Ben Ashton challenges us to look at what we are seeing and to question it by giving us a different perspective on a familiar world. His is one of the most exciting and original artistic visions of recent years: a Ben Ashton work is immediately recognisable for its finesse and exquisite skill, but also for the simple fact that it is totally different from anything else on the contemporary art scene.
” The work’s ultimate goal is to increase the capacity for empathy within the viewer. In order to do so, the work must illuminate certain aspects of the human experience that are consistent to all people. These aspects that form the emotional center of the work are uncertainty, vulnerability, and isolation. The darkness and pain associated with these aspects of the human experience can be difficult to recognize and should not be introduced to the viewer in a blunt manner. These emotions must be addressed through a circuitous series of aesthetic and conceptual facades. These facades are formed by employing the mechanisms of beauty, humor, and decadent surfaces that attract and focus the viewer’s attention and then serve as conduits to the darker emotional truths at the core of the work. Producing art that makes one confront the negative aspects of the human experience may seem at first a bleak task but it is done in the name of empowerment. The only way we can overcome these difficult elements of the human experience is to know them, embrace them, and connect with others through them.” – Anthony Sonnenberg
Princess M (Princess Mia) is a self taught, freelance artist and illustrator based in California. She started creating artwork at a young age and used her work as a form of self expression to better explain how she was feeling. She soon carried the concept of understanding someone through art as she started to expand her art career further. The mediums she works with are watercolor paint, and black illustration pen ink, while working with different surfaces such as paper, canvas and foam board. Her work is influence by her emotions and how she is feeling as well as her surroundings and the people around. Her goal for her art is to create a visual and tangible feeling in the form of a human or create to things people can’t explain in words. To give someone a chance to relate to an image emotionally without any words being said.
Kimberly Cook is currently an instructor in Beginning and Advanced ceramics at Foothill College, Los ALtos Hills, CA. She has been working as an artist, using clay as the primary medium of expression, for ten years. She attended Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas, where she studied Liberal Arts, and in 2008, she completed her MFA in Spatial Art at San Jose State University. Cook also works in textiles, photography, and film, and has shown her work both nationally and internationally. She has received multiple scholarships for her work, including the Elizabeth Heil Scholarship, the Sandra Johnstone Memorial Scholarship, the John French Scholarship, and a California State Grant for assistance in lifecast/moldmaking. Kimberly also received a full graduate scholarship from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and was accepted into five additional MFA programs, including San Jose State University, where she decided to pursue her MFA in Spatial Arts.
I stumbled upon Greek artist Christina Papagianni‘s DeviantArt page, and I was immediately impressed with her watercolor work.
Louis Fortier lives in Montréal. He received his BFA from Université Laval in Québec and he completed his MFA in 1994 at Université du Québec à Montréal. He has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions throughout Québec, namely at Galerie B-312, Plein Sud, Clark, Axenéo7, la chambre blanche and l’Œil de Poisson. In 2007 he was in the exhibition La tête au ventre curated by Mathieu Beauséjour presented at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, as well as Hot Wax at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, St.John’s, NL (curated by Andria Hickey). In 2008/2009 he was featured in It happened in your neighbourhoud: Contemporary Art in Québec, curated by Nathalie de Blois at the Musée du Québec.
‘ Seungchun Lim (b. 1973, Korea) creates figurative sculptures that appear as psychological portraits. Sensitively rendered, each work includes fantastic elements, such as an extra eye, or a cluster of houses atop a head, or oddness of scale, that take the viewer beyond the literal into the subject’s state of mind.’
Carved Ak-47 Money Clip by Mathmatiks, an independent creative design studio that develops jewelry, art, and interior multimedia design for today’s savvy urban consumer market.
Artist Andy Hixon (blogged) updates his website with some fresh illustrations. Check it out guys. Worth a look.
