Bronze Garden Sculptures

Modern Art - Symmetry and Abstraction

by Paul Cooklin

http://www.paulcooklin.com Modern Art by Paul Cooklin

Digital Art has now become a recognisable art form and medium as technology has provided new ways for artists to bare their soul and explore their creativity. This new expression allows artists to use a multitude of techniques before arriving at their final piece which could include photography and photographic manipulation, scans and pure free flow using one of many professional drawing packages. The same principles of quality and skill still apply to these new creative forms as any other medium and should be treated accordingly. Like traditional art, digital art can take many weeks and months to create and perfect.

Much of Paul's inspiration is drawn from his travels and surroundings. From the gentle landscapes of his current home in Suffolk to the striking juxtaposition of technology and nature that is particularly prevalent in Asia, where he lived for 8 years. It is these experiences that give rise to the fascinating coexistence of colour and shape in his work.

Born 9th May 1971, Barking, Essex, UK

- Represented by Prime Arts and Brand X Pictures (Jupiter Images)

- Exhibited West Florida University November 2005 "Digital Fraged"

- Cre8 Gallery January - November 2005

- Next exhibition at the NEC Manchester February 2006

MODERN ART

1900'S - Present What is Modern Art? The definition of "modern" is " of the present or recent times." To apply the term modern to art work now is confusing. Did not artists of the Renaissance apply modern to their work as well? To label the current period of art as Modern Art we can look to the attitudes and characteristics of our modern world and what art means to artist and its viewers today. Modern Art can be viewed as a rapid and radical art style with many variations. Technology brought change to society along with a differing attitude towards art. In older times artists were commissioned by churches or wealthy families, but our times brought about a change that had artists doing "art for art's sake." With the ongoing wars and political upheaval artists found an escape with art. Artists wanted to provide a longer lasting escape from all the world's problems. American artists of this time period were finally recognized as competitive artists and brought the art world looking at art from America. Art now became a movement into a world of color and expression, a world where an apple is only a blotch of red pigment or a toilet is a work of art, leaving more than a few people wondering what can be considered art.

Styles

Expressionism: Any art that stresses the artist's emotional and psychological expression, often with bold colors and distortions of form. Specifically and art style of the early 20th century followed principally by certain German artists.

Impressionism: An art movement which took its name from one particular painting by Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise of 1872. Arising out of the naturalism of the Realists, as well as an interest in the transitory experience of light and color on objects, Impressionism did two distinct things to painting: it elevated color to the status of subject matter, liberating the artist's marks from previous craft constraints, and it inadvertently asserted painting's relationship to the flat surface.

Formalism: The aesthetic arrangement of shapes, colors, and forms . (The formal elements of art)

Cubism: The first art movement of the 20th century systematically to reconsider the conventions of painting since the Renaissance. Such work is epitomized by the severe flattening of the space across the picture plane, a consistently inconsistentlight source, and an imploding of the traditional fore-, middle and background areas in painting composition.

Surrealism: A literary and visual art movement interested in unleashing and exploring the potential of the human psyche. Loosely based on both Freud's and Jung's investigations into the mind, it is also direct heir of earlier Dada strategies of unlocking of the unconscious by the use of chance.

Pop Art: (Popular Culture)- The elements of society that are recognized by the general public. Popular Culture has the associations of something cheap, fleeting and accessible to all.

Abstract Expressionism: A common appelation for the first generation American abstract painting after the Second World War, due to the primary of gesture and color while keeping consistent with the aims of formalism (the all-over application of paint and the dispersal of depth across the surface of the picture plane).

Mediums

Paintings

Drawings

Prints

Photography

Performance Art

Architecture

Digital

Artists

Salvador Dali

Andy Warhol

Georgia O'Keeffe

Monet

Picasso

Vincent Van Gogh

Christo

Websites to Visit

The Andy Warhol Museum

The Andy Warhol Page

The Salvador Dali Museum

St. Petersburg Salvador Online Museum

Georgia O'Keeffe Gallery

Christo & Jeanne-Claude Home Page

Monet in the 20th Century

On-line Picasso Project

Vincent Van Gogh Information Gallery

Bibliography

Gilbert, Rita. Living with Art, 3rd Edition. McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992. Kissick, John. Art Context and Crticism. Brown & Benchmark, 1993.

This Web site was created by Carrie Ann Elkins, April Hall, Genator Hawkins, Danny Hendrix, and Jennifer Payne, students at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

Contemporary Art -

The term contemporary art encompasses all art being done now. It tends to include any art made from around the 1960s to the present, or after the end of the modern art period. The use of the literal adjective "contemporary" to define this period in art history is due to the lack of any recognized or dominant form or genre of art as recognized by artists or art historians and critics. The period of art since modernism is also sometimes called postmodern art, but as postmodernism refers to an approach or paradigm that many contemporary artists do not operate from, "contemporary" may be preferred as a more inclusive adjective. Trends in contemporary art The most important component within Contemporary art practice, is that it continually engages matters and issues that are presently affecting the world. Cloning, politics, economics, gender issues, human rights, or perhaps even the high price of bread being sold locally. Contemporary art operates in multiple formats, media, and is in synthesis with global, political, socio-cultural change. It is not limited by materials nor methodology. It may or may not encompass traditional formats such as painting, drawing, and sculpture, but may popular conceptual practices engage performance, installation, and multi-media works. Contemporary art is often engaging a multi-disciplinary discourse, utilizing a diverse body of skills and peoples to ultimately engage the mass with a substantial, and sometimes provocative discourse pertaining to the relevant issues shaping the world right now. It is continually engaging, and affecting the boundaries of perception.

Contemporary art should not be confused with the workings of modern art, although the trends and movements in contemporary practice may directly refer to modernism. Philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto has asserted that modernism (as well as "art history" itself) died with the making of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, which functioned as art yet were indistinguishable from their real life counterparts for all relevant purposes. These sculptures therefore marked the end of any pretense that art had some essential and objectively discernible trait that separated it from non-art objects. Since the modernist days of the first half of the 20th century, art has also engaged post-modernism, neo-conceptualism, High art Lite (the Young British Artists movement (YBAs) of the mid nineties, as well as multi-culturalist work within the post-postmodern.

Contemporary artists today such as The Yes Men, Maurizio Cattelan, and Marc Quinn utilize a sophisticated language to communicate with a variety of audiences. The relationship between the viewer and the artist has grown increasingly complex over the later half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Contemporary art is becoming increasingly more global, and is slowly breaking down the cultural barriers that separate the antiquated elitism of high art from the public forum of the masses.

The future development of Contemporary art is often directed by massive biennials (The Whitney Biennial, The Venice, Sao Paulo, the Kwan Ju, the Havana...), triennials (Echigo-Tsumari), and most importantly the exhibition of documenta in Kassel, Germany.

Abstract art is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses shapes and colours in a non-representational or non-objective way. In the very early 20th century, the term was more often used to describe art, such as Cubist and Futurist art, that does represent the natural world, but does so by capturing something of its immutable intrinsic qualities rather than by imitating its external appearance. See Abstraction. Abstract pattern making has an ancient history dating back to the earliest decorations on textiles, pottery and so on. However, the idea that the arrangement of shapes and colours is not simply to be understood as design, but as fine art dates from the nineteenth century when photography began to make the illustrative function of visual art obsolete. Even before the widespread use of photography some artists, such as James McNeill Whistler were placing greater emphasis on visual sensation than the depiction of objects. Whistler argued that art should concern itself with the harmonious arrangement of colours, just as music deals with the harmonious arrangement of sounds. Whistler's painting Nocturne in Black and Gold (1875) is often seen as a major move towards abstraction. Later artists such as Wassily Kandinsky argued that modern science dealt with dynamic forces, revealing that matter was ultimately spiritual in character. Art should display the spiritual forces behind the visual world. Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich are generally seen as the first fully abstract artists. Kandinky's art is sometimes called 'soft edged', while Malevich's is 'hard edged'. This distinction is repeated in later abstract artists. The blurred, dynamic lines and colors used by Kandinsky developed into Abstract Expressionism, while the use of overlapping or interacting geometrical forms is found in the work of Piet Mondrian and many later artists such as the op artists of the 1960s.

To quote abstract artist, Robert Stark, "Every day is a test of each painting's ability to stand on its own. Each painting is subject to being changed, to being reworked or scraped and repainted as long as it remains in the studio. Where I often used to spend weeks on a painting, attempting to 'make a picture,' now my concerns are more about the energy of light, the mass of space, the emotions of shadows. I want the painting to meet the viewer somewhere in the middle, where the viewer brings his own experiences to bear in understanding and feeling what he is seeing.

I want my paintings to achieve the complexity and density of poetry or of a symphony, to build suggestive layers, implicit felt meaning, not merely to be entertaining bit of colour to seduce the eye. I want my paintings to be accessible to children as well as adults, and to be so simply and directly painted that it shows the act of painting for the joy and excitement of it.

Modern Art

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Abstract Art :: Allowing your mind to create its own picture is one of the reasons why abstract art is so appealing as it allows the viewer to explore their own creativity

About the Author

Much of Paul's inspiration is drawn from his travels and surroundings. From the gentle landscapes of his current home in Suffolk to the striking juxtaposition of technology and nature that is particularly prevalent in Asia, where he lived for 8 years. It is these experiences that give rise to the fascinating coexistence of colour and shape in his work.