First Snow
Thanksgiving
Mornings
Green
Fontenelle
Artist Statement
I have spent several years drawing trees from observation; studying how their branches twist and turn, reach and retreat, linger… My new paintings are of trees painted from my imagination. A line becomes a branch, then a line again; it spurts, stops, twists, then breaks. The limbs are sometimes graceful; other times they are awkward, coarse, entangled gestures. Tension exists in reading the marks as both nature-based and pure abstraction.
The trees are painted in oil on translucent vellum stretched over mirror creating a subtle luminous quality and 3-dimensional effect. I try to capture the sublime quality of the Hudson River Luminists as well as the sense of limitless space in twelfth century Chinese Southern Sung landscapes. Within my paintings there are no cultural references; I aim to reflect the timelessness of nature in a fleeting moment.
Website
http://www.MaggieTobin.com
Tags: Uncategorized
The Street (detail)
Biography
“A creative mind not content to simply sit back and observe- her work is alive.”
Linda Zacks has a passionate love affair with words and letters. Her signature is the way she uses type in her art – clever verbiage drawn from her trusty stack of sketchbooks. She uses words like artillery, firing back Life as it whizzes by your nose.
Linda’s work- part poetry, part paint reflects the adoration, anxiety, filth, fear, and visceral energy of just being alive and aware, and that makes its way into each picture. Tension. Calamity. The urban obstinance that turns a jackhammer into a musical instrument. That’s what it’s like. If it’s not cathartic, it’s not in her artistic vocabulary.
Her creations capture the essence of a restless mind- clever commentary about the world we live in: the wonders of being female, America the strange, Love & Hate and the twisting of traditional concepts, such as beauty and war. Every moment has the potential to be captured in a painting or a unique handmade book.
Nothing is out of the question: old wood, torn paper, rusty metal, ink, duct tape or a scribbled-over Polaroid. And the textures–gloppy skid marks, bumpy nodules and crusty scabs smother the surface.
Linda spent much of her life moving around – including living overseas in England as a young child and attending high school in Holland. Before moving to New York City in 1995, Linda graduated from Brown University studying semiotics and creative writing and spent her junior year across the street at The Rhode Island School of Design. This unique blend of studies led her to a career as an accomplished designer and fine artist.
Website
http://www.lindazacks.com
Tags: Collage · Drawing · Painting
“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon #1″ 96 x 92 in
oil on canvas
2008
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“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon #2″ 96 x 92 in
oil on canvas
2008
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“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon #3″ 96 x 92 in
oil on canvas
2009
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“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon #4″ 96 x 92 in
oil on canvas
2009
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“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon #5″ 96 x 92 in
oil on canvas
2010
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ARTIST STATEMENT
In my work I have been exploring the concept of history and aging in a painting. With this current series, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, I am exploring these same themes and concepts and how they can be applied to an image in the digital realm.
I began with a picture of Pablo Picasso’s painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. The idea was to create a painting that was “aged” digitally. By this I do not mean attempting to create what one would imagine a painting or object to look like after it has been aged over time. Rather, I mean aging as being the application of destructive forces to an object or image over and over again.
When an object is aged, it has been subjected to repetitive, minor destructive forces over an extended period of time; for example, the slow staining of a wall from drips or the rusting of a piece of metal. With a digital image, there are many “destructive” forces that can be applied to cause the image to lose information. With the first painting in the series, I shrank the image down to 1% of its size, and then blew it back up again. When this happens, the computer has to interpret what information to fill in the empty space created between pixels when it is blown back up again. In the other paintings in the series, I applied different ways of “aging” the image, causing the computer to have to make similar decisions.
Applying any of these destructive actions once or even a few times does not alter the image substantially. But when applied hundreds of times, the image loses more and more information to the point where it becomes virtually unrecognizable. Applying this digitally destructive force over and over again is the digital equivalent of an object that has been subjected to the elements over many years.
After the image was created in Photoshop, I painted it in oil on canvas roughly 8 feet square, the same size as the original Picasso painting. By repainting this “digitally” aged image, a strange alternate version of the painting is created. Rather than a painting that has been ripped, stained or discolored over time, the paintings are images that have been aged in the context of the digital realm.
Tags: Painting
