Ellsworth Kelly

“I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.”
(Ellsworth Kelly)

Arthur Dove

“I would like to make something that is real in itself,” [Arthur Dove] once wrote, “that does not remind anyone of any other thing, and that does not have to be explained like the letter A, for instance.

“What do we call ‘America’ outside of painting?” he asked a friend. “Inventiveness, restlessness, speed, change. Well, a painter may put all these qualities in a still life or an abstraction, and be going more native than another who sits quietly copying a skyscraper.”

“I no longer observed in the old way, and not only began to think subjectively but also to. remember certain sensations purely through their form and color, that is, by certain shapes, planes of light….”

Arthur Dove was interested in synesthesia – the possibility that sounds could be experienced and depicted as colors or shapes, an idea current in French Symbolist circles since the 1880s. Foghorns, 1929, represents the moaning of warning sirens in the Long Island mist as concentric rings of paint growing in lightening tones of grayed pink from a dark center: the bell mouths of the horns, their peculiar resonance, and the color of the fog are fused in one image.
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/D/dove.html

Rodney Greenblat

I just stumbled on this

http://www.whimsyload.com/home.html

What! This is his bio…..

Rodney Alan Greenblat is a creator of intriguing and whimsical art. His paintings and sculpture have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. He is the author and illustrator of children’s books, and creator of computer art and characters for children and adults. Rodney’s sculpture was featured in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and his work was a major component of the East Village art scene. Rodney designed the characters for 1996 hit Sony Playstation game “Parappa the Rapper” which has sold over 3 million copies world wide.

WHOA ! …..
The Center For Advanced Whimsy is Rodney’s New York City showroom and studio.

THERE’S MORE !

Welcome to my (Rodney) web site, a constant work in progress. In this latest version I am switching many of the older areas over to a new database driven format. The gallery page demonstrates how many of my works can be viewed through a search system. I am constantly creating new works, and since the 1980s I have created thousands of pieces. Little by little I am adding older works to the database, and over the next few months I hope to add info on works from the 1980’s and 1990s. Many of my famous productions such as Funscreen, Dazzeloids, and Canworld are not yet well represented on the site. My children’s books, Thunder Bunny and Slombo The Gross will eventually be added. Many of my Japanese consumer products can bee seen in the shop area, and I hope to include projects that I did for Sony, Minolta and Family Mart in the main database in the future. For now you can find images of those projects on RodneyFun.com.

Caio Fonseca

Harder than finding the painting I am going to do, “Caio Fonseca said in a recent interview, “is deciding what painting I am not going to do.”

It’s a puzzling statement from a painter whose work seems, at least at first acquaintance, to be triggered wholly by informed intuition and made without prior decisions.

The ambiguous, colored shapes that float across the surfaces of Fonseca’s canvases and works on paper resist identification, as if pulled directly from the unconscious.

They also refuse to settle down spatially; unnamable, but richly associative, they pulse between figure and ground, now appearing nearly submerged by creamy expanses of paint, now breaking free to hover in fictive space.

These apparently unpremeditated, albeit rigorously ordered, paintings always read as the product of accretion, which makes Fonseca’s comment about refusal and denial somewhat surprising. Yet longer acquaintance with his work of the past few years makes it clear that his emphasis on rejecting possibilies is very real.

Since about 2000, Fonseca’s process could, in fact, be characterized not simply as “finding the painting” but as creating as open-ended set of visual possibilities and then gradually destroying all of the roads not taken.

Painting a Paradox by Karen Wilken, Art in America

http://www.caiofonseca.com

Louise Nevelson

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson (born Leah Berliawsky, September 23, 1899, Kiev, Ukraine; died April 17, 1988, New York) was a U.S. (Ukrainan-born) sculptor.
Nevelson is known for her abstract expressionist “boxes” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her “assemblages” or assemblies, one of which was three stories high. Says Nevelson, ”When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Nevelson

In the mid-thirties, Nevelson turned from drawing to sculpture and it was here that she found her true artistic identity. She began by nailing together pieces of wood and painting them in a uniform black tone. Nevelson later added white and gold coloring to her constructions.

When Nevelson was 60 years old, she started to weld discarded objects and steel into rigid geometrical forms. She painted these constructions black. She also created figures with Plexiglas, achieving “magic movements” through the use of light.
www.jwa.org/discover/ inthepast/infocus/artists/

Nevelson, Louise 1900-1988, American sculptor, b. Kiev, Russia. Using odd pieces of wood, found objects, cast metal and other materials, Nevelson constructed huge walls or enclosed box arrangements of complex and rhythmic abstract shapes. These are covered entirely with black, white, or gold paint. The uniform tone gives her work a mysterious quality and emphasizes the structural importance of its shadows. Huge works such as World (1966; Detroit Inst. of Art) reflect a sense of total environment. Examples of Nevelson’s work are in the Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-Nevelson.html