Contemporary Art Dialogue
Contemporary art is so much more than beautiful objects, images, poetry or music. It is increasingly about feelings and actions.
It is taking ingredients - paper, words, sounds, color, light, forms and many others - and transforming these into artworks that resonate within us.
Contemporary art inspires, stimulates and provokes us. It can help us understand ourselves better and connect us to the human spirit.
Beauty Out of Chaos
Many artists say that, yes, creating is about working with tactile and sensory elements. They add that it is about taking discordant aspects of their own environments, hearts and souls. They re-order these elements and aspects to become objects manifesting their feelings, missives with profound messages. Masters of post impressionism, Cezanne and Van Gogh, painted obsessively while striving to order chaos within their lives. We the viewers are recipients of the beauty Van Gogh created from madness.
"Music [also] has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us," said Karl Paulnack in an address to students at Boston Conservatory in 2008. Paulnack is director of the Boston Conservatory's Music Division, music director and conductor of the Contemporary Opera Lab, Winnipeg, chef de chant of the Orchestra de Picardie, Amiens, France.
What Artists Do
"We don't have a verb, 'to art,' but what are artists, dancers, poets doing?" said writer Ellen Dissanayake in Columns, March 2009. Bruce Barcott, writer, quoted Ellen: "They're taking the ordinary and making it special. You create a bowl out of mud but you...make it special by engraving a pattern or figures on it. A poet takes ordinary words and makes them special. An artist places an activity or an artifact in a realm different from the everyday."
One of my favorite contemporary art movements is graffiti art, popularized in the 80's by Jean Michel Basquiat and currently by Shepard Fairey. Their street smart compositions have spontaneity and urgency, born from their need to make their ideas known to the larger world - a trait I identify with.
Marcus Antonius Jansen, a working artist today, draws influence from Basquiat in his paintings. Jansen explains "Graffiti is a vibrant voice that has enormous potential in terms of movement, color, vibrancy and immediacy. As I grew older, I started to recognize a connection between European expressionism and graffiti art because both styles were expressing a socio-political message." From Art-Interview Online Magazine.
I am drawn also to assemblage art, to pieces made from rusty, broken and discarded things. Works by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Kienholz and others are raw, but poetically beautiful - like the dark and light sides of life. Their creations take the ordinary and make it notable.
Of course, there is abstract art, the hard-edge or organic style, begun in the early 20th century that continues to influence artists today. The abstract Piet Mondrian painting on this page is one of my favorites. Its clean lines are representative of modern art (before 1960). While contemporary art works often appropriate Mondrian-like images, in the spirit of postmodern art.
Laguna Beach Artists
One bucolic summer morning, I met with three artists exhibiting at the Laguna Beach Festival of the Arts. Three men from different backgrounds talked about how and why they paint and sculpt. I listened to discussions about the need to create - to manifest magnificence from a blank canvas. More important, I experienced an artistic camaraderie in which each artist learned from and was inspired by the others. I left the Festival grounds filled with emotions, with an enhanced understanding of my own ability to take the chaos of life and turn it into manna.
"If you know that piece of music [Samuel Barber's 'Adagio for Strings']," said Karl Paulnack, "you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does."
"Great art should be timeless, command attention, make an artistic statement, trigger an emotion, engage and acquire the true personality and essence," wrote an anonymous writer. He was referring to contemporary art works by Kathryn Aiken, whose painting of a rose adorns this page.
As a photo-realist painter, Kathryn lit, photographed and printed her subjects. Then, using her images as guides, she rendered her compositions onto paper, painting with rich watercolors, brilliant light fast inks and 'layer upon layer' of pastels.
Kathryn passed away from complications from breast cancer in 2005. Engaging in only natural methods to deal with her illness - and no drugs - the four years from her diagnosis to her death were her most productive and joyful years. During this time, she wrote, "What started out as my affirmation - 'I am moving in the direction of my greatest dream' - has become a reality." Kathryn believed that it is the mission of every person to be happy.
"Art is the cry of the soul from the core of one's being," wrote Daisaku Ikeda, a Japanese philosopher. "Creating and appreciating art set free the joyous soul trapped deep within us. That is why art causes such joy."
Join me exploring contemporary art, discussing how boundaries between painting and sculpture have become diffused, as artworks increasingly address conceptual, political and social issues.
And watch this online art venue develop, combining core art-related topics with an expanding online art gallery: the latter representing artists whose works embody of a wide range of first rate contemporary art today.
Related Pages:
- Abstract Expressionism - Abstract expressionism is like meditation and solace for many artists. Also known as action painting, it includes expressive or intense, gestural and rapid brushstrokes, applied, dripped or thrown onto large canvasses. As with the works of Jackson Pollack, the paint might appear to be randomly placed, but is actually planned. Pollack said...
- Art Gallery - Welcome to our unique online art gallery, combining an online art venue with quality in-depth art journalism on a variety of art-related topics, producing a unique art-selling model.
- Artist List - Our artist name list includes famous contemporary artists and not so famous ones - from conceptual to graffiti artists to photographers - as well as those working in abstract expressionism and other genres. Several of the artists listed below are selling or will soon sell their work from this online art venue.
- About Me - Contemporary Art Dialogue is an adventure in art journalism, combining first-rate reporting, thought provoking text and dialogue with unique selling and buying propositions.
- Assemblage Art - Assemblage art is non-traditional sculpture, made from re-combining found objects. Some of these objects are junk from the streets. It is doubtful that this form of art could have existed before the 20th century. We needed copious stuff to have this art form. But assemblage art is more than the works themselves...
- Graffiti Art - Graffiti art is of the street, from people on the fringes of society. Many artists have at some point broken the law in order to express themselves. It is also called, Disobedient Art, Skate Art, neo-Graffiti, Mission School, The New Folk. The artists remain elusive, beyond categorization and...
- Photography as Art - Photography as art or as documentation has been debated since Louis Daguerre unveiled the daguerreotype in 1839. In the seventies, a fine art photography gallery set out to prove the debate is over. Today, the gallery’s owner asserts, that debate is...
- Postmodern Art - Postmodern art is not a movement, style or school of art, but a comprehensive philosophical term. It may include aspects of feminist and Marxist art, and often includes appropriation, which means to adopt, borrow, steal, recycle or sample from other works to create...
