Expressionist painting LeRoy Neiman

LeRoy Neiman (born LeRoy Leslie Runquist, June 8, 1921 – June 20, 2012) was an American artist known for his brilliantly colored, expressionist paintings and screen prints of athletes, musicians, and sporting events.Neiman was born in 1921 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the son of Lydia Sophia (née Serline) of Braham, Minnesota[1] and Charles Julius Runquist, who were married in 1918, and living at Grasston, Minnesota (Kanabec County). He was of Turkish and Swedish descent ("as near as I can figure out," as he has said) His father deserted his family, and when his mother married his stepfather, John L. Niman (Neiman) in 1926, LeRoy changed to the new surname as well. His mother divorced Neiman about 1935, and married for the third time in about 1940, to Ernst G. Hoelscher, of St. Paul. She died in St. Paul on November 14, 1985 at age 87. LeRoy was raised in the Macalester-Groveland and Frogtown neighborhoods of St. Paul. The home he lived in the longest, from about 1940 to about 1955, still stands at 569 Van Buren Avenue.

 Neiman served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He worked as a cook until the end of the war, when his art skills were recognized and put to use painting sets for Red Cross shows. Following his return in 1946, Neiman studied briefly at the St. Paul School of Art, then at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago on the G.I. Bill. After graduating, Neiman served on the Art Institute faculty for ten years. During the time Neiman was teaching, he was exhibiting art in competitions and winning prizes. In 1954, Neiman began his association with Playboy magazine. Neiman had met Hugh Hefner while doing freelance fashion illustration for the Carson Pirie Scott department store chain, where Hefner was a writer. Hefner and Playboy art director Art Paul commissioned an illustration for the magazine's fifth edition. Hefner told Sports Illustrated: "I don't remember the moment. Our eyes did not meet across a crowded room." One day, after Hefner had started his magazine, he ran into Neiman on a street and asked him to become a contributor to Playboy. Among Neiman's contribution over the next 50 years, he created the Femlin character for the Party Jokes page, and did a feature for 15 years titled "Man at His Leisure," where Neiman would paint illustrations of his travels to exotic locations.Beginning in 1960, he traveled the world observing and painting leisure life, social activities and athletic competitions including the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Kentucky Derby, championship boxing, PGA and The Masters golf tournament, The Ryder Cup, the World Equestrian Games, Wimbledon and other Grand Slam competitions, as well as night life, entertainment, jazz and the world of casino gambling.In 1970 Neiman did the illustration for The 5th Dimension's album Portrait.

 Neiman sponsored and supported several organizations from coast to coast that foster art activities for underprivileged children such as The LeRoy Neiman Center for Youth in San Francisco and the Arts Horizons LeRoy Neiman Art Center in Harlem. He also has established facilities at various colleges, including the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University in New York and the LeRoy Neiman Campus Center at his Alma Mater, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Neiman donated $5 million to the School of the Art Institute, which funded the construction of the Neiman Center at the School.He received five honorary doctorates and numerous awards, a recent Lifetime achievement award from the University of Southern California, an induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame and proclamations and citations. Most recently he received The Order of Lincoln award (the State's highest honor) on the 200th birthday celebration of Abraham Lincoln given by the Governor of Illinois in 2009.He has authored twelve books of his art. A documentary on his jazz painting, "The Big Band," had its world premiere in Los Angeles in February, 2009.

 Neiman produced about six different serigraph subjects a year, generally priced from $3,000 to $6,000 each. Gross annual sales of new serigraphs alone top $10 million. Originals can sell for up to $500,000 for works such as "Stretch Stampede," a mammoth 1975 oil painting of the Kentucky Derby. In addition to being a renowned sports artist, Neiman has created many works from his experience on safari, including "Portrait of a Black Panther," "Portrait of the Elephant," "Resting Lion," and "Resting Tiger." Some of his other subjects include sailing, cuisine, golf, boxing, horses, celebrities, famous locations, and America at play. Much of his work was done for Playboy magazine, for which he still illustrated monthly until his death.
Neiman worked in oil, enamel, watercolor, pencil drawings, pastels, serigraphy and some lithographs and etching. Neiman is listed in Art Collector's Almanac, Who's Who in the East, Who's Who in American Art, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World. He was a member of the Chicago Society of Artists. His works have been displayed in museums, sold at auctions, and displayed in galleries and online distributors. He is considered by many to be the first major sports artist in the world, challenged only in his later years by a new generation of artists like Stephen Holland and Richard T. Slone. His work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the State Hermitage Museum in Russia, Wadham College at Oxford and in museums and art galleries the world over, as well as in private and corporate collections.Wikipedia

Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902, Berlin – 1968, Cologne) was a German abstract painter influenced by L'Art Informel.Ernst Wilhelm Nay studied under Karl Hofer at the Berlin Art Academy from 1925 until 1928. His first sources of inspiration resulted from his preoccupation with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Henri Matisse as well as Caspar David Friedrich and Nicolas Poussin. Nay's still lifes, portraits and landscapes were widely acclaimed. In 1931 Nay received a nine-months' study bursary to the Villa Massimo in Rome, where he began to paint in the abstract Surrealist manner. On the recommendation of the Lübeck museum director, C.G. Heise, Nay was given a work grant financed by Edvard Munch, which enabled Nay to spend time in Norway and on the Lofoten Islands in 1937. The "Fischer- und Lofotenbilder" represented a first pinnacle of achievement. That same year, however, two of his works were shown in the notorious exhibition of "Degenerate art" and Nay was forbidden to exhibit any longer. He wasn't even allowed to paint nor buy ready made colours.

 Conscripted into the German armed forces in 1940, Nay went with the infantry to France, where a French sculptor placed his studio at Nay's disposal where Nay could paint in secret. In the "Hekatebildern" (1945–48), featuring motifs from myth, legend and poetry, Nay worked through his war and postwar experiences. The "Fugale Bilder" (1949–51) proclaim new beginnings in a fiery palette and entwined forms. In 1950 the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover mounted a first retrospective of Nay's work. The following year the artist moved to Cologne, where, with the "Rhythmischen Bildern" he took the final step towards entirely non-representational painting. In them he began to use colour purely as figurative values.From 1955 Nay's painted "Scheibenbilder", in which round colour surfaces organize subtle modulations of space and colour. These are developed further in 1963/64 in what are known as the "Augenbilder". A first one-man-show in America at the Kleeman Galleries, New York, in 1955, participation in the 1956 Venice Biennale and the Kassel documenta (1955, 1959 and 1964) are milestones marking Nay's breakthrough on the international art scene.Ernst Wilhelm Nay was awarded important prizes and is represented by work in nearly all major exhibitions of German art in Germany and abroad. The first English-language monograph of Nay's work was published by Ridinghouse in 2012.Wikipedia

Land Art Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist who used photography in relation to sculpture and land art.Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and early on lived mostly in Rutherford. In Rutherford, William Carlos Williams was Smithson's pediatrician. When Smithson was nine his family moved to the Allwood section of Clifton. He studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York from 1955 to 1956 and then briefly at the Brooklyn Museum School.
His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by "homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines", science fiction, and early Pop Art. He primarily identified himself as a painter during this time, but after a three-year rest from the art world, Smithson emerged in 1964 as a proponent of the emerging minimalist movement. His new work abandoned the preoccupation with the body that had been common in his earlier work. Instead he began to use glass sheet and neon lighting tubes to explore visual refraction and mirroring, in particular the sculpture Enantiomorphic Chambers. Crystalline structures and the concept of entropy became of particular interest to him, and informed a number of sculptures completed during this period, including Alogon 2. In Smithson’s eyes entropy was the second law of thermodynamics, which exploits the range of energy by telling us that energy is easier lost than obtained. He said that in the ultimate future the universe will burn out into an all encompassing sameness. Smithson used the idea of entropy to explore ideas of decay and renewal, chaos and order, non-sites and earthworks, trying to find equilibrium between these opposites. His ideas on entropy also branched out into culture, “the urban sprawl and the infinite number of housing developments of the post war boom have contributed to the architect of entropy”. Smithson did not see entropy as a disadvantage; he saw it as a form of transformation of society and culture, which is shown in his artwork like his non-site pieces. Smithson became affiliated with artists who were identified with the minimalist or Primary Structures movement, such as Nancy Holt (whom he married), Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt. As a writer, Smithson was interested in applying mathematical impersonality to art that he outlined in essays and reviews for Arts Magazine and Artforum and for a period was better known as a critic than as an artist. Some of Smithson's later writings recovered 18th- and 19th-century conceptions of landscape architecture which influenced the pivotal earthwork explorations which characterized his later work. He eventually joined the Dwan Gallery, whose owner Virginia Dwan was an enthusiastic supporter of his work.

 As well as works of art, Smithson produced a good deal of theoretical and critical writing, including the 2D paper work A Heap of Language, which sought to show how writing might become an artwork. In his essay "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan"  Smithson documents a series of temporary sculptures made with mirrors at particular locations around the Yucatan peninsula. Part travelogue, part critical rumination, the article highlights Smithson's concern with the temporal as a cornerstone of his work
Smithson's interest in the temporal is explored in his writings in part through the recovery of the ideas of the picturesque. His essay "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape" was written in 1973 after Smithson had seen an exhibition curated by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers at the Whitney Museum entitled “Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York” as the cultural and temporal context for the creation of his late-19th-century design for Central Park. In examining the photographs of the land set aside to become Central Park, Smithson saw the barren landscape that had been degraded by humans before Olmsted constructed the complex ‘naturalistic’ landscape that was viscerally apparent to New Yorkers in the 1970s. Smithson was interested in challenging the prevalent conception of Central Park as an outdated 19th-century Picturesque aesthetic in landscape architecture that had a static relationship within the continuously evolving urban fabric of New York City. In studying the writings of 18th- and 19th-century Picturesque treatise writers Gilpin, Price, Knight and Whately, Smithson recovers issues of site specificity and human intervention as dialectic landscape layers, experiential multiplicity, and the value of deformations manifest in the Picturesque landscape.

 Smithson further implies in this essay that what distinguishes the Picturesque is that it is based on real land  For Smithson, a park exists as “a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region” Smithson was interested in Central Park as a landscape which by the 1970s had weathered and grown as Olmsted’s creation, but was layered with new evidence of human intervention.
    Now the Ramble has grown up into an urban jungle, and lurking in its thickets are “hoods, hobos, hustlers, and homosexuals,” and other estranged creatures of the city…. Walking east, I passed graffiti on boulders… On the base of the Obelisk along with the hieroglyphs there are also graffiti. …In the spillway that pours out of the Wollman Memorial Ice Rink, I noticed a metal grocery cart and a trash basket half-submerged in the water. Further down, the spillway becomes a brook choked with mud and tin cans. The mud then spews under the Gapstow Bridge to become a muddy slough that inundates a good part of The Pond, leaving the rest of The Pond aswirl with oil slicks, sludge, and Dixie cups”
While Smithson did not find “beauty” in the evidence of abuse and neglect, he did see the state of things as demonstrative of the continually transforming relationships between man and landscape. In his proposal to make process art out of the dredging of The Pond, Smithson sought to insert himself into the dynamic evolution of the park.Wikipedia

Fantastic art James Christensen

James C. Christensen (September 26, 1942 – January 8, 2017) was an American artist of religious and fantasy art and formerly an instructor at Brigham Young University. Christensen said his inspirations were myths, fables, fantasies, and tales of imagination.After college Christensen began his career as a free-lance illustrator. He was also a junior high school art instuctor in California for a time.
Christensen taught art at BYU from 1976 until 1997.
He has had numerous showings of his work throughout the US and has been commissioned by media companies to create artwork for their publications, such as Time-Life Books and Omni.
His artwork has been featured on the cover of Leading Edge issue #41, winning him the Chesley Award for cover artwork in 2002.Christensen's work has appeared in the American Illustration Annual and Japan's Outstanding American Illustrators. He also won all the professional art honors the World Science Fiction Convention offers, and multiple Chesley Awards from the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists.

 Christensen appeared in an episode of ABC's show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in 2005. He created a picture featuring a member of the family as a fairy. The design team filmed a segment at his studio. The Greenwich Workshop donated a framed Court of the Faeries that Christensen presented to the family for the room as well.
Christensen has published more than three books, with many of his works appearing in many more. His first book, A Journey of the Imagination: The Art of James Christensen, was printed in 1994 to great acclaim.[citation needed] His second, Voyage of the Basset (October 1996), contains a frame story for a great deal of original work. His third book, Rhymes & Reasons, was published in May 1997. Christensen also illustrated A Shakespeare Sketchbook (May 2001) with text by Renwick St. James.
While not employed in all his paintings, his trademarks were flying or floating fish, often on a leash.

Christensen's book Voyage of the Basset was the source of controversy in 2006 when a resident of Bountiful, Utah, demanded that the book be removed from circulation from the young adult section at the Davis County Library in nearby Farmington, Utah. The book features fantasy artwork such as depictions of trolls, dragons and ogres. Two images of mermaids and one of a sphinx-like creature feature partially or fully exposed breasts.Though the images are not sexual in nature, and as drawn, the breasts feature no nipples, Rod Jeppsen of the Citizens for Decency group said: "What we normally don't consider pornography, a child may get sexually aroused by... The question to me is not whether the book has a good story line, but does it sexually stimulate young boys?" The Davis County Library Board voted to keep the book in circulation in the young adult section on August 22, 2006.Wikipedia

The World Bodypainting Festival

The World Bodypainting Festival (abbreviated WBF) is an annual bodypainting festival and competition used to be held in Pörtschach, Austria on lake Wörthersee. Now the WBF has changed its location and since 2017 the Festival is taking place in Klagenfurt, Austria. It attracts artists from 50 nations and attracts over 30,000 plus spectators
The WBF is held during the summer months of June/July. It attracts artists from 50 nations and attracts 30.000 plus spectators. It consists of a pre-week followed by 3 main days of the festival/competition. The pre-week consists of workshops and side events.
The workshops offer many educational programs and lessons by leading artists in brush & sponge, airbrush, special effects, beauty make-up, head dressing including colour theory and history. All workshops are run and handled under the WB Academy and are also scheduled throughout the year in various cities worldwide. Side events include parties such as the Surreal Costume Ball (Body Circus) and the newly added (Zombie Crawl) with international DJs and musical stage performances. Also included are exhibitions, gatherings, meeting points and industry discussions.

The three main days: Friday, Saturday and Sunday are open to the general public in a park also known as "Bodypaint City" where the World, Special and Amateur Awards are held. The festival is open to both adults and children and is considered a family-friendly environment. Spectators and visitors alike are able to step "into the surreal" filled with a unique world of art that excites the senses and the imagination. Visitors can also take part and express themselves in various activities throughout Bodypaint City. Artists compete on all three days with a given theme in the categories of brush & sponge, airbrush and special effects for the World Champion Award & title announced on Sunday with the special UV bodypainting World Champion Fluoro Award held and announced on Friday night. Also included is the World Facepainting Award, Armature Award, Installation Award, Special Effects Face Make-up, Make-up Battle Award and the Photo Award. All categories have separate prizes and trophies. Artists can use either male or female models. The festival is open for both adults and children, and many families come there together.The three main days of the festival also plays host to a VIP area, a bodypainting manufacture & suppliers' market, fashion & crafts market, food & beverage vendors, headline stage bands, performers and international DJs throughout various musical zones of Bodypaint City as well as the sun drenched pristine waters and beaches of lake Wörthersee. "There is something for everyone" including the closing Paint Party.Wikipedia

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