Tuesday, May 4, 2010

ART CHICAGO



Monday was a good day to go through Art Chicago at the Mart. We bypassed the major crowds!
Started at 11:30a.m. and went till closing at 4p.m. and still didn't see it all!

My observation was that artists get on kicks too. Like a reoccurring theme was for the artist to take something old (like the Old Masters paintings) and make them new again..adding a twist. I like what most of them did...but some of it was so obvious it became redundant and I started thinking....did they all have the same art instructor that told them all the same thing or is it by word of mouth through the artist community that this is the thing to do?

Suzanne Unrein which is represented by the Boltax Gallery in New York did a wonderful job with this idea. I applaud her creative approach. It was so well done at first I thought it was just an abstract with beautiful colors until things started forming before my eyes, and then...woo la! You saw the actual painting of an old master redone!

VICTOR WANG is one artist I totally fell in love with! He painted very large canvases with figures mostly of women that usually always incorporates sun flowers. He uses sun flowers because when he lived in Northeast China near the Russian border he grew up around sunflowers and then during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the sunflower became a political symbol. Because sunflowers follow the sun, they were used to symbolize Mao, expressing that the people must follow Mao. After High School he was sent to a farm to do hard labor for 2 years and 8 months. It was called Reeducation through labor and because of the cultural revolution everyone who graduated from school had to do it. So he worked in sunflower fields.
His paintings were done with very, very thick oil paint. He would let the oil pain sit on newspaper for several days to let the oil be absorbed into the paper making the paint less fluid.

The portrait is a portioin of a painting by Victor Wang and the other is a small portion of the painting from Suzanne Unreins painting.

1 comment:

  1. I agree, Monday was a great day to take in Art Chicago. I went on Friday too, but Monday was much more relaxed and less crowded.

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