Monday 27 February 2017

Entries being accepted through Tuesday for photography show

The 16th Annual Sara Grijalva Juried Photography Show will be the fine arts show for the month of March at the Ocotillo Performing Arts Center.
This year’s show is themed “Reflections.”
“This has been a well-entered show in the past, and this year should prove no exception,” said Laurie Schotz, executive director of the Artesia Arts Council. “There are, however, some new twists.”
Among those will be a reception for all entries Friday, March 3, with refreshments provided by The Dessert Studio and an awards presentation. Liz Mikels, star of The Harvey Girls, the show set for 7 p.m. March 3 at the OPAC, will speak after the reception about the Harvey Girls.
All entries will also receive a free ticket to “Hamlet” March 27, which is also when the People’s Choice award winner will be announced. Cash awards and ribbons will be awarded for Best in Show and first through third place, as well.
The Artesia Arts Council is accepting entries through Tuesday, Feb. 28. Entries may be dropped off at the OPAC. Membership in the arts council is not required; entry fee for nonmembers is $8, $6 for members, with no limit on entries or size restrictions.
For more information, call the OPAC at 746-4212 or visit www.artesiaartscouncil.com. Those who may not be photographers but who are art enthusiasts are encouraged to stop by the OPAC gallery from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. Wednesdays, or two hours prior to any scheduled show, to vote for People’s Choice. The public is also invited to attend the reception and be one of the first to see the show.
Jennifer Duff’s photography students from Park Junior High School will also have a photography show beginning Thursday, March 2, with a reception at 6 p.m. The public is also encouraged to support that show, which will remain on display through the end of March. A free screening of “The Harvey Girls” movie will be shown at 7 p.m. March 2.
Resource :  http://www.artesianews.com/1428171/entries-being-accepted-through-tuesday-for-photography-show.html

Friday 24 February 2017

Nail Art Chrome dan 3D Jadi Primadona

Selain make up pada wajah, kuku juga merupakan salah satu anggota tubuh yang penting untuk diperhatikan demi menjaga penampilan. Kuku berwarna indah dengan hiasan berupa ornamen-ornamen kecil tentu menarik bagi kaum hawa. Seni mewarnai kuku ini disebut Nail Arts dan memang sudah populer di kalangan masyarakat.
Pewarnaan kuku pun ada banyak sekali jenis dan modelnya. Nail Artist asal Kota Malang, Ivana Amelia Anggo, mengatakan model chrome menjadi pilihan terbaik pada tahun 2016 lalu. “Tahun ini pun model chrome masih banyak diminati karena berwarna metalic dan mengkilap namun tetap menimbulkan kesan elegan,” ujar perempuan kelahiran 1992 ini.
Begitu pula dengan jenis arts 3D yang masih sangat populer, terutama di kalangan remaja. Nail arts 3D memang terkenal dengan keunikannya dan perlu tingkat ketelitian yang tinggi selama pengerjaan. Bentuk-bentuk 3D yang unik dibentuk secara manual menggunakan acrylic powder yang dicampur dengan gel cat kuku. Selanjutnya, nail artist akan membentuknya diatas permukaan kuku sesuai dengan permintaan.
Karena model 3D memiliki karakter yang istimewa, Anda yang sering melakukan pekerjaan kantoran tidak dianjurkan untuk menggunakan nail art 3D karena bisa mengganggu aktivitas. Begitu juga dengan perawatannya, jenis 3D nail arts termasuk lebih rumit karena memiliki detail yang bersifat keras. Anda harus sangat berhati-hati jika ingin cat kuku Anda bertahan lama. 


“Nail art 3D lebih cocok untuk even-even tertentu atau acara di atas panggung. Bagi Anda yang kegiatannya padat, model gel nail arts atau chrome lebih cocok karena selain tampak elegan dan memikat, perawatannya lebih mudah,” tambahnya.

Memilih cat kuku dan jasa pelayanannya juga tidak bisa sembarangan. Kuku juga memiliki pori-pori sehingga Anda tetap harus memperhatikan kesehatannya. Jika Anda menggunakan cat kuku yang kurang berkualitas atau bahkan menggunakan bahan berbahaya, dapat menyebabkan jamur dan kekeringan di permukaan kuku. Selalu perhatikan keterangan pada label dan jangan mudah tergoda dengan produk yang murah.

Ivana yang pernah mengikuti pelatihan nail arts bertaraf Internasional juga merekomendasikan penggunaan kutek halal yang aman bagi ibu hamil maupun menyusui. Berbahan dasar air dan menggunakan pewarna yang aman, kutek halal menjadi primadona dan target sasaran bagi perempuan yang ingin mempercantik kukunya. Kuku juga menjadi lebih sehat karena kutek halal ini mengandung vitamin.

Selain memilih produk yang berkualitas, Anda juga sebaiknya menggunakan pelayanan nail arts yang kompeten. Pewarnaan kuku yang sempurna di Ivana Nail Arts bisa memakan waktu 1-2 jam dengan rentang harga mulai Rp 150 ribu.

“Kami hanya menggunakan produk berkualitas karena kecantikan dan kesehatan kuku adalah hal utama. Kompetensi yang dimiliki pun didapatkan dari kursus, pelatihan bahkan sekolah khusus bertaraf internasional,” tambah Ivana yang membuka salon nail artsnya di Perum Puncak Yamin, Tidar, Kota Malang ini. (bla/nda) 
Resource : http://www.malangpost.net/perempuan/familia/nail-art-chrome-dan-3d-jadi-primadona

Celebrate chalk art at 23rd Street Painting Festival

   

Featuring over 250 paintings, and with crowds of art lovers, onlookers and artists expected to top 100,000, the 23rd Annual Lake Worth Street Painting Festival is a huge deal.

Artists, passionate about their craft and covered in chalk, will get down and dirty while creating their masterpieces.

Watch as they transform Lake and Lucerne avenues into incredible, horizontal galleries of art.

In addition to beautiful art, there will be musical acts including Le Nauages, Grace & The Victory Riders, Nicholas Marks and Diogo Brown.

Enjoy food at downtown’s restaurants as well as fare from the festival’s food court.

The 2017 festival beer tents will be manned by volunteers from Wheels For Kids. All tips will go directly to the organization which provides customized wheelchairs for special needs children.

Where: Downtown Lake Worth on Lake and Lucerne avenues.

When: starts at 10 a.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Cost: free

Information: www.streetpaintingfestivalinc.org 
Resource :http://www.palmbeachpost.com/events/celebrate-chalk-art-23rd-street-painting-festival/oKEfn3W8N21YFaNzLnvR0N/

Monday 13 February 2017

Look Outward, Artist: What Photography Can Learn From Danny Lyon in the Age of Trump

Were there any artists who documented the rise of Trump? His rallies, his voters, his America? The election was a return to history, though liberals were perhaps too sure of themselves to see it at the time: Where is the history painting? Where are all the close-in pictures of fomenting populist rage, racism, nativism, bigotry? As far as I know, no artist captured this. (Or all did in abstract, still indiscernible ways.) All of our visual images have come from two sources, neither that reliable. First, from Trump supporters themselves. (I follow as many as I can: Students for Trump, Women for Trump, etc. But their pictures are all the same: Unironic small groups of happy, waving white people in red MAGA hats.) Second, from the news, whose focus in the end was only on Trump’s behavior and words. And however much he loved the gaze of camera banks at his rallies, Trump was right when he said, panderingly, that the cameras should have been turned away from him; they should have focused on the crowd. Only C-Span showed these crowds in extended unedited pre- and post-speech detail shots. (I do think the crowds we tended to see up close were those of Bernie Sanders.)

So why didn’t any artists rush in to fill the void? First, Trump’s candidacy happened fast; few saw his rise as a void to fill until it was too late. More to the point, by 2015, art, while often topical, mostly took on large, deeply rooted structures like systemic racism, homophobia, sexism, capitalism, or colonialism — except when artists worked on their own issues, usually having to do with aspects of identity and personal history. This often prioritized subject matter and autobiography over visual originality. But artists don’t have to choose, and their work does not have to advocate to be political — or even take “politics” as its subject. Instead, it can choose “injustice,” or “outrage,” “despair,” “community,” “vengeance,” “doom.” That is, the world and all the ways it is perpetually and violently disrupted and disjointed.

But something else happened, by and large during Obama’s presidency. By the end of his eight years, politics had become an outward projection of one’s own position and activism. This narrowed the politics addressed and subtly discouraged critical dissent. If an artwork was supposedly about misogyny but still derivative, simplistic, or just bad, being critical of it could result in being called sexist. Exclusion of art like this from exhibitions or collections could bring accusations of bias. In this way, the art world politically insulated itself while placing itself above its larger audience, often preaching in elaborate formal languages that only the choir knew. But great art did get made. Kara Walker’s gigantic sphinx-like sugar sculpture — which should be resurrected outside the White House — had the terrifying grandeur and malevolence of Moby-Dick, some Last Judgment. When will we see more like it?
One artist whose work was recently on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise especially demands attention as an example of that alternate model —especially when it comes to photography. Even with his godsend of a Whitney retrospective last summer, it’s probable that most people have still never heard of one of the most powerful and political photographers in history, Danny Lyon. This is partly because his work couldn’t be more different from what we laud as good photography now — more on that later. Lyon slipped so far off the art-world radar that three years ago, I, a lifelong fan, embarrassed myself asking Lyon’s excellent artist son, Noah, “Is your dad still alive?” Yes, he was, and working nonstop as he always has, now in Bernalillo, New Mexico, where he lives with his wife and dogs. Yet, I hadn’t seen a gallery show of Lyon in decades.

That just changed with the fantastic look back at his pictures from the early 1960s at Gavin Brown last month. Also included was a new video made with his old pal, the late Julian Bond — the two of them discussing how the Occupy Movement didn’t go far enough is fascinating, as is listening to both self-identify as “change agents” and “revolutionaries.” When I met Lyon at his gallery opening, I gleaned he wasn’t man who suffers fools, he never stops moving, and is still on fire. “Where I live is getting militarized,” he told me. “Mexicans have taken the place of black people down there.”
Born in 1942 and raised in Queens (a self-described “white boy from Forest Hills”), in 1962 he took a camera and hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois, to be part of the civil-rights movement. “The movement became my life,” he told me. “The law was wrong and it was our responsibility to break it.” Sounds familiar. There, he became inspired by and met John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, now a civil-rights hero and congressman, and one of Trump’s continual bête noires. That fall, Lyon was in Mississippi with the movement covering voter registrations. Soon this “white boy from Forest Hills” was SNCC’s “official photographer.” As such, Lyon saw it all, up close, in detail; he covered everyone and everything — sit-ins, riots, prison cells, marchers, mobs, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali. He ran from white gangs, hid in cars with guns, escaped police by giving false names at airports (Paul Newman). Yet he was so adroit, that part of our collective inner picture of what this struggle looked like — its bravery, camaraderie, suffering, danger, triumph, and violence — derives from Lyon. The famous One Man One Vote poster of a black man in overalls summed up the movement’s bottom line. Fifteen young black women held in a Georgia stockade, a black choir singing at the March on Washington, mobs turning on demonstrators — all these are Lyon’s pictures. In some ways he sums up what the early political 1960s looked and felt like as much as Jackson Pollock’s drips define what the early cultural 1950s looked and felt like in America.

I saw many of these photographs at the time, like all Americans back then; they were part of our news wallpaper. But I never knew these were Lyon’s pictures until much later; I just thought they were incredible and scary. After this, he recorded the destruction of lower Manhattan as witnessed from his downtown loft. Soon, he was a member of Chicago’s notorious Outlaw motorcycle gang. I grew up around Chicago and these guys were genuine “tough hombres.” By the end of the 1960s, he was photographing Southern chain gangs, which is when I first saw Conversations With the Dead. His book on the subject changed my life.

Like practically everyone of my generation, I was pretty politically active when I was young. In high school I took the subway from my comfy suburb to Grant Park in 1968 where Chicago police began beating us protesters. (It was the night when white kids were beaten rather than people of color that my right-wing Republican stepmother and all her friends turned against the war; in their video, Lyon and Bond rue how the war protests overtook “the movement” at this time. When white kids are beaten, change happens.) But Lyon’s black-and-white close-in images, personal interviews of prisoners, his involvement in the minutia of their lives, showed me that great art and activism could comingle and still retain art’s mysterious ability to make us look at the same picture a thousand times and still have it affect us differently every time. (I still peruse these pictures.) Lyon went on to do this with immigrants at the southern border, and more recently, in China. Fellow geniuses who also took to the streets to make their work included Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand (my fave), Robert Frank, and the visionary Weegee, as well as photographers like Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Stephen Shore (collectively known as New Topographics — a group that recorded suburbia’s encroachment on the landscape, implicitly showing the rape of the land, the socioeconomics, and white flight that was shaping America). All these artists were as visually and politically radical as any history painting, as stylistically risky as the Impressionists. These artists were models of what I thought photography should be.
But this future was not to be. By the 1970s, after the tumult of the 1960s, America turned inward. So-called political activism and street photography were back-burnered. There was no market for art (the art world hadn’t really formed yet) and so universities were mainly where art was coming from. (And I didn’t go to school.) For the first time in history, almost all artists went to art school. This changed the art world in many ways. First, it gave artists something other than life to push against insofar as most of the teachers were either men, older, or white artists who believed that art was better in the old days of the 1960s. Women in particular were shunted aside, and at the same time, there were implicit prescriptions against painting. (It was dead again.) This meant that just the act of painting itself seemed radical (I remember how shocked I was when I smelled oil paint again in galleries in around 1980!) For women to paint, however, seemed revolutionary. Schools also professionalized the art world, foregrounded careers, galleries, the nascent market, networking.

By the 1980s, these artists, many of them women who found the doors of painting closed to them, took up the camera as a tool and weapon. They made a totally new, powerful activist art. Using images and found objects, they undermined, torpedoed, and coerced new levels of visual recognition from photography, popular culture, advertising, and social structures. Artists like Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Laurie Simmons, and Cindy Sherman, as well as Richard Prince and many others, were warriors who used cameras but whose art had little to do with street or landscape photography, or overt journalism. They weren’t recording the news; they were making it. They flipped the script, making the photograph not be just a recording of reality, but transformed it into a new reality with complex languages of perception. This had been happening in the medium from the beginning, but it exploded in the early 1980s. These artists changed the world as much as Lyon and his generation.

This work was thrilling to me — as thrilling, probably, as the work I had seen by Lyon and others in the 1960s. Though it was politicized in a quite different way: These artists were simultaneously makers, thieves of other people’s images, detectives looking for socio-psycho-cultural clues, curators of subgenres. The artist’s identity was always present in the overt manipulation of these images; the artist was never passive bystander. It’s impossible to look at a Kruger image-text piece and not think “What side am I on?” They still put me on inner notice.

After Pictures Art came a group of artists — almost none of them American, almost all of them men — who drew on the ideas of New Topographics. Only this new group scaled up this vision into huge glitzy pictures, colorized, spectacularized, theatricalized, and theorized them. Artists like Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff (so ubiquitous in the 1990s that I collectively called them Struffsky; I got a nasty note from one of them), and Canadians like Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham, all took photography toward movies, billboards, storytelling, history painting, and high-production values. Wall’s gigantic setup aesthetic, with numerous allusions to other art makes him, for me, the best art-history student ever. (Never mind that only art-world denizens know these allusions.) The politics here were seduction so that great systems could be addressed: industrial farming, world trade, museums, architecture, etc. Instead of using the politics of the body, their work was commentary on the then border-to-border, buzzy hum of modern life and what Rem Koolhaas famously called Junk Space.

By 2000, with notable exceptions, the Pictures aesthetic had become so dominant in the art world, so taught in schools, fixed, validated by academics, canonized, collected, and endlessly exhibited in institutions that photography began to ossify and draw in on itself. Moreover, after September 11, 2001, the spectacularization of the Germans and Wall, etc., seemed after the fact. The medium pulled in and essentially became photography about photography. Since then, we’ve seen endless pictures of cameras, photographs of photographs, ads, green screens, commercial photography color cards, mirrors, monochromes, light fixtures, film boxes, film, digital patterns, and even pictures of chemicals used in old-style photography. Also omnipresent are collaged images of other images so that the graphic field is flawed enough for the eye and mind to know that these are familiar signals of setup photography, modernism, postmodernism and, of course, Pictures Art. This art wasn’t looking outward at the world as a subject of messy, wild interest, but only as a source of material the photographer-artist might master, imposing his or her will and vision as fully as a painter might a blank canvas.

Much of this type of work is now rote and formulaic, either ultraformal or nth degree what can you do to the preapproved formats of the monochrome, rectangle, flatness, illusion, found objects, process, materials, etc. This is Zombie Photography. And in the Bush era, believe it or not, I totally understood and embraced some of it. We all got that administration’s message loud and clear: “We don’t give a shit what you think. We make up our own reality.” War and economic collapse were brought on America. So it makes perfect sense that artists turned their backs on this and gathered around their own artistic campfires and commiserated with one another, honing ideas into finer and finer bytes. It was an act of defiance, albeit comprehensible only those in the know. But we badly needed to be cloaked then, developing our languages and looks.

But Trump is different from Bush. This is history of a type we haven’t experienced since the civil-rights and Vietnam War era, and the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. This is big history. Everyone feels the urgency — things are invading us fast, fracturing us. New questions are in the air: big questions, important ones, a rebirth of tragedy maybe. Agglomerations of seriousness are gathering; inner excitements, doubts, ideas are tumbling. This is what a test of time feels like. And the government isn’t prepared to address any of this.

My favorite scene in Apocalypse Now is when the Martin Sheen character asks a soldier in a firefight, “Do you know who’s in charge here?” The terrified soldier pleads, “I thought you were!” Next he asks another soldier the same question and he calmly replies, “Yes.” Meaning we are in charge. This moment gives agency. The situation has fallen once again to us to take matters into our own hands. No one is currently a spectator to any of this. We’re in it. Individuality and the group mind are mingling in new ways. This is why we mustn’t become art police, demanding that art “be political.” All art is political because within every contemporary artist is the deep content of this time and all of that is in their work — even if it’s just stripes or squiggles, done unoriginally, in a fever, with insight. Art, in other words, is going through the same changes you are, that we all are. Last week I saw a great protest sign — Cary Smith’s stark blue, geometric abstract painting that seemed to say, “Focus on this, motherfuckers.”

Indeed, the energy of the streets is already changing inner consciousness, replacing sheer hopelessness, passive alienation, and business as usual. New generations have already found embodied activisms. None of this is a call for artists to make “political art.” Please, God, save us from the reams of insipid “so-called” political art about to wash over us. As Gerhard Richter said, “You can’t say that art is no good because Mozart didn’t prevent the concentration camps.” This isn’t a call for the end of formalist or conceptual photography, either. Nevertheless, it does seem something is stirring in younger artists that stirred in Lyon long ago. Some of them may hitchhike to the heartland to take pictures of Trump supporters or the new faces of all of us feeling like we’re part of some sort of new countermovement. Either way, for this stain to be erased from America, two things need to happen: First, Republican overreach and failure will lead to protest; second, this energy of the street can make us all “change agents.” America is in the balance again. We need to see what all this looks like without the filters of the news and zealots. We need to see America singing from the point of view of the artist.

Resource :http://www.vulture.com/2017/02/danny-lyons-photography-is-a-great-lesson-for-the-trump-era.html

Sunday 12 February 2017

The man who painted a street mural of Beyonce

The photograph is barely two weeks old but already it feels like it has existed forever.

On 1 February superstar singer Beyonce announced on Instagram that she is pregnant with twins - with 10.2 million "likes" (and counting) the photograph has become the most popular picture ever on the social media platform.

For days people around the world chatted about the complex symbolism behind the picture, its possible similarity to awkward posed family photographs, and some even thanked Beyonce for crushing the myth that women must wear matching underwear.

Now a 20-metre (60ft) high mural of Queen Bey in her flowing green veil and purple bra with blue pants has appeared in the trendy Collingwood district in Melbourne, Australia.

The artist is Mark Wells, known as Lushsux on social media.

He has made a name for himself by painting celebrities and politicians, including Kim Kardashian, Hillary Clinton and "Salt Bae" - the Turkish man whose videos of cutting meat made him a social media sensation in January.

Mark Wells says he chose Beyonce to be his most recent muse because her photograph broke world records and he likes to "paint things that normal people like".

"Street art used to be about real counter-culture - but now that has been normalised. What used to be radical is now just mainstream and not cool.

"Beyonce is really the antithesis to what normal street art people like," Wells explains.

But although he recognises the power of the photograph, he isn't exactly Beyonce's number one fan.

"She's not bad or anything. She is talented - wasn't she in TLC before?" he commented.

When it was pointed out that before she went solo, Beyonce actually used to sing in Destiny's Child not TLC, Wells replied that he really likes Destiny's Child too.

The mural is already proving popular.

Pregnant women have posted pictures of themselves posing in front of it, including Amy Jackett who is 40 weeks pregnant. 
Not everyone is happy though.

One local resident complained that it is a "horrendous eyesore" that he hoped was defaced as soon as possible.
A$8,000 of paint

But painting walls is not just a frivolous hobby for Wells, who used to work in a soft drinks factory.

The paint for the Beyonce mural cost him A$8,000 (£4,850), and it took him five days of standing outside in the blazing summer heat.

He says it's worth it.

"Whether people like it or hate it, they take photographs and discuss it.

"I enjoy laughing at some of the angry reactions".
Wells claims that he gets unique commissions as a result of the global attention, including one from the Russian Foreign Ministry.

In January he tweeted a photograph of his mural of the popular meme of a fake photograph of Russian President Vladimir Putin riding a bear.

Political street art is popular in Russia, and the president is already the subject of numerous murals.

"The next thing I knew after sending the tweet was a guy claiming to be in the Russian foreign ministry contacted me to ask if I would come to Russia to paint Putin.

"I want to do it - I'm now trying to make it happen", Wells explains.

Is he worried about what might happen if the mural does not meet the brief?

He says he just hopes he won't meet a sticky end.
 Resource : http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-38952442

Monday 6 February 2017

Décor designs ruling spring 2017

The last few years have seen trends in interior décor changing fairly slowly, with some styles lasting for a long time and few elements really distinguishing each season. 2017 brings something very different. Now is the time for a major revamp. You don’t need to spend a fortune to do it – paint, wallpaper and accessories, such as rugs and cushions, are easy to change. Many of the new items coming in are beautiful, however, and look set to have staying power of their own.

Jewel colours


After the greys and neutrals of the past few years, we’re entering a bright new era in which vivid jewel colours are starting to appear everywhere. You’ll find them particularly striking in glass, plastics and ceramics, so purchasing just a few small items can bring a fierce burst of colour into your room. If there’s one shade that stands to the fore, it’s cobalt blue, replacing the navy that dominated last season with something far more charismatic. You’ll find that gold is out this year (even if White House decorators disagree), but little splashes of it alongside this blue are still on trend and really bring it to life.

Playing with patterns


Patterns are going through a big shift this season. Classic stripes and checks will always have their place but they’re starting to look old fashioned, and chevron patterns are completely out. Instead, look out for Art Deco-inspired geometric patterns and 80s style abstracts that make bold use of squares, rectangles and triangles. Placing different patterns next to each other is a great way to make a statement but it’s hard to pull off, so approach it with caution. You’ll find that some wall prints and printed fabrics have done the hard work for you here.

Go wild


There’s another big trend in printed and painted materials this year, and that’s African wildlife. Gorillas, elephants, giraffes and lions stalk across walls and bedspreads, and bold leaf prints brighten up previously demure rooms. You’ll also find these themes showing up in ornaments and as motifs on carved pieces of furniture. One great way to enhance them is to introduce some suitably dramatic potted plants to your home. Never mind the begonias – bring on the yuccas and palms.

Slim down


This is something many people set out to do at the start of every season, but when it comes to your home, it’s a lot easier to do. This season, it’s time to get rid of bulky canopies, throws and curtains, and slim your décor down. Unadorned windows are also out (and impractical for a lot of homes) but Roman blinds or a slim set of plantation window shutters are a great solution, with lots of colour choices to suit the overall look of a room. Beds that have had their draperies removed, meanwhile, can be smartened up with padded headboards, which have the added benefit of being very comfortable when you want to sit up and read.

Sensual textures

Although trims and frills are out this season, that doesn’t mean that you can’t indulge. 2017’s soft furnishings are all about texture. Think velvet, chenille and soft wool – textures that absorb the light and make those jewel colours look even richer, while feeling wonderful against your skin. Goatskin, stripped down and dyed, is making an appearance in the luxury market. If you really want to stand out, you can try reindeer skin, which is amazingly soft and supple, and in rug form, a great insulator for draughty floors.

Metal and stone


Are you choosing flooring or work surfaces for your bathroom or kitchen? Just as white is out as a paint colour for walls, white marble is out for finishing these rooms, and you can say goodbye to tiled worktops and bathroom surfaces. Terracotta is great for floors but too absorbent for other uses, so consider coloured marble or granite for the luxury look. If you’ve recently refitted everything in copper, you’ll be sorry to hear that that’s out now, having always looked a bit overwhelming – instead, this year is likely to be dominated by mixed metals creating subtle tone effects, such as brass and steel, placed side by side. Meanwhile, a new form of black stainless steel is making an impression in the world of appliances.

With all these exciting new trends to explore, this spring is going to be a busy time for redecoration. One thing is for sure: when you’re done, your home will look a lot more vibrant, warm and welcoming. It’s time to say goodbye to a world of drab colours and welcome in a brilliant future.

Resource :http://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2017/02/06/decor-designs-ruling-spring-2017/

For muralist, Allen, it's all about the art

For Mindy Allen, art is just something she’s always done.

It’s who she is, in a sense.

“Ever since I was little, I would take books or magazines, look at the pictures and copy or draw them,” she said. “I remember in kindergarten my teacher hanging a picture up that I colored. It’s just what I’ve done. I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t do this because it’s like ‘the thing’ that I can do.”

Allen, a Scott City native and 1990 graduate of Scott Community High School, turned her love of art into a professional mural painting business, Mindy’s Murals. She earned a degree in graphic design from Kansas State University in 1994 and has two children, a son, Cole, who is attending K-State majoring in wildlife biology, and a daughter, Haley, a senior at SCHS.

At first, right out of college, Allen’s painting was more of a hobby or sideline.

She has worked several different jobs, including a stint at the Garden City Telegram as an advertising sales person and an ad designer, and also worked at picture framing shop and would paint murals in her spare time.

“I just sort of decided to see what I could do when my kids got older and it took off,” she said of heading out on her own about four-and-a-half years ago.

Allen said in the beginning, she started in mural painting by doing her children’s and nieces bedrooms, and would get calls every now and then from people asking her to paint murals in their homes.

One of her more recent pieces is the mural in the maternity waiting room at St. Catherine Hospital, which features a kind of a magical, enchanted forest theme with rainbows, trees, fairies and fairytale castles. She said it took roughly a week to complete it in December.

As to why she specializes in murals rather than other mediums, Allen thought about it a moment and said it probably has to do with the scale of a room-sized piece.

“Yes, a painting is nice to look at on the wall. But to have it around you in the whole room, or on such a large scale, to me it’s so much more rewarding. I love it,” she said. “I love being able to walk into a room and add to it, make it original to (the customer) and what they like, so that every time they walk in the room they see it and they feel it and they like it — love it hopefully.”

Allen’s inspiration comes in various ways. Clients usually give her a general idea of what they are looking for and Allen runs with it. Others are more specific, while some suggest a theme limited by a certain budget.

After she gets the idea or theme, Allen looks around online for some of her ideas and then puts the pieces together mentally. She doesn’t draw a sketch first, she said she “just starts.”

“I don’t usually sketch things out. For one thing, I’m kind of a project by project person,” she said. “I mean, it’s in my head, I’m thinking about it, but I’m not putting anything down. Then when I get there, I know what I want to do at that point.”

Another benefit of doing things that way, she said, is it avoids people having their homes in disarray for longer than is necessary. She also likes to get in and get it done as quickly as she can while her creativity is at its peak.

In general, Allen paints 6 to 8 hours a day on her projects. She charges an hourly rate, and for mileage and supplies. Some projects take a few hours while others can take as long as a week, but most are one to two day affairs.

Most of her jobs are within two hours of Scott City, but Allen has taken on jobs in Kansas City, Wichita, Manhattan and Salina, and hopes to attract business in Colorado as well.

Allen has a number of favorites, but when asked to name one she cited a bedroom mural she painted for a boy who is a junior in high school. It depicted a fierce dragon with the fire coming out of its mouth changed into a music staff that winds around the room. On the music staff is the boy’s favorite song, and a variety of fantasy and music motifs throughout the room.

“That’s probably one of my favorites just because of the thought and creativity of it,” Allen said. “And I love painting fantasy, mystical type things. I’d love to paint dragons more often because it’s just fun. There’s not really any rules.”

Allen said she loves her job and wouldn’t want to do anything else.

“This is like a dream. I went to school for graphic design thinking I was being practical and it would be easier getting a job in graphic design rather than being a painter. It turned out that’s what I actually do,” she said.

Allen’s work may be viewed on Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, by searching “Mindy’s Murals.” People interested in hiring her may also contact her through those social media sites.

Resource:http://www.gctelegram.com/news/local/for-muralist-allen-it-s-all-about-the-art/article_c37a5e28-e24c-572f-92dd-a3b980def068.html

County College of Morris to debut Black Art Matters exhibit

RANDOLPH TWP. - In honor of Black History Month, the County College of Morris Art and Design Gallery will open an exhibition in February, Black Art Matters, honoring the accomplishments of African-American artists in New Jersey.

The Black Art Matters exhibit opens Monday, Feb. 6 and runs through Friday, March 31.

A reception, which is free and open to the public, will be held from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 23

“The exhibition offers the opportunity to explore the achievements, culture and heritage of New Jersey’s African-American artists through their work,” said Todd Doney, director of the gallery and professor of visual arts at the county college.

To accomplish that, Doney reached out to Jersey City artist and friend, Alvin Pettit, to curate the exhibit.

Pettit is director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Life Center in Jersey City and is well connected to the state’s visual arts community.

A Baltimore native and New York based fine artist, Pettit is firmly situated within the figurative sculpting and painting traditions.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, his home was filled with paintings by his father and grandfather. Combined with the fact that his family was heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, the paintings led him to recognize the importance of using art as a tool for social awareness.

The Black Art Matters exhibition highlights African American artists from New Jersey including Yvonne Bandy, who teaches graphic design at the County College of Morris; Tyler Ballon, recipient of a Congressional Art Competition award; and Cory Ford, whose work earned a first place award at the Greenpoint Gallery 2014 People’s Choice Show.

The title Black Art Matters is used to emphasize the point that art created by African Americans is part of the history of visual arts in the United States and worldwide according to Pettit.

“The significance and impact African-American Art has had on society is immeasurable,” Pettit said. “It is woven into the fabric of civilization and the recognition it deserves is long overdue.”

The Art and Design Gallery is located in the Sherman H. Masten Learning Resource Center on the County College of Morris' Randolph campus, located at 214 Center Grove Road.

Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Monday and Wednesday from noon to 8 p.m., Tuesday and Thursday , noon to 4 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. the first Saturday of the month.

Resource:http://www.newjerseyhills.com/randolph_reporter/news/county-college-of-morris-to-debut-black-art-matters-exhibit/article_c6739543-6293-51c4-99b8-82c05ebf082f.htmla

Thursday 2 February 2017

Paint me a story


 The Traditional and Folk Artist Workshop at Punjab Kala Bhawan opens a window to the colourful world of tribesmen
Amarjot Kaur
Tribal prints often score an edge in the fashion industry, be it the native-American Aztec prints or the fascination of neo-hippie cult with Indian Warli prints. Quite a transition from walls to wardrobes, don’t you think? At the Traditional and Folk Artist Workshop, organised by Punjab Lalit Kala Akademi and South Central Zone Cultural Centre, Nagpur, Meenakshi Vasudev Vayeda of Ganjhad village earns a living by making Warli prints.

“Folk art of Maharashtra, Warli was traditionally created by the tribal women. First explored in the early seventies, Warli art may be traced to as early as the 10th century AD. But now, we earn more as we take orders to make Warli designs on sarees, and even though Warli art is painted in red (gherua) and white (rice powder) colour, we don’t mind filling in more hue if the customer wants it,” says Meenakshi.

Made mostly on weddings, the central motive in each ritual painting is the square, the chauk; inside it we find Palaghata, the mother goddess, symbolizing fertility. “I learnt this art at weddings. However, now things are a little different. There aren’t many buyers for Warli art in India, but outside (of India) it sells. I make Rs 20,000 per painting and sometimes, we even paint a square-foot area of wall for Rs 500,” she adds.

Though Meenakshi managed to teach this art to her cousin, Nilesh Rajad, 30, who hails from the same village as hers, there aren’t many young village folks who would like to pursue the art. “I am the only one in my village who does farming and makes Warli paintings too. Not many people in my village like to take this up,” he says.

Meanwhile, Ganesh Nagilla and his wife, Vanaja, of Andhra Pradesh specialise in Cheriyal scroll painting, a stylized version of Nakashi art, rich in the local motifs located in Cheriyal, a small village.

“It requires meticulous handling of different nuances of this art that tells a mythological tale in a story format—it’s like a film on canvas,” shares Ganesh. Colours are made from easily available substances such as indigo, black from lamp soot mixed with thirumany tree gum, white from crushed, ground sea shells, lemon yellow from a particular yellowish stone, red from tamarind seeds, brown from geru, and so on. “I learnt this form of painting from my guru, who we stayed with, but now-a-days, there’s more stress on studies, so I send my daughter to Anganwadi schools and sometimes, she helps me and my wife paint and we manage to make up to Rs 40,000 on a month on an average,” he says.

Also, Dilipkumar Kale, a traditional painter from Mysore, shares that Mysore painting is a form of classical South Indian painting, which evolved in the Mysore city of Karnataka. “Under Wodeyars’s patronage, this school of painting reached its zenith. Quite similar to the Tanjore paintings, Mysore paintings make use of thinner gold leaves and the most popular themes of these paintings include themes of Hindu gods, goddesses, and the pictographic representations of the scenes from the prodigious epics of Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Bhagavta Purana,” he adds.

Jayadevanna T.S, a Surpur traditional painter of Karnataka, narrates that Surpur miniature art flourished under the then Surpur ruler Raja Venkatappa Naik during 1773 to 1858. He says, “It was during this period that artists from the Garudadri family, practicing miniature painting, migrated from Andhra Pradesh to Surpur (now in Yadgir district) and hence their paintings had the influence of Golconda miniature. The Surpur miniature painting style, which had nearly a century of extinction, was revived by Vijay Hagargundgi, a Gulbarga-based artist.”

The workshop also features the works of 10 artists of Gond, Mandana, Pinguli, Warli, Cheriyar, Surpur and Mysore styles from Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

Open daily from 10.30 am to 6.00 pm at Punjab Kala Bhawan. On till February 7.

Resource: http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/life-style/gyan-zone/paint-me-a-story/358097.html

Wednesday 1 February 2017

Cuban artists paint garments, not canvases for 'Fashion Art' show



HAVANA: A fantastical blue bird emerges from leaves in the latest work by Manuel Mendive, considered Cuba's top living artist. But this isn't a framed canvas, it's a painting on a dress, for the exhibit "Fashion Art Havana" that opened on Tuesday.

In creations by other Cuban artists, a ghostly face seems to scream out from a dark cape, a red and blue matryoshka doll is painted onto a dress, while a bubble-shaped frock is covered with wooden spikes.

The show is the latest in the "Fashion Art" series by Spanish designer Manuel Fernandez, who has worked with artists all over the world to create one-off garments at the intersection of both disciplines.

"Art doesn't have to always be hung on walls, it could also be on floor tiles, earrings, tights or many other places," Fernandez said in an interview.

Participating artists said at the opening they had high hopes the exhibit would help fashion become viewed in Communist-ruled Cuba as more than a mere consumerist indulgence.

"Fashion is also art, and this is a concept we need to start understanding here," said Jorge Perugorría, who painted a graphic black and white design on his dress.

Fernandez said he first designs a garment for an artist, letting their work and personality inspire the form. He leaves the fabric blank though, like a canvas for them to then paint.

Given that he lets the artists paint whatever they wish, he has no idea what his shows will look like until the very last minute - a nail-biting experience.

In the case of "Fashion Art Havana", which will run in Havana's sumptuous, neo-baroque Gran Teatro until Feb. 11, Fernandez said he was struck with how two painters ended up drawing on Russian themes.

This testified to the strong influence the Soviet Union had on Cuba during their Cold War alliance, something you would not find in other Latin American cultures.

Eduardo Abela, son of the Cuban artist of the same name, daubed a matryoshka doll onto his dress, while Gustavo Echevarría, known as "Cuty," stained his scarlet, then painted communist symbols like a hammer and sickle on it.

"Cuba remains a Communist country, yet at the same there is the sensuality of the dress and the consumerism of the designs - there is a contradiction there that in this case coexist perfectly," Cuty said.

With this show, Fernandez said he decided to juxtapose the new Cuban creations with works from previous collections by Puerto Rican and Spanish artists like Antonio Martorell and Rafael Canogar.

Since embarking on his "Fashion Art" project in 1998, he has worked with 300 artists worldwide with a particular focus on Latin America although his next exhibit will be in Zimbabwe, in May. His long-term aim is to create a museum for his collection, currently stored between Spain and Panama.

(Reporting by Sarah Marsh; Editing by Bill Rigby)

- Reuters

Resource:http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/entertainment/cuban-artists-paint-garments-not-canvases-for-fashion-art-sho/3482770.html