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Tuesday, 31 March 2009

Jane Maxwell




"Jane Maxwell is a collage artist based in Boston, MA. Her current work largely focuses on women, body image and the feminine ideal. Jane's collages are deeply layered works, combining color, texture and text that surround and become the female figure.

After graduating from Middlebury College in 1986 as a literature major, Jane worked in public relations for 10 years, before turning her full attention to art. At that time she took her interest in collage and a natural affinity for found papers and objects, and delved into a range of mixed media classes at the DeCordova Museum School (Lincoln, MA) and The Museum School (Boston, MA). She soon began to show her work locally.

Today, Jane's work is shown in New York City, San Francisco, Paris and in the South of France. Her work has been purchased by collectors throughout the world.

Jane has been a guest lecturer at Wellesley College, Stonehill College and The New England Art Institute, on the topic of body image and art. Her work has been the focus of numerous newspaper and magazine articles and has been featured in many art books, including Collage for the Soul and Mixed Media Collage.

Jane lives in Newton, MA with her husband and three children."(Jane Maxwell)


++Jane Maxwell

Rankin


Damian Hirst


David Bowie


Vivienne Westwood


George Clooney



Hugh Grant


Kevin Spacey


Justin Timberlake


Jude Law


Robert Downey Jr.


"Photographer, publisher, and most recently film director, Rankin established his reputation when he launched Dazed & Confused with his business partner Jefferson Hack in 1991.

From his iconic shot of Kylie lying naked and prostrate, to the Queen smiling enigmatically, Rankin’s iconic, intimate portraiture style, and his mischievous eye have gained him a reputation as one of the world's leading photographers.

Rising to every challenge, Rankin has never shied from portraying difficult subject matters, addressing issues from domestic violence to body image in both his personal work as well as charity and commercial projects. He made headlines again with his campaign for Dove showing women who differed from the usual stick-thin advertising stereotype. He has also shot prominent charity campaigns for Amnesty International, Everyman, Special Olympics, Oxfam, Teenage Cancer Trust, Refuge, The Teaching Awards, Women’s Aid, Women’s Vote, Breast Cancer Awareness and Youth Music.

In December 2006 he published the book ‘TuuliTastic' - A Photographic Love Letter’, featuring an exclusive combination of commissioned fashion, advertising and editorial images of Tuuli, Rankin’s favourite model and muse. Then in January 2007 Rankin published ‘Beautyfull’, a book that brought together the most photographed women in the world in a powerful display of beauty.

Both the books were accompanied by intimate exhibitions in London as part of ‘The Series’, a six-month programme of exhibitions that ran from November 2006 to summer 2007.

Rankin also published a retrospective book in 2007 called ‘Visually Hungry’. The book documents his extraordinary career, drawing together over 400 images from two decades of work. A selection has been exhibited at the International Photo-festival Knokke-Heist in Belgium.

In September 2007, Rankin held his debut American solo show in Los Angeles at the Fahey/Klein gallery, entitled ‘Eye Candy’. Of the show, that featured a selection of his favourite female nude images, Rankin said simply, “There’s no point in dressing it up, I love women and I love taking photos, it’s more like a fantastic hobby than a job.”

Rankin lives in London and has a twelve-year-old son, Lyle." (Rankin)

++Rankin

Monday, 30 March 2009

Simon Birch





"Simon Birch is an exciting Hong Kong-based artist who is fast building a reputation in Asia. His portraits, in particular, have drawn attention due to a number of high-profile commissions and two highly successful exhibitions in the past few years.

In 2003, as well as a collection of striking portraits, that include well-known Hong Kong personalities, Birch added an extra dimension to his work with collaborative pieces, handing over finished works to selected artists, designers and photographers and giving them total freedom to add, take away, re-paint, create or destroy. Award-winning designers Stanley Wong and photographer Wing Shya were among those who took part in this project, which not only reflected the artist's position as a Westerner living in the East, but also mirrored modern culture where so many creative ideas are shared, stolen, mixed and enriched.

Simon Birch paints like everything else he does in life, with passion and intensity. In his portraits, often on a large scale, the subjects are reduced to an austere minimum, with the removal of context, giving an ambiguous intimacy and tension to the work. The faces are intense, yet non-specific in their expression, leaving the viewer to decide on his own perception. Painter, subject and viewer, each has his own subjective interpretation.

Born in Brighton in 1969, Birch began painting at a very early age under the guidance of his parents. His mother is an accomplished painter and art teacher; his father, an award-winning graphic and interior designer. He has pursued a versatile career, which has included design, entertainment, music and sport, but he has continued to paint throughout his life. In 1996 he moved to Hong Kong.

Birch describes himself as an artist immersed in street and eastern culture, a catalyst for many forms of creativity, an artist reacting to the fragmented perception of the everyday world, saturated with images. Inspiration for his paintings may be triggered by the smallest detail - a colour, a face, a texture, a sound, a song. Once he has that spark, he begins painting as soon as possible, compulsively, often for days at a time with little or no rest.

Like Kippenberger, he uses different styles concurrently with the aim of developing himself as an artist, not purely a figurative painter. He is influenced by Abstract Expressionist artists such as Rothko and Richter, whose work has the power to convey strong emotions, as well as, less obviously, Basquiat and graffiti artists such as Futura 2000."(10 Chancery Lane Gallery)

++Simon Birch
++10 Chancery Lane Gallery
++Alive not dead profile

Marc Yankus




Marc Yankus was born in Hempstead on Long Island in New York. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and majored in Fine Arts. His work has been included in expositions at the Brooklyn Museum (NY), Exit Art (NY) and The Library of Congress (Washington, DC). You can also find his work on book covers and for theatrical posters.He is represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

++Marc Yankus
++Artnet
++An interview with Marc Yankus on Double exposure

Dave Anderson



"Now in his mid-30s, Dave Anderson came to photography only after working in other fields. Born to Quaker parents and raised in East Lansing, Michigan, he studied history and film in college. He worked for President Bill Clinton’s communications and media affairs office, MTV’s nation-touring "Choose or Lose" bus recruiting young voters, and later for Madstone, a maverick independent movie studio in New York.

A chance sighting of a course catalog from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York led to classes and soon an all-consuming passion for photography. He pursued his studies under Keith Carter at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas and Michael Kenna, via ICP, yet he continues to be primarily self-taught.

For the past three years, he has been a full-time fine art and commercial photographer. In that short time, he has been recognized as “one of the shooting stars of the American photo scene” by Germany’s fotoMAGAZIN and named to the “PDN 30” list by Photo District News, the much anticipated annual list of 30 emerging photographers as the “ones to watch.” ROUGH BEAUTY was the winner of the Santa Fe Center for Photography’s 2005 Project Competition.

His work has been featured in numerous magazines (Esquire, Stern, ESPN, Photo District News, British Journal of Photography, B&W) and is part of the collections of various museums (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; George Eastman House; Art Museum of Southeast Texas; Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts; Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans).

A former New Yorker, he now lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with his wife."(LUX)


++Dave Anderson
++LUX
++Clampart

Thursday, 26 March 2009

Sarah Bereza



Sarah Bereza was born in 1979 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She graduated in Fine Arts in 2001 at the University of Michigan.

++Sarah Bereza

Mario Testino



Mario Testino photographed Robert Downey, Jr. for Vogue's April issue featuring an article about the Sherlock Holmes star. And I really like this picture, don't really know why. The look, the pose, the close-up, I don't know. But I like it.


++Sophie Dahl's interview with Robert Downey, Jr. in Vogue
++Mario Testino

Lee Friedlander




Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977. Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970's. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set, and in 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie's Art House auction.

Friedlander's style focused on the "social landscape". His art used detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, and posters and signs all combining to capture the look of modern life.

Friedlander now works primarily with medium format cameras (e.g. Hasselblad Superwide). While suffering from arthritis and housebound, he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book, Stems, reflects his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his "limbs" reminded him of plant stems. These images display textures which were not a feature of his earlier work. In this sense, the images are similar to those of Josef Sudek who also photographed the confines of his home and studio.

In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art displayed a major retrospective of Friedlander works. In the same year he received a 2005 Hasselblad International Award. His work was displayed again by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a retrospective in 2008. Concurrent to this retrospective, a more contemporary body of his work, America By Car, was displayed at the Fraenkel Gallery not far from the museum.(Wikipedia)


++Artnet
++Fraenkel Gallery
++Wikipedia