James Rizzi

 

James Rizzi with the "Rizzi Beetle"

James Rizzi was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950. He went to the University of Florida at Gainesville and graduated in 1974. While studying at the University of Florida, Rizzi came up with the idea of 3D multiples, and he started experimenting by combining painting, sculpture, and printmaking. He created an etching, printed it twice, hand colored it, and mounted parts of the one print on top of the other, using wire as a means of adding depth.  Rizzi received good grades from all his teachers on that project, and therefore he stuck with the idea and developed it further.

 

 

The Best Art Is a Good Heart

Rizzi is an “urban primitive” artist. The subject matter of his work is the celebration of his happy childhood in New York. He is most famous for his 3D artwork, especially the large, elaborate prints and rich manlike cityscapes. His amusement and delight in enthused detail and elaborate minor detail and matter create a true art brand, a trademark style as recognizable as any in the world. Colorful and spirited, James Rizzi’s work displays the artist’s fascination with contemporary urban themes. His three-dimensional constructions have been acclaimed for their bold and detailed portrayals of everyday people and places. His latest paintings combine his Picasso meets Hanna-Barbera drawing style with an increasingly chromatic palette and a complex graphic structure that simultaneously evokes cubism and the most sophisticated Amerindian friezes.

 

 

That First Kiss

Duplicate images, carefully cut out and attached, each one above its counterpart, create richly textured editions through a truly striking use of traditional printmaking techniques. James Rizzi’s most notable influences are the French Dadaist painter Jean Dubuffet, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee. Since his 1974 debut in The Brooklyn Museum’s ongoing series of print exhibitions, James Rizzi has been honored with one-person shows throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. 
A true innovator, James Rizzi articulates through his art, the influences and emotions experienced by us all. He is a universal artist who has found an enthusiastic following throughout the world.

Corita Art Center

The art gallery at Corita Art Center in California is presenting a Pop Art exhibition that is currently being held from April 18th till May 31st. The gallery will present a variety of student’s amazing works that you can check on their website louwegallery.com. If you also like to critique or hear about the art work, you can join a discussion that will be held on Sunday, May 31st at 3 p.m.

The Lou We gallery at Corita Art Center is located on:

306 Hawthorne Street, South Pasadena, CA  91030

For more information you can call them on 626-799-5551 or e-mail info@louwegallery.com

Have Fun

“At the end of the day, my art is about happiness, and that’s what I want to bring to my life and work.” -Romero Britto

Romero Britto

Romero Britto was born in Recife, Brazil in 1963 as the seventh of nine children. Art was an outlet Britto used to escape through his teenage years and early twenties when he was working toward entry into law school.  Britto has explored many media including watercolor, pen and ink, serigraphy, lithography, acrylic, and even finger paint. With clean, bold, and colorful imagery, Britto delivers strong messages in a refreshing and upbeat manner in referece to mass culture in Pop Art.

Part Time

In 1989, Romero Britto’s work was brought to the attention of Michel Roux, former U.S. importer of Absolut Vodka and creator of their legendary advertising campaign. As a result, Britto was crowned their newest showcase artist. Now, Britto’s artworks are in the collections of heads of state, European nobility, international art collectors, and superstars of the sports, entertainment, and business worlds.

zig zag love

Passion

Britto is often compared to Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, but Romero Britto is a young artist who has emerged with his own imagery and a unique style that is in fact redefining Pop Art today. Britto’s worldwide exposure propelled his rise to becoming one of today’s most celebrated and recognizable young artists. Britto’s paintings capture the ecstasy of the imagination.

Audi RS4 Art Car by Romero Britto

side view

“The notions of celebrity, fame and money are all ideas I like to play with.” -Roberto Rabanne

 

Roberto Rabanne

Roberto Rabanne was born and raised for thirteen years of his life in Panama. Therefore he has an outsider’s perspective of American and European cultures. “I see pop culture as a seductive relationship between ambition and art. My photographs record the high and low points of that liaison.” says Roberto Rabanne. Rabanne began his career in New York as the influences of the counter culture were being felt on music, fashion, art and politics. His iconic photographs of Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and other rock idols quickly earned him a reputation as a master at capturing the exhilaration of live performances on film.

 

 

Ray Charles II

Bob Marley

Rabanne’s work is greatly influenced by the works of Dadaists and Surrealists. In the late 1990s Rabanne began experimenting with photographic images to take his work beyond just capturing a moment in time. He wanted to create moments, moods, and ideas from the photographs using new technologies to push himself to be more artistic and more provocative. 

 

Objects of Desire collection at Sundance Film Festival

In 2002, Rabanne founded Rabanne Design, Inc. as a creative laboratory for expanding the limits and applications of photography to both objects and environments. He creates art from pop culture imagery that extends the parameters of fine art photography. By melding photographic images with purposeful objects, Rabanne has created “Objects Of Desire”.

Fredrick Prescott

Fredrick Prescott

Using the visual and emotional impact of brilliant color on moving steel, Fredrick Prescott produces sculptures which reflect his singularly fantastic interpretation of the world around him. Born in Palo Alto, California in 1949, the oldest son of the chief inventor and owner of the Universal Coin Meter Company, Prescott’s childhood experienced innovations of unique art form which he describes as “kinetic scenarios and kinetic landscapes”.

Hollywood Freeway

Galaxy Drive-in

Prescott embraces the most technologically advanced tools to transform raw sheets of steel into three-dimensional canvases. He draws each image onto the full color graphic computer of his Hypertherm Plasma Cutting System. Prescott’s painting style is loose and fast. His final touch of “flicking” thin fluid lines of paint mimic the waving movement that some parts of the sculptures make. Movement and the illusion of movement captivate viewers once the brilliant colors and delightful subjects have captured their attention.

Prescott has created works for the Warner Brothers and Disney Studios. Today, Prescott is as comfortable binding his own mechanical art creations as he is drawing the original designs for each piece. In the metal fabrication area of the Prescott Studio sits his pride and joy – an industrial monster machine called a Plasma Arc. “It’s the best in the world,” Prescott claims.

“I love that final breathtaking moment when you lift the screen from the paper and the image appears, as if by magic!” -Peter Mars

 

Peter Mars

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1959, Peter Mars began collecting comic books, baseball cards, and coins at an early age. When he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana in mid 1980’s, Mars started learning printmaking while working in the silkscreen studio of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center.

 

 

Lady In Blue -Peter Mars

 

 

My Heart Belongs to Daddy -Peter Mars

Mars incorporates the use of silkscreen on wood, canvas, and paper in his paintings. He is known for completing his paintings in series, where the same image appears each time within a slightly different context. Mechanical repetition, a tradition of Pop Art, plays an important role in Mars’ work. Much of his work reflects the pop culture of his childhood in the 1960s and 1970s, notably the idealized American family, television, space age inventions, and comic book figures.

 

 

 

 

Designer Steal and Lace -Peter Mars

 

See the Jaguar -Peter Mars

Mars has been the leader of Chicago’s Avant Pop Movement for the past 20 years. He fuses the traditional distinctions between high culture and low art by combining avant-garde innovation with a deep Pop Art sensibility. Mars’ works fall somewhere between Dada and Pop, as Mars himself says, “In that area where nonsense and popular culture so frequently meet.”

My opinion of Warhol

Andy Warhol is a great artist who I think is one of the few who truly lived up to the impact he created. I’m not saying he was perfect, but he was just simply that outrageous at the time. Many people don’t know of him and some of those who do know him think he is crazy and his art gets too much attention. Well i think his art isn’t famous for what it looks like most of the times but for what it actually means. 

I personally don’t think that Andy Warhol was a creative artist. I rather think of him as a genius who turned the 60’s into a pop art world. His art simply reflects the things that fascinate us. He wasn’t just interested in Art. His own magazine covered anything ‘of the moment’ and explored informal celebrity interviews, noting down everything they did, wore or said. He was basically the inventor of today’s celebrity culture.

Warhol had a massive impact on pop culture. He made it clear art was about the idea, not necessarily the accomplishment. Through his prints and his videos, Warhol shows that every little detail in our lives should be appreciated as art. This is how Warhol’s life became an exhibition of  conceptual art, and that caused for him to be the inspiration of many other artists including me.

Some people try to use Warhol’s personal life to hate on his art, but I think his personal life is irrelevant when it all comes down to his art and films. Andy warhol was extraordinary….

Today’s economy and Pop art

The U.S and the world’s economy has been seeing a significant decline in economic activity, and this has been affecting everyone including the art market. Artists always feel the pinch of bad economy first. To keep and maintain their art sales, artists have been trying to make their work indispensable to their potential buyers. They’re acquiring better marketing habits, going after people who supported their work in the past, and getting flexible about art pricing. Of course, this still does hurt the artist’s income and the value of the art piece, but this is the best way to handle the downturn in the economy.

U.S recession reduced the number of American buyers and caused prices to drop in the art market. However, the art market has a big hope  that it wouldn’t be long before the American buyers get replaced with the large groups of international art buyers. The lack of American buyers caused art price reductions which would eventually attract international buyers to the American market thus causing the American market to recover. Another factor that keeps our hopes up is that people are turning to use art as a secure investment against the later to come economic rise.

Oyvind Fahlstrom

Oyvind Fahlstrom

Oyvind Fahlstrom was an artist of immense influence whose pioneering works reflect a transition from Surrealism and Dada to Pop and various current art strategies.

Born on December 28th in Sao Paulo, Brazil to Norwegian parents, Oyvind Fahlstrom was sent by his parents to Sweden to spend his holiday with his grandfather and aunt. Due to World War II, Fahlstrom wasn’t able to see his parents again until after his graduation in 1947 where he became a Swedish citizen, and he withdrew his Brazilian passport. Fahlstrom studied archeology and Art History at the University of Stockholm in the 1950s. After that, he travelled around and met other poets and painters.

In 1954, Fahlstrom wrote and published his Manifesto for Concrete Poetry, where he defined language as a material for playful interaction, which eventually led him to the visual arts and on to become one of the first painters to incorporate comic book iconography and integrate substantial text. Later on, he joined the Phases Movement, signs a contract with Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris, and started having solo exhibitions. In 1961, Fahlstrom received a grant from the Swedish-American Foundation to live in New York. So he moved into the 128 Front Street studio formerly occupied by Robert Rauschenberg, and meanwhile neighbored by Jasper Johns. Fahlstrom started his Sitting painting series in 1962, and he started participating in exhibitions in New York with his painting series and plays.

Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, he made paintings referred to as “variables”, as well as large installations with sculptural elements, that viewers could manipulate by moving elements into changeable configurations. Fahlstrom is considered to be a pioneer of an interactive multimedia Art, a politcal activist, who combines concrete poetry, Concept Art, and Pop Art. He died on November 9th, 1976 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Black house by Oyvind Fahlstrom

Nights, Winters, Years by Oyvind Fahlstrom

Column No. 2 by Oyvind Fahlstrom

Y.I.P Miami by Oyvind Fahlstrom

An interview with Christos Polemenakos

Pop Art has been my passion for a few years now. I was familiar with some of the pop artworks earlier, but I didn’t go deeper into it until I learned about American Pop Art in my first art class in college. I learned just a little bit about Warhol, Raushenberg, Wesselman, and other American pop artists, and from there I started reading on my own to learn about it.

“Pop art movement brought a totally new perspective into the art world”, says Polemenakos. Christos Polemenakos is the membership coordinator at the Contemporary Dallas, a new artspace for Dallas. He received a BFA degree from UNT, and before joining Contemporary Dallas, Polemenakos was an Art Ambassador for the Art Think program. Pop art started in the 50s, and it is still being used till today. Polemenakos thinks that Pop art will never die, and it will continue to be used daily in commercials, advertising, magazines, comic books, supermarket products, and may be in new ways that evolve over the years.

One of the greatest and my favorite pop artist is Andy Warhol. Up until today, people all over the world use the whats so called “warhol effect” over the internet to edit their pictures and make them resemble Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints and paintings. Polemenakos believes that the reason Warhol’s art developed over the years and never died is because of mass media, and because Warhol dared to be different, causing him to succeed.

Polemenakos’  believes, “Making any object or any body iconic, finding beauty in objects you would never find beauty in…. that is what makes an artist”.