Fashion and Contemporary Art: A Perfect Match
Is fashion art? Can art be fashion? These arguments should no longer exist thanks to a long history that has witnessed how the two creative cultures have collided, collaborated, and crossed over time and time again. Fashion and art both have stories to tell and messages to communicate to their audiences. Bold or understated, loud […]
NFT Art Guide: What It Is, How To Use It, and the Future of the Tech
Thanks to the incorruptible power of blockchain technology, we have decentralized digital ledgers that have opened a world of possibilities for digital art. While the digital marketplace gave us a new way to conduct transactions through cryptocurrencies, it also evolved and created a method for representing and managing the ownership of digital assets. The future […]
How-to Marketing for Self-taught Artists
While anyone these days can easily access paints, pencils, sketchbooks, canvases, or clay, not everyone is driven by creativity to see what their minds and hands can produce with these materials. Most artists will tell you that they came into their craft naturally, drawn by curiosity which grew into a nagging need to continue to […]
The Mysterious Motives of Manet’s Masterpiece, Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe – Art and Nude Series: Part. 4
“I paint what I see, not what others like to see.” – Édouard Manet It can’t be helped. When you first look upon Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe (1863) by French painter Édouard Manet, your eyes are instinctively drawn towards the woman who illuminates against the darker, rich tones of her background. But it’s not just […]
Art and Politics Part. 3: Art Speaks in Times of War
From a mural in Paris of a young girl waving a Ukrainian flag while crushing war tanks beneath her feet to a 13-by-13-meter painting of a white dove holding an olive branch in Ukraine’s national colors on a building façade in Frankfurt, artists all over the globe are showing solidarity with Ukraine through powerful art. […]
Food Art Obsession – A Feast for Our Eyes
The almost ritualistic behavior of capturing images of photogenic food and sharing with social connections didn’t begin with the digital age. Well before the “camera eats first” phenomenon, depictions of food were the main theme for artwork. Recalling the primitive roots of food art, the subgenre is anything but bitesize, but rather, a banquet that […]
Benefits of Signing and Dating Your Art
Do you sign your artwork with the same signature you use on legal documents? Do you sign your work on the back of the canvas or do you hide your signature within the painting? Or do you not sign and date your artwork at all believing it’s not necessary? It’s not uncommon for artists to […]
Celebrating the Legacy of Black Artists in Black History Month 2022
The Black Woman is God (TBWIG) exhibition, which showcases Black women visual artists, is back in person at the SOMArts Cultural Center. Exhibits like this one showed their flexibility last year, along with many other venues that had to respond to the disruption brought on by the global pandemic. But while it was forced into […]
Why Your Art Title Is Important
There’s a divide between artists; those who believe that a title helps give the artwork its identity, those that don’t give titles much thought, and those who deliberately do not title their work. Why do artists leave their work untitled? Many visual artists philosophize that their art should speak for itself and allow the viewer […]
Arte Povera – The Birth of an Art Movement
Influenced by earlier art movements such as Spatialism and Dau al Set, the avant-garde Arte Povera movement originated in Italy — lasting a relatively short period between the late 1960s and early 1970s. The radical movement challenged the traditional art world by rejecting fine art materials like oil paint and marble and choosing instead to […]
Remembering Lawrence Weiner and Art of Semiotics – Conceptual Art Series Part. 5
“Because Mr. Weiner’s words are mutable, appearing in one state and then another, they are not only continually remade but also renewed.” – New York Times critic Roberta Smith On December 2nd, 2021, the world bid a final farewell to Lawrence Weiner, the American artist who was widely recognized as the “godfather” of the Conceptual […]
The Alluring Populism of Art Toys
There are art collectors, and there are toy collectors. There was a time when those two would never be confused. However, toy designers and collectible toy enthusiasts have long argued that designer toys are a true art form — likening the medium to sculptures. And just as art can carry emotional value, so do toys […]