Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns, Map, 1961.



Jasper Johns

American Contemporary Art 101

Alright… for those of you who are wondering who Jasper Johns is, here is the quick and dirty version… Jasper Johns is one of the first American Contemporary Artist to begin using pop culture references in his work. One could argue that he is one of the originators of the Pop Art movement. He is most known for using imagery, such as the American Flag, Targets, and Numbers, as subjects in his work circa the 50’s and 60’s. Johns was a roommate of Rauschenberg and has even been featured (as himself) in the Simpsons… Google him!

This imagery is part of a new body of work that Shepard is working on, focusing on American Pioneers in art, music, and culture. Stay tuned as more revolutionary portraits are on the way.

This is a collaboration with photographer Michael Tighe. Check out more of Michael’s work at michaeltighephotography.com. Print on sale now, Edition of 450, $55.









Jasper Johns by Shepard Fairey

SHEPARD FAIREY at Art Basel Miami

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/art-basel-miami-2009-shepard-fairey-video/

Great Animation Hand Painted Digitally Animated

Pavel Rehurek Photo Based Digital Art

Canadian artist of Czech origin, Pavel Rehurek wants to reach your heart. He accomplishes this by putting his own passionate art on paper with pigmented inks. His strong and memorable images are stimulating and provocative recollections of the physical freedoms we sacrifice by living busy lives.

Rehurek’s innate and skillful sense of colors and forms immediately capture the viewer’s attention. His suspenseful, if not bizarre, figurative compositions and portraits are juxtaposed in unique subject orientations.

He achieves his inimitable expression initially in the photographic stage. He then goes through the processes of cropping and alteration that enhances textures, colors and shapes. The final results are images that become tactile and desirable, easy to communicate with. Glimpses of Matisse and Warhol are fused with his own vision to culminate in the mastery of post-fauvist pop art realism.

His background in portrait photography as well as his missionary work cannot be ignored. His photo based graphic art prints have been exhibited in galleries in Europe, Canada and the U.S. It is no surprise that Pavel Rehurek’s work has found its way into many collections worldwide.

Istvan Horkay Digital collages

Description of Work:

Horkay's work combines original drawn and painted images, appropriated masterpieces, photographs, artists' signatures and commercial logos. These elements are digitally assembled, i.e., collaged, to create a single, layered moment. This work is post pop, i.e., post modern pop art. Whereas Warhol took moments from popular culture and turned them into history, Horkay takes history and turns it into a moment, as though the past millenium was a monolithic unit of time.

Scott Blake

Scott Blake Barcode Artist



I started making art with barcodes right before Y2K, inspired by the year 2000 computer bug, and threatening digital apocalypse. Barcode Jesus was born in Photoshop, by creating mosaics with simple shapes. I first tried circles and then squares. The tile patterns morphed into a cluster of lines, and before I knew it, I was staring at a bunch of barcodes. I assigned the numbers to describe each pixel's grayscale value and grid coordinate.

Vik Muniz talks about creativity.

Vik Muniz makes art with wire, sugar

Chris Jordan Photographic Arts

Chris Jordan

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/

The Computer is Just a Tool to Make ART!

This is a blog to showcase what the Digitally Based ART class at Aquinas College is about.
The class will be exploring numerous ways to use a computer to make art.
We will use a variety of 2D and 3d software programs form Photoshop, to Flash, to Illustrator, to Google Sketchup. Open source graphic software will also be covered.

Art is capitalized in Digital Based ART because Art is the main focus of this class.

We will use the computer to look at the world in a different way, then we will, create art based on these impressions.

The class will involve studying artists who use a computer to make art.

We will use this blog to communicate and share digitally based artwork and artists.