blogger – nik uzunovski

Artist of the Week: Sally Mann

Posted on 26/05/2013 by nikuzo87 in Creative Practice

Sally Mann (American, b.1951) is best known for her black-and-white photographs, featuring portraiture and landscapes in the southern United States. Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, and attended Hollins College. She began working as a photographer for Washington and Lee University after graduation, and her photographs of the construction of the University’s library were included in her first solo exhibition, held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Mann received great acclaim and critique for her Immediate Family series, in which she photographed her own children, often nude, in ethereal, unsettling works, picturing the everyday activities and games of a child while alluding to darker and more serious themes of loss, sexuality, loneliness, and death.

Mann’s more recent works include photographs of landscapes in the Deep South, which incorporate 19th century methods of developing photographs, and use damaged cameras and lenses, giving her work a scratched, unfinished look that continually references the photographic process. Mann has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and has published several books of her photography. She exhibits her work around the world, in cities such as New York, Berlin, Chicago, Rome, and Tokyo. She currently lives and works in her hometown of Lexington, Virginia.

Fallen Child, 1989. Gelatin silver contact print, 50.8 x 61 cm

Untitled /At Twelve/ Lisa Tab, 1983-1985. Silver gelatine print, 19 x 24 cm.

Images and text: http://www.artnet.com/artists/sally-mann/

Artist of the Week: Annie Leibovitz

Posted on 19/05/2013 by nikuzo87 in Creative Practice

Photographer Annie Leibovitz (American, b.1949) is best known for her engaging portraits—particularly of celebrities—which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Leibovitz took painting classes at the San Francisco Art Institute as an undergraduate, but found herself deeply attracted to photography after taking pictures on a family vacation. She switched her studies to photography, and began working on commission for Rolling Stone while still in school in the early 1970s, when the magazine was in its first years of publication. At age 23, Leibovitz became the chief photographer of the magazine; over the next 10 years, she photographed figures such as Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and a particularly famous photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, just hours before Lennon was killed in 1980.

In 1983, Leibovitz became a photographer for Vanity Fair, and encouraged many other celebrity subjects to choose poses revealing the intimate, playful, and expressive aspects of their personalities; portraits included celebrities in the nude, in stunning gowns, covered in paint, and in tanks of water or baths of milk, often with dramatic lighting.

Her photographs have been published in several books, and have been used in many ad campaigns. Her work was the subject of a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; she was the first woman to receive a solo exhibition at the museum. Leibovitz currently lives and works in New York.

Steve Martin, Beverly Hills, California, 1981. Archival pigment print, 101.6 x 101.6 cm.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Dakota, NY, December 8, 1980, 1996. Off-set lithograph on card stock, 11.2 x 15 cm

Images and text: http://www.artnet.com/artists/annie-leibovitz/

Artist of the week: Horishi Sugimoto

Posted on 05/05/201305/05/2013 by nikuzo87 in Creative Practice

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at Rikkyō University in Tokyo. In 1974, he retrained as an artist and received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, California. Afterwards, Sugimoto settled in New York City.

Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death.

Sugimoto is also deeply influenced by the writings and works of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Dadaist and Surrealist movements as a whole. He has also expressed a great deal of interest in late 20th century modern architecture.

His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures have garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work. Begun in 1978, Sugimoto’s Theatres series involved photographing old American movie palaces and drive-ins with a folding 4×5 camera and tripod, opening his camera shutter and exposing the film for the duration of the entire feature-length movie, the film projector providing the sole lighting.^[4] The luminescent screen in the centre of the composition, the architectural details and the seats of the theatre are the only subjects that register owing to the long exposure of each photograph, while the unique lighting gives the works a surreal look, as a part of Sugimoto’s attempt to revealtime in photography.

Cinerama Dome, Hollywood, 1993, Quad-tone Lithograph, archivally framed (edition of 100), 34.5 x 27.5 inch image
44 x 34 inches framed.

Business Cards

Posted on 02/05/2013 by nikuzo87 in Creative Practice

I just received the business cards as well as some postcards that I designed and ordered from vistaprint.com. Having business cards and other promotional material as an artist is important because its is another form of promotion for your work and your practice, well designed business card can get a person interested in who you are and what you do, even people who may not have been interested in what you do in the past. Postcards act as another form of promotion, by offering a number of them for sale and strategically giving some away you further promote your practice as an artist and give people a taste of what it is that you do. Going through companies such as Vista Print is a cost effective way to get what you need, though if you are so inclined you can always hire a graphic designer to design the cards for you and print them yourself, though the costs can be prohibitively expensive.

D Hooks and Picture Hanging

Posted on 01/05/2013 by nikuzo87 in Creative Practice

Just purchased some D Hooks so that I can hang my framed works and works on canvas a lot easier, the only disappointing thing was the cost for delivery which was almost as much as the hooks themselves (100 pcs), I was disappointed that there was no option for standard international delivery, the only option was first class. However looking at the prices and quantities of hooks from retail outlets, I found that I still had a better bang for my buck by purchasing them off ebay.

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/100-MED-D-Ring-Picture-Hangers-100-SCREWS-triangle-/150770353159

Artist Statement

Posted on 01/05/2013 by nikuzo87 in Creative Practice

Here is my most recent artist statement, it is a brief piece of writing relating to my most recent work and practice.

Painting is a meditative medium, whether you work in the figurative/representational tradition or as an abstract painter, or even cross between the two realms like myself, the act of painting transcends all schools, styles and movements. Over the past year there has been a major transformation in my work and my creative process, I have changed my practice radically, moving away from figurative and representational painting and investigating the potential results abstraction can offer. I have come to understand that the process of abstraction; especially when abstracting from life, is not just what we see, but also what we feel, remember, taste and hear. The act of abstract painting is the translation of these sensations, along with sight, into a visual art context. John Elderfield et al (2011) writes “A representational painting can be composed through abstract manipulation of the medium of painting and also the less familiar one that an abstract painting may be created through acts of representation” My current work is about the appropriation of representational elements and manipulating them into abstract compositions, I am questioning what we interpret as the world around us, experiences, happenings and memories and how these can be represented in an abstracted context.

Bibliography

Eldefield, J et al 2011, de Kooning a retrospective, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Artist of the Week: Vik Muniz

Posted on 27/04/201327/04/2013 by nikuzo87 in Artist of the week

Vik Muniz (Brazilian, 1961) (Text and images from http://www.artnet.com/artists/vik-muniz/)

Vik Muniz is a Contemporary visual artist who was born Vicente José de Oliveira Muniz (Brazilian, b.1961) in São Paulo, Brazil. Muniz began to discover art in the books he borrowed from his high school library. After studying advertising at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado de São Paulo, he moved to Brooklyn, NY, with his family in 1983. The artist began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980s, but he gradually became more interested in drawing and photography.

In 1988, Muniz explored the memory, perception, and images represented in arts and communication. He created The Best of Life, the series of drawings in which he reproduced from his memory some of the famous photographs he saw in the magazine Life. He then photographed his drawings to give more reality to his memories. In the mid-1990s, in order to create witty, bold, and often deceiving images based on photojournalism and art history, Muniz began to incorporate unusual and everyday materials into his photographic process. These materials included dust, diamonds, sugar, dry pigment, ketchup, caviar, and wire. In 1997, Muniz became well-known for his Pictures of chocolate series, in which he used chocolate syrup to create his works. The artist borrowed from popular culture and Old Masters artists such as Georges Seurat and Vincent Van Gogh to make his works more familiar. He called this approach the “worst possible illusion.”

In 1998, he participated in the 24th International Biennale in São Paulo, and in 2001, he represented Brazil at the 49th Biennale in Venice, Italy. In 2006, Muniz created the series Pictures of Junk. In 2010, the documentary Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker, followed Muniz for three years. During this time, the artist created art with recyclables at Jardim Gramacho, a landfill which serves the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. Muniz collaborated with the people employed to pick out recyclable material from garbage and created large-scale mosaic portraits; these works were sold at art auctions in London and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo. The artist has had his work exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the KAsama Nichido Museum of Art in Japan, among many other prestigious institutions. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Maria Callas from Pictures of Diamonds, 2004, Chromogenic print (edition of 10), 101.6 x 76.2 cm.

The Flowers in the Blue and White Vase After Chardin, 2005, Chromogenic print (edition of 6), 101.6 x 129.5 cm.

Artist of the week: Alexander Calder

Posted on 19/04/201319/04/2013 by nikuzo87 in Creative Practice

On my artists page on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nik-Uzunovski-Artist/225201424159742 I started a series where I would find an artist whose work I enjoyed, or has inspired me or has just been a general interest to me and I have shared the artist and some examples of their work on my artists page, usually by way of sharing a link to a page like artnet.com

I have recently decided to move this series over to my blog and will do my best to make it the best series possible, rather than just copying and pasting a link. So this will be the first official artist of the week feature on my blog.

This week’s artist is Alexander Calder: (Text and images from www.artnet.com)

Alexander Calder (American, 1898–1976) is one of the most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century. Born in Pennsylvania, Calder was interested in creating movable objects from a young age, and graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, in 1919, with an engineering degree. He later decided to pursue a career as an artist, and moved to New York City to study painting at the Art Students League. While in New York City, he worked for the National Police Gazette and was sent on assignment to sketch circuses, a festive motif that would become a famous and enduring subject in his work. Upon moving to Paris in 1926, Calder began creating large-scale mechanical installations of intricate circus scenes, featuring wire sculptures with moving parts that he would operate over a two-hour performance session. Building off of his Cirque Calder, he began sculpting portraits and figures out of wire, and received critical attention exhibiting these works in subsequent gallery shows in New York City, Paris, and Berlin.He befriended several important Abstract artists in Paris at this time, including Joan Miró (Spanish, 1896-1983) and Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944), and was invited to join the group Abstraction-Création in 1931. Inspired by the work of his fellow artists, he incorporated Abstract Kinetic elements into his sculptures, creating the Mobiles he is best known for today, in addition to his static works, Stabiles. Calder constructed his unique sculptures out of wire, metal, and wood, combining Abstract and Surrealist forms with biomorphic imagery in a distinctive style. His structures were carefully weighted and balanced, remaining sensitive to the movement of the wind or the motions of the viewer. Internationally celebrated for his wholly unique, whimsical pieces, Calder produced a wide-ranging body of work during his lifetime, including sculptures, drawings, paintings, jewelry, and set designs. He has had several retrospectives, and, among many other awards, was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Bicentennial Artist Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art, from New York City, in 1976. He died that same year, at 78 years old

Coral and Shells, 1970. Colour Lithograph, 69.7 x 99.5 cm.

La memoire elementare (edition 48/100), 1978. Lithograph, 51.4 x 72.1 cm.

Artists Page on Facebook

Posted on 24/07/201215/08/2012 by nikuzo87 in Creative Practice

This being one of my very first posts on this page I would like to take this opportunity to share one of my other social media outlets. My Facebook page has been my sole blog and website where I have been sharing elements of my own practice and also sharing sources and materials that have helped me in my own practice or have been of general interest to me. Even though I have created this page, I will not delete my Facebook page, and I would appreciate it if every follower on WordPress would visit the link and like my page. Also there is a link to my page in the sidebar above, as well as a link to my Twitter account.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nik-Uzunovski-Artist/225201424159742