Jackson Pollock is easily the best-known abstract painter to the public at large. This fact is largely due to the feature article that Life magazine ran on him him in 1949, skyrocketing him to fame. More recently, Pollock was the subject of the biopic "Pollock", starring Ed Harris. This is an excellent film, by the way, I highly recommend it.

(click on images below for a larger view)


Pollock, Male and Female, 1942


Pollock, She-wolf, 1943


Pollock, No. 32, 1950


Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950

Willem de Kooning is less known outside of art circles. Within the art world however, many people feel that he was a better painter than Pollock, and de Kooning has been arguably much more influential to other painters in the last 50-60 years.


de Kooning, The Wave, 1944


de Kooning, Excavation, 1950


de Kooning, Woman V, 1953


de Kooning, Gotham News, 1955

Pollock died tragically behind the wheel in a drunk driving accident in 1956. De Kooning worked through the 1980s, but his work fell off as he suffered increasingly from Alzheimer's disease; he died in 1997, 93 years old.