…Week Two…Jim Dine

JIM DINE

It’s very hard to know where to start when talking about the work of Jim Dine; he has done such a range of art pieces ever since he entered the art world with his Happenings of 1959-60. Of course this is not meant in the derogatory sense as I love his pieces but there’s just such a variety of subjects that he has studied and made into artwork. Officially most would say he is an American painter, stage designer, poet, sculptor, illustrator, print maker and performance artist but I would describe him as someone who sees the potential beauty in even the most mundane domestic object and draws the beauty out of it and injects it into his work.

Some of the projects of work that Dine has created could be considered to be quite disturbing, especially his work ‘Santa Hell’. In this series he photographed lots of figurines of Christmas santas, most of which he had painted to change their looks. This was one of his many books that he creates to display. Tools are another theme that shows throughout a lot of Jim Dine’s work as he grew up in a family that created them so he was familiar with their form from a young age.

The piece that he talks about in the video clip is an exhibition of a number of his books mainly suspended from the ceiling. I like his work as it is always different in whatever he does and he uses lots of different media as well.

…Week One…’Signs for the homeless’

http://homelesssigns.tumblr.com/

KENJI NAKAYAMA

Nakayama is an artist who began this particular work in 2011 by exchanging people’s signs that they were using on the street, with ones that he had repainted by hand. By doing this he helped the people to attract the attention of passers by more effectively as the signs became more noticeable and smart looking in contrast to the sheet of cardboard they had previously been. He named his project “Signs For the Homeless”.

What had started out as being a small, one-man project based in the Boston area soon became a more widely recognized effort after a front page story was written about it. This is when Christopher Hope from Cambridge joined up with Nakayama and it became about more than just replacing the signs, but actually hearing people’s stories and presenting them all individually as humans with their own personal stories to tell.

I think that this is such a brilliant idea as it is helping, even in a small way in terms of the world, to show many that people who are homeless on the streets aren’t invisible and that they are like any other person just in a different situation.

Another artist who has done the same sort of thing is called Andres Serrano who purchased over 200 signs from people in New York City, paying $20 for each one.

…Week One…Christo

CHRISTO (and Jeanne-Claude)

Christo is an artist from New York who is known to have created, along with his wife Jeanne-Claude, several works of art on a huge scale using the environments of certain countries around the world as his canvas.

An example of his work are the 3,100 large scale umbrellas that he installed along a 6-8 mile stretch of both Japan and the USA as a joint project (1991)…

Together they also have used the main media of material to cover other landscapes and buildings…

Both Christo and Jeanne-Claude also create multiple drawings and paintings of plans and finished works of their projects…

Alongside their other ambitious works of art they also wrapped the Reichstag building in Germany. At first after watching the clip above, I was a bit confused as to what the aim was. When I researched further into the artists artwork however I found that they were actually wrapping the building in over a million square feet of aluminium coloured material from the top to the bottom. This project was one that Christo had wanted to be able to do for many years and he finally accomplished it in the summer of 1995. The idea behind the veiling and unveiling of the parliament building was to signify the end of one era and the beginning of a new one.

I personally really love their artwork. I love the way that they merge the man-made elements with the natural on such a different level regarding the sheer scale of the projects and the simplicity of the designs too. The way that Christo uses material in such a fluid way to mask also interests me, particularly with his ‘Wrapped trees’. It reminds me of a piece of artwork I once saw of two figures positioned inside a tube of opaque white material with a light directly behind which showed up their silhouettes in the certain places that their bodies where touching the fabric. I really like the idea of seeing only fragments of a picture or image reflects a theme of brokenness in shards of light or object.