Australian contemporary art

Kevin Charles "Pro" Hart

 

Kevin Charles "Pro" Hart, MBE (30 May 1928 – 28 March 2006), was an Australian artist, born in Broken Hill, New South Wales, who was considered the father of the Australian Outback painting movement and his works are widely admired for capturing the true spirit of the outback. He grew up on his families sheep farm in Menindee, New South Wales and was nicknamed "Professor" (hence "Pro") during his younger days, when he was known as an inventor.

His pictures are typically painted with oil or acrylic, using paint brushes and sponges, and depict scenes of rural town life, topical commentary, and some religious subjects. His illustrations for the collection of Henry Lawson's poems show keen powers of character observation combined with a n obvious wit. Hart was also a sculptor, working with welded steel, bronze and ceramics.Wikipedia 

Albert Tucker

Albert Lee Tucker (29 December 1914 – 23 October 1999),was an Australian artist, and member of the Heide Circle, a group of modernist artists and writers that centred on the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, whose home, "Heide", located in Bulleen, near Heidelberg (outside Melbourne), was a haven for the group

Tucker's main inspirations include post-impressionists, expressionists and social realists, as well as personal experience. Tucker's work was strongly influenced by the realistic reflections of two important émigré artists, Josl Bergner and Danila Vassilieff, who arrived in Melbourne in the late 1930s about the same time that Tucker began to explore images of the Great Depression. Tucker also met Sunday and John Reed, members of the Contemporary Art Society, which was set up in 1938 by George Bell, in opposition to the government Australian Academy of Art, which was believed to promote conservative art and not the modernists.Wikipedia

Gordon Bennett 

 

Gordon Bennett (10 August 1955 – 3 June 2014) was an Australian artist of Aboriginal and Anglo-Gaelic descent. Born in Monto, Queensland, Bennett was a significant figure in contemporary Indigenous Australian art. Gordon Bennett died on 3 June 2014, of natural causes.Wikipedia

Canadian Landscapes Bruno Côté

Bruno Côté (August 10, 1940 – June 30, 2010)was a contemporary Canadian landscape painter.
Bruno Côté was born in Quebec City in August 1940. His youth in a family where art held a strong significance encouraged the development of his artistic talents. He joined the family's publicity business in 1957. In 1978 he moved to Baie-Saint-Paul, where he held his first important solo exhibition. In 1980 he began to travel, painting landscapes in many different regions of Canada. Bruno Côté is represented by art galleries across Canada. Such art galleries have been for example, in the Chateau Laurier hotel of Ottawa Canada. In 2008 the Canadian Parliament gave Côté's painting, The Portage Trail to the Parliament of Scotland to mark the opening of the Scottish Parliament Building.
Côté died on June 30, 2010 in Baie-Saint-Paul.Wikipedia

Art that inspires you

 

Mixed-Media Carl Beam

Carl Beam R.C.A. (May 24, 1943 – July 30, 2005), born Carl Edward Migwans, made Canadian art history as the first artist of Native Ancestry (Ojibwe), to have his work purchased by the National Gallery of Canada as Contemporary Art. A major retrospective of his work, mounted by the National Gallery of Canada, was exhibited in 2010, recognizing Beam as one of Canada's most important artists. He worked in various photographic mediums, mixed media, oil, acrylic, spontaneously scripted text on canvas, works on paper, Plexiglas, stone, cement, wood, handmade ceramic pottery, and found objects, in addition to etching, lithography, and screen process. Wikipedia

 The direction of Carl Beam's visual style was firmly established by the late seventies. In 1979 Beam met and married his wife, Ann Beam. "In developing his work over the years, Beam has been accompanied by his wife, Ann, herself an artist and a former teacher at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Often they have worked as collaborators" At this time he incorporated multiple photographic images onto a single picture plane. "He disregarded the illusory deep space of Renaissance depiction, in favour of a flat tableau, where a dialogue of multiple images could take place". At this time his photographic imagery was achieved primarily via screen process, photo-etching, Polaroid instant prints, and a solvent transfer technique also used by Robert Rauschenberg. Wikipedia

By the mid-1980s, Beam was working with new techniques for incorporating photo-imagery into his work. He utilized a heat transfer technique learned from fellow artist Ann Beam, with his work on paper and Plexiglas. He also began working with photo emulsion and mixed media on paper and large scale canvas works. The works contained various juxtapositions of imagery from the spiritual, the natural, and political world, and incorporated his own poetic inscriptions and math equations. "My works are like little puzzles, interesting little games. I play a game of dreaming ourselves as each other. In this we find out that we're all basically human.... My work is not fabricated for the art market. There's no market for intellectual puzzles or works of spiritual emancipation" Wikipedia

Mixed-Media

 

William Dutterer

William S. Dutterer (1943–2007) was a Washington artist who moved to New York City in 1979 and continued to make innovative paintings until his death in January 2007.

 Over his 40 year career Dutterer developed his own, idiosyncratic visual vocabulary that often referenced masks (or, interchangeably, the face), wrapped objects (a mummy or a bound head), and the concept of the bystander (a witness so close as to be a possible victim of irrational acts) from his minimalist work of the ‘60s. His work engages the viewer, encouraging us to consider the impact our culture and world events have on the way we see ourselves and allow others to see us.Wikipedia

Guillermo Meza

Guillermo Meza (September 11, 1917 – October 2, 1997) was a Mexican painter, known for his oils depicting fantastic background and often distorted human figures, generally with denunciations of society. He was born to a Tlaxcalteca indigenous father of modest means, but his parents had interest in the arts, history and literature. Meza showed interest in art and music in his youth, studying painting with Santos Balmori. Later, he approached Diego Rivera to look for an apprenticeship, but instead, the painter recommended him to the prestigious Galería de Arte Mexicana, which helped him develop as an artist as well as promoted his work for twenty years. Meza won various awards for his work during his career and was also granted membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.Wikipedia

Art that inspires you 

 

Marina Maca

Painting & Sculpture  

 

Martin Kippenberger

Martin Kippenberger (25 February 1953 – 7 March 1997) was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.
Kippenberger was "widely regarded as one of the most talented German artists of his generation.Wikipedia

There are a couple of different versions of the motive crucified frog. The first one was a green frog holding a beer jar in the one hand and an egg in the other. It had the title: “the feet first”(1990). The work was partly connected to Kippenberger’s attemt to change his exessive lifestyle and to get clean from dependencies during that period, which he never really managed. Anyway the connection to the crucified Jesus, which he used very much as a metaphor in his art, caused a huge scandal 2008, when it was shown in the Museum for Modern Art in Bozen. With the support of Pope Benedict XVI. the President of the Council for South-Tirol, Franz Pahl, started a public hunger strike to force the Museum to remove the Wall-Installation. With no success, it remained until the end of the exhibition. Kippenberger, who had died in 1997 already, has a devoted circle of admirers and enemies as well until today.(inenart.eu)

Alternative 

 

Stephen De Staebler

Stephen De Staebler (March 24, 1933 – May 13, 2011) was an internationally celebrated American sculptor, best recognized for his work in clay and bronze. Totemic and fragmented in form, De Staebler's figurative sculptures call forth the many contingencies of the human condition, such as resiliency and fragility, growth and decay, earthly boundedness and the possibility for spiritual transcendence. An important figure in the California Clay Movement, he is credited with "sustaining the figurative tradition in post-World War II decades when the relevance and even possibility of embracing the human figure seemed problematic at best.Wikipedia

Art that inspires you 

 

Davyd Whaley

Davyd Whaley was born on December 6, 1967 and died on October 14, 2014. He was a resident artist at the Santa Fe Artist Colony in downtown Los Angeles, a member of the Los Angeles Art Association, and had previously worked for 20 years as an electrical engineer.  He was admired and deeply loved by his colleagues, his friends, and his spouse, television director Norman Buckley.
His time was split between being a full-time studio artist and teaching classes to the underprivileged in East LA. For the latter he was awarded 2012 Volunteer of the Year by the City Council of Los Angeles. Davyd Whaley was primarily self-taught, but studied painting at UCLA and also with Ronnie Landfield and Larry Poons at the Art Students League of New York.(davydwhaley.com)

To create a thing of beauty that can comfort or inspire others, Davyd believed was his highest calling. The genesis of his art comes from nature and its surroundings, but also of his dreams and the subconscious. He was intrigued by Jungian psychology and his own willingness to understand the unconscious mind through the study of dreams, symbols, art and philosophy. From a technical point of view, Davyd pointed to asymmetric forms and energy and power created by 3-dimensional contrast touch of depth, light and color.(davydwhaley.com)

Alternative 

 

Johannes Sveinsson Kjarval

Johannes Sveinsson Kjarval (15 October 1885 – 13 April 1972) was an Icelandic painter. He is by many considered one of the most important artists of Iceland.
Born in poverty, he was adopted and as a young man worked as a fisherman. However, he spent every spare time drawing and painting and managed to learn basics from artist Ásgrímur Jónsson. At age 27 with financial support from fishermen and the Icelandic Confederation of Labour he passed an entrance examination and was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts for higher education in the arts where he completed his studies. During the Copenhagen years he became acquainted with various styles including impressionism, expressionism and cubism but he also became an accomplished draughtsman, possibly one of the finest Iceland ever had. Later he also took shorter trips to France and Italy. Later in his life his art frequently also included abstract painting.

 Kjarval was a prolific painter, leaving thousands of drawings and paintings after a long life. The paintings vary greatly in style and frequently mix different styles into a very personal style. Although not surreal, some of his works include absurd and symbolist elements mixing elves and myths into landscape. Many of his works include Icelandic landscape and lava formation but many of his landscape paintings are partially "cubist" and abstract with his focus on zooming on the closest ground and less the impressive mysterious mountains in the background. The painter has been much discussed and also criticized by some because of this unusual mixture. Nevertheless, it is an oversimplication to classify him has a landscape painter. His work includes expressionist, abstract, cubist, landscape and portrait paintings and drawings - and his "style promiscuity" was highly original as the man himself was. He was a highly original modernizer of his time and still remains quite unique among Icelandic and world painters. In 1958 he was awarded the Prince Eugen Medal by the King of Sweden.Wikipedia