BEAUTY: Painting--Fran Shalom

The compelling work of Fran Shalom is...well, compelling me. I love how the shapes and colors engage me. They are so primal and primary yet they seem to contain so much. She alludes to that Zen-like feeling in her Artist Statement below:

"I am a modernist abstract painter with a pop sensibility and a penchant for improvisation.

My work balances the formal with the playful, paring down shapes and ideas into their most basic forms. To counter the chaos of everyday life, I instinctively gravitate towards elemental shapes, with defined edges resulting in an appearance of control and order (however illusionary it may be).

The shapes reference the human body but are open to interpretation. Animated by bright, cartoony colors and figure/ground relationships, I think of the paintings as ambiguous characters who inhabit my studio keeping me company and often engaging in silent conversation.

I love ambiguity and have learned to be comfortable with not knowing. In Zen there is a wonderful saying: Not knowing is most intimate.”

It suggests approaching something with open-minded and whole-hearted curiosity. I try to begin my paintings in this way, with a willingness to be present with uncertainty, and with the confidence that the process will result in work that both satisfies and inspires.

– Fran Shalom, 2024"

Top to bottom: Backbone; Bon Vivant; Holding On; Incognito; Lighten Up; Shoot the Breeze; four untitled pieces; Witness

https://www.franshalom.com/

BEAUTY: Sculpture--Kevin Francis Gray

I last posted about the marvelous work of sculptor Kevin Francis Gray a dozen years ago and his work since then has become amazingly abstract and gestural. After mastering figures draped in silky, diaphanous material (seen here), he is now taking the texture and silhouette of raw clay, especially the way it moves, and rendering those figures in marble. His Picasso-esque Family Series and Gestural Series stands out.

https://www.kevinfrancisgray.com/

BEAUTY: Painting--BENKA

I just discovered the work of  BENKA. His artist statement on his site explains it all:

BENKA opposes mankind´s dangerous game of underestimating the consequences of AI. Whether it is the digitization of our social relations through the invasion of smartphone screens, the progressive introduction of humanoids and cyber-surveillance, our contemporary society is facing a crazy mutation.

His artistic approach aims to expose the question of the robotization of our world. If we are still very far from a war against robots as seen in the series of Terminator, our time calls in his opinion to the questioning of our relationship to artificial intelligence. If A.I. has a considerable advantage in fields such as medicine or astronomy, on the other hand, it presents many drawbacks and raises both questions and concerns.

These numbers and letters in his paintings are captchas.

A captcha is a program that protects websites from bots by generating tests that humans can perform unlike malicious computer programs (robots). The captcha is used to verify, for example, that you are a human when connecting to an interface (login) or to avoid "SPAM" on your mailboxes for contact forms on your website.

These captchas are interpreted by BENKA and transformed into a symbol of his artistic struggle.

https://www.instagram.com/benka.1

BEAUTY: Painting--Piet Raemdonck

I am in love with the work of Piet Raemdonck. Love his color use, love his composition and shapes, love the confident painterly execution. They seem like abstracts but many of them have some depth and are deconstructed representations of actual interior and exterior spaces...

Top to bottom: Binnenbuiten; Breekwerk; Dazzle City; House By The Sea; Little Things and Nothings; Moving About; On Further Lane; Part Of A Party; Perfect Day; Project; Uit de Schaduw; Veldwerk

https://www.pietraemdonck.com/

Even More Collage...2024

Regular readers may recall that during the pandemic, I spent some of my downtime creating a lot of new art work including a series of collages previously seen here, here, here, and here. I was recently inspired to revisit this technique but this time with a few different goals. I wanted to work with texture, color, and shape alone, and not try to create anything representational like my prior works. I wanted to leave white space around each composition. I wanted to assemble each composition very, very quickly, using instinct, without overthinking or fussing too much with placement--since I had all the pieces pre-cut, I spent about an average of a minute or so on each one, just grabbing what seemed right. Even the titles came quickly, in just a few seconds--I chose simple, one-word titles and not the narrative titles I used in previous collage pieces. Goals met! I found it a fun way to kickstart creativity.

Top to bottom: Union; Ticket; Farm; Mycelium; Kingdom; Tectonic