Tipping the Scale

My art is about humanity and it's selfish tendencies. People put themselves first, it's a way of survival. This is especially evident is such an individualized culture as this. Think about skin and how every little piece is a cell that combines to create a whole. Now apply that to behavior. Every action, thought, decision, event; they all create who we are. An obvious metaphor, but I still enjoy how grotesque skin appears close up. I feel the same can be felt about humanity at it's most naked and desperate moments.

New years is about resolutions. And while most are broken, the effort and intent is still valuable. Next time, before you act, think about how your actions are affecting other people. If you say you're going to do something and other people are depending on you, it is not okay to flake for reasons other than emergencies. If you decide you're going to drive somewhere, and a person omits buying a ticket so they can catch a ride with you. You can't flake on them and force them to buy an overpriced train ticket that is not in how they budgeted their money for the next month. It is not okay. Not okay. Sorry, that was a blatant rant, but a relevant example of my art.

People my age are ridiculous. But I know older adults aren't anymore reasonable. This new years eve I have a bitter taste in my mouth when thinking about humanity and trust and reliance. That hope that I talk about in my artwork is being suffocated by frustration. I guess every once in a while you have to be emotive instead of rational.

I think we all can relate at times. My artwork is about harnessing that rationality. That struggle to hold onto it. That moment where, despite all reason and calm thought, you are still let down and making excuses for others is pointless. I think I know what my next project is going to be.

This new year, try and be a good person.

Paper Cuts are the Worst

I think scribbles are beautiful. It's the thousand little lines trying to capture the perfect one.

Tag, you're it!

I wish I saw more of these in my life. They're pretty fun.

Bought Frames Today!

My most recent book. And my most current artist statement. They're starting to be cohesive, to me at least. The book has two sentences repeated through the whole thing. "I'm trying to be a good person. I'm sure they're good people." It's about the process of reassurance I go through when struggling not to be a judgmental person. Bittersweet.

Humanity is a collection of relationships and interactions that invoke awe as well as disgust. It is beautiful, resilient and noble, while being selfish, unsightly, and weak. The existence of these contradictory qualities makes human nature a concept to be cherished and ridiculed. It is a journey of transient understanding through the act of living and reflection.

All my life I have struggled with the innate cruelty that seems to plague humans. I have tried to erase this idea and reassure myself that people are good, just merely misguided. I have done my best to withhold judgment, and live and let live. However, my obsessive quest to reaffirm a hopeful perspective has become a life long struggle.

My art is inspired by this internal battle to appreciate and believe in the beauty of humanity. It is full of doubts, struggles, and loss, but mostly it is full of hope. The imagery in my art is familiar but often unknown. I use abstract figurative forms to cultivate a nostalgic confusion. In addition, I use text to show the compulsive process of reaffirmation. I have found a lot of peace in accepting that I will never understand humanities conflicted nature. Understanding everything is not vital to my happiness, however watching, describing and exploring, is important in my life and in my art.

Visit my Website.

Visit my Website!!

http://courtneyvoss.weebly.com/

I don't know if anyone would describe website design as a strength of mine, but I'm proud of it. Simple and functional. C'est suffit, n'est pas?

Peter Callesen

Website

Peter Callesen is a Danish Artist who takes a very relatable everyday object, an A4 size piece of paper and turns it into art. Once again, his work is playful, similar to Toles work. He is able to create something out of a blank piece of paper. His work is beautiful because it combines a very simple idea with a meticulous and fragile process.

Another thing I like about his work is his interaction with the frame. Often he uses box frames and pieces of paper sit smartly on the bottom of the frame. This makes the presentation part of the piece.

David Linneweh

Website

Linnewehs work explores how humans gain meaning in their lives from the environment around them. He claims to question the idealism in American landscape my constructing and deconstructing landscapes through prints and paintings. People define themselves by the environment they choose, but cities decay over time and the pride behind them lives on.

I like Linneweh's work because of his use of texture and solid blocks of color. His work, although architecture in form and content, is not at all exact or measured. This leaves his landscapes appearing chaotic and unbalanced. I really like this because it evokes feeling. When looking at some of his work, you see a decaying cityscape. This aged look makes the content seem even more real.

Wassily Kandinsky

website

Kandinsky has been one of my favorite artists since highschool. His work explores the idea of automatic painting, the subconscious and improvisation. I think exploring the automatic and unprovoked imagery produced by humans is absolutely fascinating from a psychological perspective. His work came around the same time Freud was exploring the subconscious.

Kandinsky uses lots of color, straight edges and subtle shading. These non figurative combinations of shapes, texture and color lead the eye around the canvas. Every time you look at his work, there is something new to look at. They're just absolutely awesome to look at.

Kate Long Stevenson

website

I really like abstract painting purely for the aesthetic enjoyment of it. This is what I see in Stevenson's work. The ability to combiined color and form in an abstract meaningful way has always interested me. With Stevenson's work she creates the appearance of light behaving in an environment. Her yellows and whites bounce of other colors to create a world of movement. Stevenson's biggest influence in her work is music. She uses music to inspire her and create different rhythms and tempos in her work. This is very similar to the work of Kandinsky, one of my favorite artists.

Nicholas Conbere

Website

The line in Nickolas Conbere's artist statement that really stood out to me was "fractured connections between nature and culture." This juxtaposition between the natural environment and the modern world is really interesting to me. His method of layering with drawing and printmaking also really appeals to me. His work is full of small meticulous details but he maintains a simple color palette. In the piece above I especially like his use of light and dark yellow to create a faint image.

The line work in his images is really strong. This is something that I would like to work on in my own works.

Tom Toles

website

Sometime in high school I become obsessed with scrap booking political cartoons. I would read the paper every day, and cut the satirical clippings out. I did this for nearly two years and created a little personal political history book of my own that I still have and look back on for amusement. Although I have less time, and don't have regular access to a free printer, political cartoons are still an almost daily ritual with me.

If you were too look in my scrap book, you would notice that Tom Toles is a dominant cartoonist in my collection. If you look next to my scrap book on the shelf, you would see that I have purchased a book of his best editorial cartoons for the past several years. He is an American Political Cartoonist from Buffalo who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

There is something really important in making people laugh in art. Art can often be a depressing and too serious. Tole takes our culture and instead of highlighting the atrocities of the modern world, he makes fun of it. He is able to make people laugh while critiquing the human condition. He uses dry humor, sarcasm, and wit to create images that people quickly develop a relationship to. His subject matter is completely serious, but in illustrating that seriousness in a simplistic manner he helps people understand the hilarity of politics. I read the editorial cartoons in the New York Times everyday and I consistently find Tole's work to be the most tasteful and humorous. His cartoons are very simplified and usually there is a doodle in the bottom right that is a self portrait of himself commenting on the panel. He successfully imparts an opinion on the viewer, and somehow manages to do it in a simple and understandable way.

Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford have a very annoying flash website. I first saw his work in the Boston ICA. He is in American artist from Los Angeles. He works in a combination of paint and collage that I have never seen before. He layers paper on and then rips it away, creating a speckled grid like pattern that is reminiscent of a city map. I like the way he combines all colors until the appear to balance each other out and become dull. His work is strategically messy and very tactile in person.

Gretchen Scharnagl

Gretchen Scharnagl

Ephemeral Mapping

Gretchen Scharnagl is an artist and art professor in Florida who explains her work as "the resemblance of patterns (and forms) of human behavior and environmental phenomena creating metaphor."

Her work has environmentalist quality. A lot of her imagery pertains nature, decay, organic patterns, and meticulous detail. Her images are beautiful and grotesque at the same time. This is a quality that I am sort of trying to incorporate my senior thesis work. Her ability to render images with such detail makes them beautiful, but all her subject matter is bittersweet. It is contemplative for the viewer. I really like this about the work because it forces the audience to really appreciate the content. Her work is not just a pretty image of nature, but a narrative about the ephemeral journey of real life.

Dorothea Tanning

Plus fort que moi (Beyond Me)

Amis ou ennemis (Friends or enemies)A la derive (Adrift)

Poppies

Dorothea Tanning in an American artist from Illinois who was heavily influenced by the surrealist and dada movement. She is the wife of the artist Marx Ernst. She is currently living in New York. She has been making work her whole adult life which spans a lengthy 7 decades or more.

Tanning's work reminds me of many abstract expressionists that I like. She uses distinct forms in her work, but then slowly abstracts them so that they become aesthetic figures that evoke emotion instead of a subject matter. Her work has a lot of movement in the visible brushstrokes and very few solid lines. Also, she uses a lot of white mixed into her color. All her colorful forms are cloudy and washed out.

I really admire her painting style. Her wispy forms create a strong atmospheric quality. Her ability to use forms as a very the very first inspirational part of her work is something that I like to thing I include in my own painting.

Ranjani Shetter

Just a Bit More

Just a Bit More

Sun Sneezers Blow Light Bubbles

I found Ranjani Shetter in an article in the New York Times and promptly googled her. What I found was absolutely stunning installations. Shetter was born and still works in her home country of India. Her craft is very labor intensive, recalling the eastern culture she grew up in.

Her work, reminiscent of Tara Donovon, is repetitive organic forms that interact with the space in which they exist. She uses a combination of man made and natural materials and her work is both very logical and patterned as well as chaotic and random. The materials are often found in junk yards and reworked and recycled into another life. The work is made up of many small and humble pieces that create a whole that is magnificent and strong.

Her use of junkyard materials illustrates the multiple lives that possessions have before they are destroyed. Old cars are passed from owner to owner and then scrapped for pieces and left to rust. She pushes the utility of these materials even further by granting them one last purpose.

These installations also make the invisible atmosphere surrounding them very relevant. The circular sculpture in the last picture might be hollow, but in labeling them bubbles Shetter makes the air surrounding the sculpture relevant and called it to attention.

Simply put, her sculptures are beautiful. The piece can be appreciated for the beauty of the final form, the small delicate details close up, and the labor process which created it. They make a world of their own and invite the viewer to be part of it.