James Welling Searches for Beauty

James Welling "Gelatin Photograph 40"

The dramatic, glossy black shapes in James Welling’s “Gelatin Photographs” look like coal or tar or chunks of primordial ooze. Both solid looking and fleshy in appearance, they are laid out across a plain white surface and look like an abstract painting. In reality, they are made of Jell-O, dyed black with ink. These mysterious images appear in Welling’s current retrospective at the Hammer Museum. On view through Jan. 12, it surveys 35 years of photographic work in which nothing is ever just Jell-O.

Toro Y Moi's 'Rose Quartz' Video

Toro Y Moi's 'Rose Quartz' Video Features Stop Motion Animation Oil Painting

The fourth single of the American indie musician Chazwick Bradley Bundic, also known as Toro Y Moi's new album "Anything in Return." The whole project was created and produced by Lauren Gregory. In 2009, Moi was signed to Carpark Records, from which he released his first album Causers of This. In promotion of Anything in Return, Toro y Moi has embarked on a tour across North America and Europe, which started on May 27, 2013 in George Washington, and will end on November 10 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Gill Miller Abstract

Interstellar Chain Drive, 2013

Recently completed acrylic abstract painting from Gill Miller. Interstellar Chain Drive is the sixth in the series of the exploration of humanity vs. the machine, and the results of that marriage. What do we get from that union? The machine as an extension and a tool to advance our interests and causes and to promote a more "civilized" life-style. Certainly two sides to this equation. The modern world has embraced the machine as a tool for living. We are interconnected.

Eric Clapton Sells Another Gerhard Richter

 

Gerhard Richters Abstraktes Bild

This November, the music legend Eric Clapton will sell his second Gerhard Richter painting at Christie's Auction House in New York. The first time around in 2012, Clapton sold a Richter painting, also by the name of Abstraktes Bild, for $35 million, which was far and away above the expected sale price of $14-19 million. This set a new record as the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction for a living artist. This current painting that will be up for auction is expected to fetch around $25 million.

Warhol's "Flash-November 22, 1963"

Andy Warhol

A new exhibit at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Ga is marking the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, with a collection of Warhol's prints that disseminate the horrendous tragedy that was drawn from five years of the American public's emotional response. It is two things; a celebration of the president as a much beloved leader of the United States and the free world, and through obscured film stills of the moment of the assassination and the ensuing horror, an archival, historical documentation of an event that most people who were alive then, still remember in detail. 

Selections from Andy Warhol; Flash-November 22, 1963; Collection of Herbert Brito. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Cy Twombly's "The Rose II"

Cy Twombly's "The Rose II"

The Huffington Post  writes about "100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age", and included is The Rose II, a masterwork of epic proportions. His cryptic depiction of over sized flowers are at once beautiful, as well as somber and morose, as the paint runs down off the flowers. This implies death, and his professional background as a cryptologist would explain the artist's fascination with the subject matter.

Twombly's style combined graffiti and abstraction in a style that set a precedent to some of today's art. The artist was a working contemporary of Robert Rauschenberg while studying at the Art Students League, and Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell when he went to Black Mountain College. Twombly died in 2011 at the age of 83. He left a body of work and a legacy that will be studied and interpreted, and re-interpreted for years and years to come.

New Banksy Mural in Los Angeles

 New Banksy mural in Los Angeles, Better Out Than In. Painted with black spray paint with flowers representing vomit. The mural is accompanied with the text "October 2013", which aficionados claim the artist is up to some mischief in the U.S. next month. Stay tuned Banksy fans!