Giuseppe Gonella is an Italian painter whose amazing, often large-scale work is literally a whirlwind of both recognizable and abstract shapes, like a dream that blends every memory you’ve ever had into one still image. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Italy, Giuseppe won many awards for his exhibitions and now divides his time between Venice and New York.
Every now and then I run into the kind of portfolio where an artist shows that they are apparently very passionate about the making of their pieces, but then their photographs are fuzzy and dark, and it becomes obvious that they did not given nearly as much attention to the presentation as they did for their work. When you put so much effort into creating something lovely, shouldn’t the way you present it to others be just as lovely if not more?
Sasha Prood is a wonderful illustrator who grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She creates beautiful watercolor paintings of organic shapes and typography, then photographs her work among supplies from her plant-filled studio apartment in Brooklyn, NY. Not only is her work gorgeous on its own, but her presentation makes it seem so much more fun and personal. It’s easy to understand why clients such as J. Crew, Juicy Couture, and Wired Magazine UK have gone gaga over it.
I think there is so much to be learned from letting go of perfectionism and allowing things to develop naturally, both in art and in life. It’s something that is so hard for many people to do – to work unrestrained without bothering so much with all of the little inconsistencies that may pop up in the process. Sometimes mistakes left unfixed can be a distraction, it’s true, yet today’s feature is about an artist who not only allows her mistakes to remain on the canvas, but embraces them as natural occurrences that are to be appreciated.
Deborah Zlotsky is an artist based out of Albany, NY whose paintings are completely unplanned – instead they develop during a responsive and organic process where she constantly alters the relationships between shape and color. In her artist statement, Deborah says, “As I adjust one relationship, another slips out of balance. Overlaying, abrading, reconfiguring, and repeatedly repainting and revarnishing create slippage between the past, present and future, as accidents and change remain visible in each work.”
William Miller is a veteran photojournalist from New York who once considered cameras to be merely tools that were used to interpret a visual story for the numerous magazines and newspapers that commissioned his work, but when he stumbled across a broken Polaroid camera at a yard sale, he found, through experimentation, that there was actually a story to be told by the inner workings of the camera itself. See more work below…
Paul Wackers is an artist who draws on the work of the traditional masters of art (Matisse, Picasso, etc.) and changes it up with his own contemporary approach. As he says, his work “is a response to the world and then a reaction to what it has to offer.” He tries to create the feeling of getting lost in the thoughts that are easily ignored or put aside with his landscapes and now interiors which can be seen in his current exhibition at the Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York until the end of this month. See more work below…
Aaron Johnson is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. His works are maniacal depictions of the decaying excess of the insatiable culture we live in today. Bold colors, evil monsters, hidden symbols, and insane mixtures of textures and patterns all contribute to the sensory overload of these pieces and, in turn, of the world as a whole. See more work below…
Shay Kun is an artist in New York whose realistic looking paintings attempt to capture the grandeur of nature and the adventure seeking tourists who have come to invade it. See more work below…
