The museum of bad art...
Out of the midst of many categories of art museums comes one that was bound to happen: the Museum of Bad Art. Some museums are sold the to public as wonderful, yet contain a majority of bad art, but this one doesn’t lie like the others. MOBA is our friend because MOBA won’t lie to us like that. It is an honest, straightforword gallery - and if you see your piece in this barrage of hilarious art, I apologize for any offense. It's all in good fun, and in all reality, you could get famous for sucking. deal with it. Justin Timberlake did. This blog is blank on purpose (sort of). See the failure for yourself....Read more
The Optimistic Life and Mind of Mark Warren Jacques
Portland, Oregon based artist Mark Warren Jacques makes cosmic, comic, orgasmic, and phsycedelic paintings with awesome titles like, “Saying Fuck it and Letting Go All Together.” In an Arrested Motion interview, Jacques describes his relationship to art. He says, “Sometimes life is pretty wearing on the soul and the body, so the work becomes a resting place. [...] Art is a place to get away from everything and to connect to myself, both in thought and in the action of making stuff.” His artwork certaintly acts as a “resting place” for viewers. The positive vibes resonating in his work are obvious; to lose oneself in o...Read more
The Street Art Revolution
With a style similar to cave painting, talented street artists embrace the thoughts of a new generation by painting the walls of our Denver metropolis. With phrases like “I was here”, “These are the words that were on my mind”, and “This is what I cared about”, the works express what fills the minds of artists who unveil their sketches onto the drab walls of urban settings in order to transform those featureless landscapes into colorful expressions. Most are written so that one can read them without much attention or practice, but because the trend in street art is to twist the alphabet into its own language, many pieces a...Read more
filed under: art
tags: graffiti denver street art denver street art santa fe spraypaint bombs burners
Alvin Gregorio is a Homesick Gypsy
Alvin Gregorio is a “homesick gypsy” who also happens to be an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His work seems to have popped straight out of a children’s TV show. The characters in his paintings remind me of human-faced Teletubbies on acid, surrounded by freaky Barney-like animals floating in a spraypaint dreamspace. Children with numb expressions in furry animal costumes exist in worlds of acid-bright color, tiny helicopters, and furbie owls. His canvases are full of geometric shapes , child-like markings, stencils, intricate patterning, life and color from top to bottom... His work is not only...Read more
Pattie Lee Becker
Belonging to that defiantly playful school of the unschooled, the work of Boulder, Colorado based artist Pattie Lee Becker displays a child's unhindered imagination and hand. Repetition turns simple shapes into intricate patterns, and mundane objects into fantastic messes, like a pile of colorful ropes grown to the proportion of a spaghetti mountain. However this Rhode Island School of Design and Columbia trained artist shows no impetuous aversion to skill and craft as she brings her bright fantasies into the tangible realm as sculptures connected through the same fanciful perpsective of awe where the ordinary and out of this world become extraordinary objects in the here and now. A...Read more
Robert Bradford
Robert Bradford In an interview on his website, Robert Bradford explains that while staring into a box of his children's old toys, he realized that bright playthings would make great scrap for sculptural pieces. The result is sculptures resembling bodies that have magnetized other toys into them in order to form some sort of supertoy. The toys stuck on Bradford's sculptures may look unfamiliar to Toys R Us veterans of the US, and this unfamiliarity makes the works all the more interesting. Toys, already outlandish and neon out of context, gather power as components of the large sculptures. Many of the toys that compose a Bradford sculpture assume an anatomical role - ...Read more
Scott Teplin
Working in a space between architecture, design, and visual art, Scott Teplin produces maximalist illustrations that command total absorption. Most of his drawings involve intricately modeled interiors, architectures, and appliances. In other works, like the one below, Teplin shows us what might happen if the walls of his parceled worlds collapsed: explosions of color, information, and object. Human presence goes absent from his work. What matters are things, places, and placement. Often if one looks for long enough at a Scott Teplin, slight changes from the ordinary become evident. In the illustration below from Teplin's Alphabet City, the environment seems innocuous ...Read more
Bonus Ups! w/ Colin Ward
Two weeks ago I was sitting in relatively the same place, having coffee, and watching Mark Gonzales videos. I'm always watching these fucking videos. They're entertaining on a handful of levels, both skateboarding and non-skateboarding related. They are performance-based, in a sense. I had done this, however, for the better part of a two-hour span. I read threads and picked out newer videos to sift through, but it was getting me nowhere. Finally a friend of mine told me to look up his friend Colin's videos. I was familiar with Colin to some degree already. I had seen his band Phonebooks play in the past and actually knew one of the other members from my brief stint of living in Santa Fe, NM....Read more
filed under: art
tags: Colin Ward William Wegman Tony Oursler Video Youtube Paul Reubens PeeWee Herman
Dmitri Obergfell//Zach Reini at Phillip J. Steele Gallery
Of the visual art world in Denver as of late, things have kept a similar face. Not to say that there have been stagnant or stale exhibitions or that everyone is doing the same thing, but it is apparent that many in the world of visual art have found themselves on the same page. That being said I must say two artists that have read the entireity of said book and are on pages far beyond the material most have at hand are Dmitri Obergfell and Zach Reini. Both are currently students at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and are making leaps and bounds of progress in mixed media, paint, and installation art. Obergfell's portion of the show Huckleberry Hound has a fascinating effect to i...Read more
filed under: art
tags: Zach Reini Dmitri Obergfell Frank Stella Dan Flavin minimalism RMCAD
Tattoo's: Appropriate
Jean-Luc Moerman is a Belgium artist who is well known for his intricate line work which references tattoos and graffiti. I came across him looking at the Galerie Nichido exhibition. Obama covered in tribal tats definitely caught my eye. Moerman appropriates imagery, and adds an intricate layer of his linework to the bodies of the subjects appropriated. This is an interesting commentary on the social acceptance of these fierce looking styles, can they be commercialized? Perhaps. Moerman may also be commenting on the post-colonial issue of what is considered art (which must be difficult as a European). This is a complex position, and I find his work interesting and stylistically imp...Read more
