Kadar Brock (born May 28, 1980) [1] is an American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA from Cooper Union School of Art in New York City in 2002. His abstract paintings explore history, personal psychology, materials and surface.
Brock creates paintings through a repeated system of painting, sanding, priming and scraping on the surfaces of canvases. [2] A canvas is "painted on, dried, un-stretched, scraped with a razor blade, primed over, sanded, re-stretched, and painted on again." [3]
A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(July 2015) |
This labor-intensive processes maps the artwork's history of production. He repeats these processes until the layers of paint "stop functioning as pictures and evolve into a historical object." [4]
Marina Cashdan, in Artsy wrote: "His studio is an ecosystem—and an efficient one—in which the artist’s methodical and ritualistic process makes for a consistent upcycling of materials across the space: when he spray-paints, he uses a canvas as the drop cloth; that canvas becomes the start of a painting; and that painting has two fates: one sliding door is going under the razor and the industrial sander, before being coated with layers of pigments and primed, sanded, and primed, a process repeated until the desired effect is reached; the other fate is to be martyred into chips or dust. [5]
Stephan Cox, in Hunted Projects: In Dialogue wrote: "What’s fascinating is that Brock’s works are the product of an artist who aims to demystify the gesture in painting through creating rituals that in effect eradicate the didactic artist-viewer scenario. Brock doesn’t aim to create works that are easily read as being a by-product of an artist’s expression; Brock has created a set of rituals, a rolling of dice, where he, in effect has his actions directed for him. This could be through the number of brush strokes to apply or the number of cuts to make, in all, his intuitive approach to painting is not present or discernible to the viewer." [6]
Acrylic paint is a fast-drying paint made of pigment suspended in acrylic polymer emulsion and plasticizers, silicone oils, defoamers, stabilizers, or metal soaps. Most acrylic paints are water-based, but become water-resistant when dry. Depending on how much the paint is diluted with water, or modified with acrylic gels, mediums, or pastes, the finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor, a gouache, or an oil painting, or it may have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media.
Oil painting is a painting method involving the procedure of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel or copper for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of the world. The advantages of oil for painting images include "greater flexibility, richer and denser color, the use of layers, and a wider range from light to dark". But the process is slower, especially when one layer of paint needs to be allowed to dry before another is applied.
Action painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist.
Monochromatic painting has played a significant role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes. Artists have explored the non-representational potential of a single color, investigating shifts in value, diversity of texture, and formal nuances as a means of emotional expression, visual investigation into the inherent properties of painting, as well as a starting point for conceptual works. Ranging from geometric abstraction in a variety of mediums to non-representational gestural painting, monochromatic works continue to be an important influence in contemporary art.
Rabbit-skin glue is a sizing that also acts as an adhesive. It is a type of animal glue that is essentially refined rabbit collagen. The glue has been used for centuries for stretching and priming canvases for oil painting. It has also been an ingredient in traditional gesso.
Tomma Abts is a German-born visual artist known for her abstract oil paintings. Abts won the Turner Prize in 2006. She currently lives and works in London, England.
Svein Koningen is an abstract expressionist painter born in Trondheim Norway, childhood in Amsterdam, education in Australia, lives and works in Bruges, Belgium.
Painting is a visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, may be used. One who produces paintings is called a painter.
The portrait is made by Ole Mejlvang Hedeager, Denmark
James Lavadour is an American painter and printmaker. A member of the Walla Walla tribe, he is known for creating large panel sets of landscape paintings. Lavadour is the co-founder of the Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts.
I believe that a painting must stand up on its own without explanation. I think of myself as an abstract action painter. I just happen to see landscape in the abstract events of paint. - James Lavadour
The practice of conserving an unstable painting on panel by transferring it from its original decayed, worm-eaten, cracked, or distorted wood support to canvas or a new panel has been practised since the 18th century. It has now been largely superseded by improved methods of wood conservation.
Big Painting No. 6 is a 1965 oil and Magna on canvas painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Measuring 235 cm × 330 cm, it is part of the Brushstrokes series of artworks that includes several paintings and sculptures whose subject is the actions made with a house-painter's brush. It set a record auction price for a painting by a living American artist when it sold for $75,000 in 1970. The painting is in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen collection.
Mary Corse is an American artist who lives and works in Topanga, California. Fascinated with perceptual phenomena and the idea that light itself can serve as both subject and material in art, Corse's practice can be seen as existing at an crossroads between American Abstract Expressionism and American Minimalism. She is often associated with the male-dominated Light and Space art movement of the 1960s, although her role has only been fully recognized in recent years. She is best known for her experimentation with radiant surfaces in minimalist painting, incorporating materials that reflect light such as glass microspheres. Corse initially attended University of California, Santa Barbara starting in 1963. She later moved on to study at Chouinard Art Institute, earning her B.F.A. in 1968.
Shane Guffogg is an American artist associated with the abstract art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Guffogg lives and works between Los Angeles and Strathmore, California.
The new World Trade Center complex features public art by a variety of artists.
Abstraktes Bild (809-1) is a 1994 painting by the Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter. In the top-ten list of the most expensive paintings by Richter it occupied 6th place in 2013.
Nathan Hylden is a contemporary American abstract painter based in Los Angeles, California. He is known for creating abstract paintings exploring philosophical relationships between cause and effect, absence and presence, and emptiness and meaning; as well as for process-oriented artworks that investigate dualities of existence.
Eddie Martinez is a New York-based artist best known for large-scale paintings that feature bold color, urgent line and brushwork, and graphic shapes and forms. His style combines painting and drawing, abstraction and representation, and a casual approach to materials with an eclectic iconography of figurative elements. While contemporary in his choice of materials and subjects, he bridges a wide range of historical influences, including CoBrA, Action painting, neo-expressionism and Philip Guston, and classical conventions of portraiture, still life and allegorical narrative, filtered through the lens of daily experience and popular culture.
Jackie Saccoccio was an American abstract painter. Her works, considered examples of gestural abstraction, featured bright color, large canvases, and deliberately introduced randomness.
Grattage is a technique in surrealist painting which consists of "scratching" fresh paint with a sharp blade.