BEAUTY: Mixed Media--Glen Martin Taylor

These wonderfully whimsical recycled/upcycled art pieces by painter-artist Glen Martin Taylor speak to mental health issues and challenges...with a leap toward resiliency.

It is easy to see that the artist has a gentle, thoughtful soul from the work but his current project from his website offers even more proof:
"Current Project: I am currently creating works with broken pottery recovered from the destroyed homes and schools of Ukraine for a traveling exhibition (2024-2026) that will begin in the USA and then Europe, ending in Kiev, Ukraine. The purpose of the project involves awareness, fundraising for relief, and international engagement about the human tragedy of the Ukrainian War."

To purchase one of his pieces, visit his website!
https://glenmartintaylor.com/

BEAUTY: Porcelain--Jacqueline Tse

Sculptor Jacqueline Tse created her Death By Sugar series in unglazed porcelain without any color because, as she says, "I find color very visually addictive, especially colors on smart phone screens. In the current fast pace digital world where we are constantly bombarded with messages of consumption throughout social media, I wanted to pull away from that distraction so the viewer can be present and focus on the details and form. Hiding behind the enchanting sugar surface are subliminal messages against the over indulgent contemporary society, and how I fell victim to this disease. To bring awareness that our desire for consumption is an escape from ourselves and inner truths. These works are fueled by my personal love-hate relationship with sugar and part memento mori. It is an ode to my obsessive and indulgent nature, childhood nostalgia, love of pastry arts, frustration, and ultimately, acceptance of my addiction to sugar."

https://www.jactse.studio/

BEAUTY: Ceramics For Easter--Juliette Clovis

French artist Juliette Clovis created lovely porcelain eggs at La Manufacture La Seynie, the oldest Limoges porcelain manufacturer in France.

https://www.julietteclovis.com/

BEAUTY: Ceramics--Niharika Hukku

Just look at these gorgeous ceramic pieces by Australian artist and ceramicist Niharika Hukku. She works in watercolor and translates that medium to glazed pieces portraying clouds, the moon, landscapes, and birds, fish, and natural objects...

http://www.niharikahukku.com/

BEAUTY: Installation--Darren Waterston

Currently on display at the Smithsonian Institute's Freer and Sackler Museums of Asian Art in Washington D.C. is Darren Waterston's installation Filthy Lucre.

The museum's website says:
"Filthy Lucre, an immersive installation by painter Darren Waterston, reimagines James McNeill Whistler’s famed Peacock Room—an icon of American art—as a decadent ruin collapsing under the weight of its own creative excess. Forging a link between inventive and destructive forces, Filthy Lucre forms the centerpiece of an unprecedented exhibition that highlights the complicated tensions between art and money, ego and patronage, and acts of creative expression in the nineteenth century and today. "

Waterston's own website says:
"Whistler’s original, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (1876), was the dining room of the London home of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland. It was designed to showcase Leyland’s collection of Asian ceramics, with Whistler’s painting La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863-64) featured over the mantle. Asked to consult on the color scheme for the room, Whistler took bold — if not egregious — liberties while Leyland and his architect were away and in a fit of enthusiasm painted the entire room — executing his now famous peacocks over the expensive Italian leather wall panels. The collector sued the artist for the large sum of money Whistler charged to Leyland’s account, and Whistler, in response, painted an unflattering caricature of his patron titled The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor). Conflating the words frilly and filthy, Whistler made a jab at Leyland’s own ‘peacocking’ as well as his miserliness."

http://darrenwaterston.com/

Here are views of the original Peacock Room by Whistler. It is now in permanent residence at the Smithsonian Institute's Freer and Sackler Museums. See it alongside Waterston's Filthy Lucre through January 2, 2017!

http://www.asia.si.edu/

BEAUTY: Sculpture--Kate MacDowell

Internationally renowned sculptor Kate MacDowell says she is interested in the conflict between the romantic ideal of union with the natural world and our contemporary impact on the environment. Her mutant creations eerily combine human and animal or human and plant in a way that transcends both.

MacDowell says, "These pieces are in part responses to environmental stressors including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops. They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones. In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world. In others, animals take on anthropomorphic qualities when they are given safety equipment to attempt to protect them from man-made environmental threats. In each case the union between man and nature is shown to be one of friction and discomfort with the disturbing implication that we too are vulnerable to being victimized by our destructive practices.

I hand sculpt each piece out of porcelain...It highlights both the impermanence and fragility of natural forms in a dying ecosystem, while paradoxically, being a material that can last for thousands of years and is historically associated with high status and value. I see each piece as a captured and preserved specimen, a painstaking record of endangered natural forms and a commentary on our own culpability."

Top to bottom: Assisted Living 2; Assisted Living; Badgered; Casualty; God of Change; Panhandlers; Predator; Predator detail; Strange Fruit

http://katemacdowell.com/