Art Hound

Swiss artist Klodin Erb’s work is dark, playful and disjointed. Her paintings catch and hold the eye with their mix of refinement (including references to classical paintings) and crude ugliness.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

I found Patricia Hagen’s stylized landscapes, seascapes actually, in one of my favorite art publications, New American Paintings issue #127. Quite simply I like the artist’s crude, dark outlines and thick wavy lines of sky, water and land. There is an innocence in these works – as if seeing the world through the eyes of a child who has reduced a complicated landscape into a simple, understandable lexicon. Hagen has an MFA from California College of the Arts and resides in Seattle.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Marc Etherington is a self-taught artist based in Sydney I came across on Instagram. One thing I love about self-taught art is the honesty, stripped of pretense and Marc’s work definitely fits in that category. It doesn’t sugarcoat the human condition – the petty battles we wage, the hopeless way we see ourselves at the center of everything.

Etherington references iconic American pop culture in his paintings including scenes from The Big Lebowski, Fargo and No Country For Old Men.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

..

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

..

.

.

.

…

.

.

..

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Pot Plant was a collaborative exhibition of ceramic vessels and floral arrangements that ran earlier this fall during London Design Week 2016. The show was put together by The Garden Edit and featured beautiful stoneware vases by Matthias Kaiser and Alana Wilson with floral arrangements by The Garden Edit and Fjura. Some of Matthias Kaiser’s vases are available here.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Images via The Garden Edit, Alana Wilson Studio, Mattias Jose Kaiser, Fjura and Jessica Wang

Today is the release of my first book Ceramics: Contemporary Artists Working in Clay which can now be purchased online. This was easily the biggest project I’ve worked on, certainly the longest and required a lot more stamina than blogging! I wrote this book to show the public what I was seeing online: artists bringing incredible creativity, inventiveness and liveliness to ceramics. I saw my role as curator and sought to include a diverse collection of artwork being made today. The book is by no means a survey of contemporary ceramics but more of a snapshot of an evolving, growing, reinvigorated art form.

.

.

I’d like to thank all of the artists whose work is included in this book. I’d also like to thank Danielle Krysa for supporting this project and writing the forward. And I’d like to thank Chronicle Books for picking up the book and for their designer who did a knock-out job designing the book and it’s incredible cover with its cut-outs.

Cara Nahaul was born and resides in London. She received her MFA from Parsons The New School For Design in 2014 and was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship. She is exhibiting her work with Christine Park Gallery and was represented by them at START art fair this past weekend.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.