2 days ago I posted about a piece of art that I had commissioned for Shane for our 6th wedding anniversary. What I didn’t know was that Shane had also secretly commissioned another brilliant local South African artist, Emily Jane Long to create a piece of art for me as a gift. It was so awesome when we both pulled out these 2 flat wrapped gifts and almost immediately we both realised what they were.
The other day I went to an art exhibition at the Turbine Hall in town. I saw some really nice pieces of art there and some of them I would of really liked to have taken home with me, especially this one painting of a swimming pool by an artist named Swain Hoogervorst. I really like his work, it reminds me of being a kid and coming home after school for a swim and a white bread and polony sandwich.
Russian-born Alex Kanevsky is a figurative painter who creates such beautiful pieces out of almost moving paintbrush strokes. He explains his technique best in these few lines –
-People, whom I paint, are never still. They want to move, they are built for motion. It is actually painful for models to be still longer than 20 minutes. I like them, I find them endlessly fascinating, how they are built, the way they grow and shrink over time, how they move, act, express their emotions, etc. So I want to paint them the way they are, and to me they are defined by their motion. A brick is defined by its shape and people are defined by their motion.
These paintings are by Japanese artist Naomi Okubo, I really like how she layers each one with patterns and textures, they create a sensory overload, but in such a good way. It’s like she’s made up these super colourful worlds that her subjects get lost in, literally.
This is the work of Christer Karlstad, he studied at the the Norwegian National School of Fine Arts and Glasgow School Of Arts. His work looks like they could be the pages that make up an old-school storybook of tales that have not so happy endings.
Ryan McGennisken is a self taught, multi-disciplinary artist working across a range of mediums. I really like his ink on paper series.
– “My new work is an ongoing investigation of what it means to be human. What it means to be conscious in this weird existence; what it means to be alive and if there’s any great purpose for it all. I struggle to see humans as being anything but human. I don’t see societal structure, laws, classes, money, race, sexual preferences or genders etc, etc. When a human is stripped back bare, all there is is skin, blood, bone and the mystery of consciousness.”