Saturday 15 November 2014

New activity

I've not been completely idle for the last couple of years and I've been looking around for inspiration and ideas. In the last year or so I've been looking at the work of a number of painters...

Hogan Brown who as far as I can make out is a bloke just starting out, he was introduced to me by a bloke at work who paints - Andrew Graves. You'll find Hogan Brown website here

The reason I like his images are the connections and similarities with my initial influence which was Jack Vettriano...
Vettrianos work has a theme to it that has captured the publics eye and it's the idea and concept behind Vettrianos work that I'm interested in and why is it that it works so well?

In recent weeks I've found an American Artist Alex Katz who produces massive wall size painting and sometimes knocks the final painting out in a single day and again you'll see that there's some similarities with both the artists above. What I like about these artists - and it was Vettriano that I first realised had these attributes is the simplicity of the whole thing, they look as though they're easy to do, but when you get down to it they're actually not. Listening to Alex Katz in interviews one of the things he speaks about is knowing when to stop and in my earlier efforts when trying to paint my son Joe, the issue was exactly that. In the earlier stages of the painting he looked too cartoon-esque and this drove me forward to keep on trying to add detail, but as I did so the painting then changed and I realised that I was starting to produce something that was beginning to look like a photograph.

The artist that kind of got me back on track was Chantal Joffe, who's work is far from 'Photo-real' and far more expressionistic and less Pop-art as the two previous artists discussed seem to be?
This is her work here...
 
Out of all the recent stuff I've been looking at Alex Katz work has been the most inspiring because he works on such a vast scale and in the past I've scaled up my paintings and produced image that are much larger... 4' x 4' and I quite enjoyed working at that size. What I also like about Katz is the fact that it is very cartoon-esque/Pop Art and some of it doesn't look anything like the people that it's supposed to be. I was quite excited to read when doing my research that he'd painted Kate Moss. Most of his work is very personal - people in his family and people he knows and so when you're looking at them there's no point of reference. Kate Moss we all know, she's everywhere, so once I'd read this I went searching. Better still, when I found the image it was on the website that had recently sold it, so there was a price and details about its size. This is Alex Katz version of Kate Moss...
 
This sold at auction for $180,000 dollars - the image is 6' x 5' the details are here.
 
Another American artist I like is Kenton Nelson again he produces images that are like Alex Katz enormous in size, using American themes and life, in Nelsons case laced with essences of fantasy and memories. Nelsons work is far more vibrant in its use of colour and light...
 
 
Others that I've been looking at have included David Hockney, Rosalyn Drexler, Elizabeth Peyton and a bloke who's name escapes me for the moment, but I'll get his images and a link on here in a couple of days or so...