Ben Frost.
“This painting was made for an exhibition I did in San Francisco, and is definitely one of my favourite large paintings I’ve done in the last year or so. The painting is called ’20th Century Violator’ and it relates to how I see myself as an artist, and society’s place in the scheme of things. My process is one of taking images, subverting them and juxtaposing them into weird situations, so it’s very much like looking back at the 20th century and fucking with it – or ‘violating’ it. I have a love/hate affair with advertising and the media, which also includes the morals and values of previous generations.
The female protagonist in the center of the image peers sultry and exotic over a shoulder of her own death – or a ‘projected’ death that wants to ‘Have and To Kill’ rather than to ‘Have and To Hold’. The skull on her back is from a poster for the movie Evil Dead 2 (one of my favourite series of films) which reflects a contrasting duplicity of attraction and repulsion that I often explore in my work.
I’ve alluded to the turmoils of relationships with the pistol image on the left. It features a love heart on the handle, with a rose in the barrel, and the phrase ‘like a boss’ along the side – which is juxtaposed with the couple kissing beneath it and a frightened rabbit.
In the background there is a landscape scene – on the right there is a colorful rainbow with a fairytale castle and sheep in the fields and on the left we see the same scene in banal greys, with the same sheep dead in the field.
So there is darkness and light, old and new, hope and distraught – all opposing emotions and ideas that we experience often simultaneously in the rollercoaster that is life.”
~ Ben Frost
BEN FROST.
Here are some works by a very influential artist of mine.
I feel his work has similar ‘Pop’ styles to my own, as well as using collage and advertisements, along with bold colours and great composition. Here is an article I found online:
http://www.shootinggallerysf.com
Australian born artist Ben Frost is known for his kaleidoscopic Pop Art, mash-up paintings that take inspiration from areas as diverse as graffiti, collage, photorealism and sign-writing. By subverting mainstream iconography from the worlds of advertising, entertainment and politics, he creates a visual framework that is bold, confronting and often controversial. With a blatant disrespect for the signifiers of our visual culture, Ben creates multi-layered surfaces of refreshing intensity.
He has been exhibiting throughout the world for the last 12 years and has been involved in his own share of controversy. In 2000, he faked his own death for an exhibition suitably titled ‘Ben Frost is Dead’ which made national news in Australia. His painting ‘White Children Playing’ caused a stir for its graphic depiction of children using drugs and a masked and disgruntled assailant slashed one of the paintings in his exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Police also tried to remove one of his collaborative artworks in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney because of its graphic nature. He also began and continues to run the Australian street art website ‘Stupid Krap’ and started the yearly paste-up festival Paste-Modernism, which is the largest of its kind in the world.
Jeff Koons artworks have certainly shown to us the influence of his enlargement of mundane objects, to younger artists such as Damien Hirst.
His 20ft painted bronze sculpture called “Hymn”, which was originally inspired by his son’s fourteen-inch anatomical model toy, this is very similar to Koons “Balloon Dog” sculpture from 2005.
A giant sculpture by British artist Damien Hirst, called “Hymn”, is seen on the roof of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. Picture taken 30th March 2010.
Jeff Koons
(January 21, 1955)
I find Jeff Koons inspirational, because of his idea’s of scale and objects. I feel his work is an important part of ‘Pop Art’ and is also essential for contemporary ‘Pop’ artists.
http://www.coskunfineart.com
Jeff Koons is an American Artist born in York, Pennsylvania 1955, he studied painting at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, and the Maryland Institute College of Art.
In the 1980’s he set up a factory studio in a loft on the corner of Houston and Broadway in New York.
Each assigned to a different aspect of production, 30 staff were involved in Koons work.
Koons then moved on to the works of large stainless-steel blowups of children’s toys, called “Statuary”.
From (1994-2000) Koons released his work called “Balloon Dog” based on a balloon, which is twisted into the shape of a Dog. To give the appearance of balloons, the sculpture was made of metal, which was painted bright red. This sculpture was more than ten feet tall.
Koons was asked in 1992 to create a piece of artwork for an exhibition in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
This resulted in Jeff Koons forty-three feet tall sculpture of a West Highland White Terrier called ‘Puppy’, which was constructed in a steel substructure, blooming in a variety of flowers.
Roy Lichtenstein
(October 27th 1923 – September 29th 1997)
Roy Lichtenstein is a huge favourite of mine. Because of my love of graphic novels and trashy comic books, I find his work inspiring. His defined black lines and emphasis on the enlarged dots within his work, I find remarkable.
Roy Lichtenstein is an American artist who was born in New York City on October 27th in 1923.
Lichtenstein was inspired by comic strips and advertisements, which moulded him into becoming one of the leading artist’s of the new Pop Art movement in the 1960’s.
His works are parodied from American popular culture and the art world itself.
Following artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, his work started having characteristics of Abstract Expressionism and popular American culture. Instead of abstract paintings that Pollock and others had done in the past, Lichtenstein drew inspiration directly from advertising and comic books. He mimicked his borrowed sources down to a stenciled process, which imitated mechanical prints used for commercial/industry art.
“When I have used cartoon images, I’ve used them ironically, to raise the question: Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?”
– Roy Lichtenstein
