Pattern Pulp

Do It: Sketching while Traveling




Next time you’re a passenger in a car, on the train, in an plane, or simply walking about, take a sketchbook and a fat black marker along with you. Carve out some time to focus on something spectacularly ordinary – a broken brick, an awkward divot in the sidewalk, a beautiful asymmetrical flower, the window grid of the office building across the street…the clouds in the sky.

Draw it. Draw it again. One more time.

Keep at it, until you’ve filled the page and have a few angles that look interesting. Before you know it, you’ll have enough material to weave a themed pattern together from your sketch.

When you’re done, we’d love to see it…share on #mypatternstudio. Also…for more prompt ideas, please do visit My Pattern Studio where you can pick up a book and challenge yourself to 49 more exercises!

 

October 14, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday’s Gallery Picks




This week’s gallery picks exist at the intersection of memory, imagination and modernity.

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1. Fine art photographer Susanna Majuri is known for images where water is a key element at galleria heino
2. Sarah Letovsky’s GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS brings together an assembly of women, each distinct, separate, and detached. Are they strippers, Mötley Crüe groupies, single moms or curatorial graduate students? Are they Teenage Dreamgirls or Olay Aging Cream Consumers? Why are they wearing clothes? Are they on display for looking or are they looking? at Project Gallery
3. For 20 months, Nidaa Badwan did not leave her 100 square foot room to face the outside world. Inside, in her war-imposed withdrawal and isolation, she created-and photographed-an immersive world of her own. Safe and free in this small oasis, she produced a series of stunning self-portraits, a project she calls 100 Days of Solitude, an homage to the landmark novel of magical realism by Gabriel García Márquez at Postmasters Art
4. In Kevin Peterson’s Sovereign, children and wild animals peacefully coexist as complicit companions in the detritus of stark urban environments. The poetic staging of these unexpected oppositions visually elicits powerful psychological themes. Recurring concepts continue to surface in Peterson’s work, like the perpetuity of change in self and environment, the navigation of personal trauma and loss, and solitude and the pursuit of companionshipat Thinkspace Gallery
5. The North Fork is a photographic narrative derived from the Trent Davis Bailey’s experience of an agricultural valley in western Colorado, experienced first as a child and then as an adult at Koch Gallery
6. Valérie Belin presents All Star, a new portrait gallery of superheroines photographed in a style reminiscent of comic books. at Galerie Nathalie Obadia

September 3, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday’s Gallery Picks




It’s all about color and shape in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. In Hunting Color, Jaq Chartier continues to develop her own custom formulas of deeply saturated inks, stains and dyes at Elizabeth Leach Gallery
2. During Complex Computational Compositions, Rafaël Rozendaal shows new works including tapestries and sculptures. A recurring theme within his body of work is to limit the influence he has as an artist on the final composition of his work at Upstream Gallery
3. Abdoulaye Konaté’s vivid, thought-provoking installations have their roots in his Malian homeland. The materials he uses, woven and dyed cotton, are integral to the country’s culture and by extension, to his practice.  ‘I use textiles in the same way other artists use paint, steel or marble – it is my colour palette and medium for artistic expression’ at Blain | Southern
4. Brain Bress is known for the fictional characters he creates, inspired by 1980s children’s programming, exotic world cultures and historical art movements. Born as doodles or collages, these imaginative figures take shape as sculptural costumes and come to life on video, performed in front of elaborately composed backdrops at OCMA
5. Mokha Laget’s geometric abstractions evoke vast landscapes, urban environments and ambiguous interiors, the categorization of which lies beyond conventional interpretation. They engage the viewer to actively explore relations between the shaped canvas, its embedded planes and surrounding architecture. At once sensual in surface color and intellectually playful, her paintings invite the viewer to accept paradox and impossibility as an aesthetic premise at The Museum of Geometric and MADI Art
6. Central to Ric Evans’ practice is colour and form. Evans’ work is informed by his surroundings, deriving shapes from various spaces that he finds between buildings, chairs, parked cars and other moments in everyday life. These shapes become what he describes as an armature to hold his idiosyncratic combinations of colour that create his distinct geometric compositions at Nicholas Metivier Gallery

August 29, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday’s Gallery Picks




This week’s gallery picks have a focus on the lines between nostalgia and current events.

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1. A rare opportunity to see 14 American quilts dating from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s at Minneapolis Institute of Art
2. Through the power of artistic expression, HEATWAVE celebrates a season that personifies escapism and outside culture. The sensation of sand between your toes, an idyllic romp in the green grass, a sweaty late night rendezvous–all this and more drips with newfound perspective via ceramic booty sculptures, vibrant paintings, paper cutouts and textiles at Stefanie Chefas Gallery
3. ABOVE’s stencil and text-based artworks usually have a strong message or awareness about social, political, or international current events, while his abstract works are a visual language of shape, color, and form at The Quin Hotel
4. Stephanie Syjuco’s Neutral Calibration Studies (Ornament + Crime) features works across a wide swath of media that touch on the legacy of historical colonialism, fictional fabrications, and perceptual studies of photographic “neutrality” at Catherine Clark Gallery
5. Mark DeLong’s Several Shades of Sugar at Cooper Cole Gallery
6. Luke Pelletier’s newest body of work continues to riff on his own moral dilemmas of romance, self reliance, and leisure, playing with ironic twists on both tourist culture and American nostalgia at New Image Art

August 20, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday’s Gallery Picks




The artists in this weeks gallery picks use art to stretch their views of the natural world and time.

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1. Gabriel Orozco explores complex geometry, mapping, and anatomy in a creative, playful, and inventive manner at Aspen Art Museum
2. A master at translating belief and ritual into stunningly arranged strands of spun fiber, Ramón Medina Silva’s yarn paintings pulse with vivid depictions of the Wixárika cosmos at Fowler Museum
3. Embracing the Contemporary celebrates Keith and Katherine Sachs’ leading collection of contemporary art at Philadelphia Museum of Art
4. Jae Ko creates a site-specific installation entitled flow 流, the newest iteration in a series she calls “Force of Nature.” Inspired by visits to Newfoundland and the far northwestern reaches of the United States, Ko reconstructs the melting Tundra, with its floating, fractured glaciers at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5. For the past year, Cody Hudson has taken his elemental compositions, typically applied to birch panels, and translated them to stretched linen, augmenting their painterliness and deepening their relationship to a painting tradition. While remaining stylized and abstracted, his newest works are also indebted to portraiture and landscape painting, at times suggesting masks, sunrises, and still lifes at Andrew Rafacz Gallery
6. A Kingdom of Hours explores how artists disrupt sequential time – from biological rhythms to historical chronologies – to undermine rigid structures of belonging at Gasworks

August 16, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday’s Gallery Picks




This week’s artists come together to contemplate differing realities.

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1. Look up here, I’m in heaven, a group exhibition of unconventional portraits featuring paintings, works on paper, and mixed-media work by David Antonio Cruz, Yashua Klos, Tschabalala Self, and Yoon Ji Seon. While cultural and political realities are central elements of the work on view, the artists create imagery that aims to transcend the here and now to establish a more transcendent sense of self at BRIC House
2. Maryrose Crook draws on traditions of surrealism, still life and folk art creating worlds where beauty and brutality exist in close proximity at La Luz de Jesus
3. Group show School’s Out aims to capture that same sense of freedom – of playfully breaking from the ordinary and letting the imagination run wild at Mike Weiss Gallery
4. Aaron Frisby and Lane Cyril Mountain’s newest works at Seeing Something Gallery
5. An examination of the profound physical and emotional impact of violence in America, particularly against women at Paradigm Arts
6. At once charming and provocative, Michael De Feo reinterprets and embellishes the existing imagery in a novel spin for the age of appropriation at Danziger Gallery

August 9, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tracking Repetitive + Awesome.
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