Art Hound, a guide to living with art Art Hound

on the hunt for good art

Artist Crush: Valerie Belmokhtar

November 23rd, 2010 · 2 Comments

Parisian artist, Valerie Belmokhtar reached out to share her work, and I am totally enamored with her exquisite drawings and etchings. The obsessive repetitions and fading are wonderful foils for the psychological fragility of the artist’s subjects, who include Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul. These women appear to be having out-of-body experiences, less rooted in reality than they are floating through a sea of emotion.

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Artist Cheat-Sheet: Frida Kahlo

June 22nd, 2010 · 6 Comments

About the Artist Cheat-Sheet Series: Perhaps you’ve lamented the fact that your love of Picasso won’t help you in the pursuit of living with art, but with a bit of guidance you can start to develop your taste on current art based on your preferences of “famous” art.

In this series I match major artists of the 19th or 20th century with current independent artists who share the artist’s style, subject, tone, etc. You’ll no longer have the excuse of not knowing any current, affordable artists you like!

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter from the first half of the 20th century who I consider a feminist artist. Her work is highly personal, exploring the often female subjects of pain and immobility (from a devastating streetcar accident at age 16), love, loss, infertility and heartbreak. Frida was a communist and was highly involved in politics during her lifetime (she even notoriously had an affair with political refuge, Leon Trotsky). Her life was full of drama, passion and physical and psychological pain, and these themes underscore much of her work as an artist.

Current artists whose work is reminiscent of Kahlo’s…

Megan Campbell

Common themes: nature, primitivism, love, ceremony.

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Elsa Mora

Common themes: women, symbolism (heart, snakes), body parts as living entities.

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Caitlin Keegan

Common themes: traditional women’s work, gender roles.

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.Jennifer Parks

Common themes: vulnerability, adornment, masks, death.

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Lily Piri

Common themes: vulnerability, our relationship with personal possessions.

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Olaf Hajek

Common themes: nature, the exotic, primitivism, sadness.

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Julia Selin

Common themes: motherhood, life, the human body.

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Rachel Bone

Common themes: Women’s complicated relationships with each other, adornment (patterns).

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Caitlin Quiet

Common themes: love, heartbreak, femininity, memories.

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Amy Kligman

Common themes: dreams, the ornamental/symbolic (flowers, cake).

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Iviva Olenick

Common themes: traditional women’s work, gender roles, female suffering.

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Pia Bramley

Common themes: the female body, everyday life.

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Explore previous Artist Cheat-Sheets:

Keith Haring

Wassily Kandinsky

Roy Lichtenstein

Gustav Klimt

Georgia O’Keeffe

The Death of an Icon: Louise Bourgeois

June 1st, 2010 · 5 Comments

Louise Bourgeois was a bullshit-dispelling, feminist visionary who died yesterday at the age of 98. Bourgeois’s brilliance lay in her way of leading people to simple truths derived from complex ideas and questions. “A work of art doesn’t have to be explained. If you say, What does this mean? Well, if you do not have any feeling about this I can not explain it to you. If it does not touch you I have failed.” Louise Bourgeois, Art 21

(Source: New York Times)

I quickly became enamored with Bourgeois after seeing her multi-media sculpture, Cell (Hands and Mirror) at Boston’s ICA. The piece really grabbed me, particularly the way the hands are clasped in anxiety, desperation or perhaps hope and then projected through the makeup mirror.

My love for Bourgeois was sealed with her appearance in this episode of PBS’s Art 21 (starts at 40:20). She is, without a doubt, the stereotypical French grandmother (we even meet her grandson in the segment!): stern, fiery, intimidating but loving at heart. Not to be underestimated, this very old, diminutive French woman is miles ahead of us, discussing her revolutionary and brilliant observations on humanity and interrelationships without pretense and with utter humility.

Other awesome quotes from her appearance on Art 21:

(On her Welcoming Hands) “They are my hands (cast from plaster)… This is a real document… It shows how much I care about the whole thing. It shows that I match the emotion that is expressed. It’s true. It is an emotion that has been lived and is real.” Bourgeois, Art 21

Bourgeois is often quoted as saying “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” On the notion that artists always remain children she says “It might be true that the artist, there is something in them that either refuses or is unable to grow up. This is possible.” Bourgeois, Art 21

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Artist of the day: Amanda Wachob

October 7th, 2009 · 4 Comments

Today’s artist is Amanda Wachob, whose large-scale oil paintings explore gender roles and racial tension using iconography from the 50s and 60s.

In the company of Wachob, I would be remiss in not referencing Anne Taintor, who’s built a big business of cheeky postcards and accessories of mid-century domestic scenes and biting captions (below).

anne_taintor_ididntwantareallifeanyway anne_taintor_her jackass

Both Wachob and Taintor’s work explore the restricted role women led during the last century, but while Taintor’s illustrations find humor in these cultural relics from a bygone era, Wachob explores the issue in much more depth. Her work elicits anger and confusion from the viewer and does so while retaining a strong aesthetic appeal and pushing boundaries stylistically.  Her work is at times figurative, abstract and highly- graphic.

For those who prefer to wear their art, Wachob has an equally impressive career as a tattoo artist, with an uncanny ability to translate her art into this alternative medium.