Art Hound

Shawn Huckins is a New England artist with chops (not too many people could pull off the hyper-realist style of Ingres et al). His historical portraits are currently featured in 1708 Gallery’s juried biennial FEED2011.

“The American Revolution was conceived through an exchange of a few well-formed ideas communicated in person and by handwritten letters. Imagine what George & Co. could have done with the Internet.” – Huckins

[Rolling On The Floor Laughing]

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[My Eyes Glaze Over]

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[Like Duh Obviously, It’s A Complete Waste Of Time]

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[Talk Dirty To Me]

Lenore Thomas is an artist and assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is represented by Kathryn Markel. Her mixed media pieces are small, ranging from 7 x 7” to 15 x 15″, but pack an intense visual punch that belies their subdued palette. Thomas conjures abstracted but vaguely familiar scenes, an aesthete’s fantasy of a world that has subsumed pop culture’s visual lexicon into its core. In this way it parallels the work of Takashi Murakami (below).

Lenore Thomas’ recent work is mixed media that includes a variety of digital and traditional print processes as well as painting and drawing. Her current work is a melding of observed reality with the imaginary.  In a desire to escape the truth of the everyday world, she creates fantastical, abstract environments via the realm of video games, pop culture, television, and contemporary design. – Kathryn Markel

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Paintings by T.L. Solien who was born in Fargo, North Dakota and currently lives and teaches in Madison, Wisconsin.

Mixing abstraction, appropriated cartoons, and illustrations and images of homey, old-time interiors, the paintings create a haunting narrative blend of the domestic and the hallucinatory. – Ken Johnson, New York Times art critic (2004)

Solien’s dark, figurative work has been highly-regarded since the 70’s. In fact, his work resides in some of the best institutions in the country including The Whitney and The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art held a 25-year retrospective of the artist in 2008.

So, in many ways Solien does not fit the typical Art Hound profile: his work is certainly not affordable and he’s had a long and remarkably-successful career. Despite these discrepancies, I’ve chosen to showcase his work because of the common threads (figurative, experience-based, pop culture references) between his work and that of many young artists today.

Taking a step back, we recall how out-of-vogue figurative art was twenty or thirty years ago, but today a new generation of artists has returned to figurative art making, taking cues from graphic novels and pop culture. Although this is only speculation, I wonder if Solien’s prescient work hasn’t in some small way contributed to this renewed interest in the narrative.

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