Ron Mueck

The hyper-realistic world of Ron Mueck is staggering to say the least. The incredibly lifelike sculptures that he creates are so perfect that if you were not careful you would mistake his sculptures as real people. Almost all of his work is either larger than life, or smaller than life. He forms these sculptures first by molding them out of clay then casting them with fiberglass and resin and silicone. He tatkes the time to put in every little detail that the body has so that it appears as perfect as possible, all the way down to each hair follicle. Many of his works contain figures that are usually nude and show complex emotions. He has made figures from babies to the elderly and everywhere inbetween. "Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images."

Chuck Close

Chuck Close is most known for his large scale paintings of portraits of people. His attention to detail is superb. His paintings look so much like photographs that it is extremely hard to tell the difference between the original and the paintings. He has done many portraits of himself, celebrities, etc. During the time when began painting many people were doing a lot of abstract work and there was little to no competition for realistic art. His signature photorealistic style set him apart from other artists at the time like Andy Warhol. Along with his photo realistic paintings he has also done some work in the abstract category. After he had a spinal artery collapse in 1988 he was left partially paralyzed. He now paints with a brush strapped to his wrist because he no longer has the ability to use his fingers. He still creates amazing large scale portraits but they are much different than the ones that he created in the 1960's. He uses shapes like ovals, circles, squares, and oblong swirls filled with different colors to bring across his images. 

Tara Donovan

Styrofoam, Plastic, Straws, Paper Plates, Sheets of Paper, Glass, Buttons, Pins, Needles, Nails, Toothpicks.

These items are just some of the items that Tara Donovan uses in her art. This list to the normal person would sound like items you might find in a recycle bin or a junk yard, but to Tara Donovan these items are full of artistic potential. She likes to take everyday items like the ones listed above to create installation pieces that take the objects to entirely different levels of meaning. In many of her pieces she uses thousands of little pieces to create one large masterpiece. Like her untitled pieces using styrofoam cups it starts out with just one cup but soon you have hundreds and then thousands of cups forming beautiful naturalistic shapes. She explains that she chooses the material before she decides what can be done with it. She noted in an interview that she thinks "in terms of infinity, of [the materials] expanding."

Transformation Artist Statement

Staircase of Forks

Since I work in the food industry I though it was fitting for me to pick an item that people use for eating but rarely ever study it as an object of beauty of artistic. The plastic fork is something that people use and throw away. I think that I gave them a whole new meaning. I took a bunch of white forks and used them to create a spiral of sorts. When one fork is by itself it doesn’t really mean a lot but when many are combined together with an artful intention I created something much more interesting. The forks give the sculpture as a whole a really cool texture almost like a spiral staircase. I appreciate the simplicity that the forks are by themselves and the the complex shape that they form when stacked and glued together. I thought about adding some color to it but I honestly really like the natural white finish that the forks have. They create interesting shadows and also reflect light well.

Tyler Penner

Skeleton and Skin Artist Statement

At first I was not sure how this piece was going to come out and I was not entirely excited with what I had come up with from my first two attempts. But after brainstorming a little and being patient with the material I created a piece that I am happy with. The piece that I created for this project has a corkscrew kind of shape that winds from point to point getting thicker in the middle. When I was constructing it, it was difficult to get all of the pieces to stay in the right places long enough for them to be held permanently. This was the third attempt that I made for this project, and definitely was the one that turned out the best. The first two attempts allowed me to get more familiar with the materials that I was working with and how they were able to create shapes that had artistic value. The material that I used was just some medium gauge wire and some screen mesh. I held the mesh onto the wire with a good amount of rubber cement and I also decided to paint over the mesh with the rubber cement which gave it an interesting look like the mesh was more solid.

A Successful Artist Statement

Millie Wilson - Artist Statement
I think of my installations as unfinished inventories of fragments: objects, drawings, paintings, photographs, and other inventions. They are improvisational sites in which the constructed and the ready-made are used to question our making of the world through language and knowledge. My arrangements are schematic, inviting the viewer to move into a space of speculation. I rely on our desires for beauty, poetics and seduction.

The work thus far has used the frame of the museum to propose a secret history of modernity, and in the process, point to stereotypes of difference, which are hidden in plain sight. I have found the histories of surrealism and minimalism to be useful in the rearranging of received ideas. The objects I make are placed in the canon of modernist art, in hopes of making visible what is overlooked in the historicizing of the artist. This project has always been grounded in pleasure and aesthetics.

I think that this artist statement by an artist named Millie Wilson gives the reader a good look into the thought process that is happening when creating these pieces and gives the viewer of the piece a different perspective with the art. They may look at it differently or in a new thought process than they did before. This artist statement also gives some insight into what the artists thoughts are on her own work and what she thinks of them.

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy is an artist who mainly uses products of the environement to create his art and his hands as tools. He generally uses all natural found objects to create his pieces. The materials that he uses are usually natural materials, such as leaves, sand, ice, and stone. The artwork that he produces usually does not last long and many times is only seen in pictures. Many times when he is working with materials, he really gets to know the material and how it acts in different positions. He also takes the materials to the edge of their collapsing points. That is what makes so many of his pieces so interesting. Andy Goldsworthy is probably best known for his installation pieces resembling cones. He has constructed these forms from wood, ice, stone, and other natural materials. 

He knows that these pieces that he creates will not last long and that soon after he finishes them they could be destroyed by the natural elements of the earth. In some videos that I have seen of him working with such materials I can tell that he has an extreme amount of patience to create the work that he does. So many times he has to start over because the works that he is developing never make it to completion. They collapse by one slight shift in weight or a little breeze that tears the craftsmanship apart. 

Damien HIrst

Damien Hirst is probably known most for his first series that he did in 1988 called "Freeze" this exhibit consisted of many differnt animals that were frozen in place and preserved in time. The most recognizable piece is a frozen shark titled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." They give people the opportunity to look at these animals in ways that probably were not accessible to the general public. I think that that is his purpose in most of his pieces. He tries to do work so that people will look at things in ways that they would not normally look at them. He likes to use dead animals in many of his pieces to make people think about the concepts and attitudes towards death. Besides being a sculptor and installation artist, he also has done paintings and print making. His work is usually very controversial but also many times very thought provoking.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Away From the Flock

For the Love of God

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud is most famously known for his work with painting cakes, pies, and other pasteries. At first when he went to many art dealers in New York no one would take his art seriously and sent him down the road, but eventually an art dealer named Allan Stone believed in him enough to hang some of his work in his shop. "When Thiebaud's first show opened at the Allan Stone Gallery in 1962 it was an immidiate sensation."(CBS Sunday Morning) "The Museum of Modern Art even bought a picture." The record selling price for one of his pieces at auction is 1.7 million dollars.

Wayne Thiebaud's work is sometimes thought to be part of the Pop Art movement or perhaps a precursor to it. He painted everyday familiar objects. The most recogizable pieces are the rows of pies and cakes that he painted with very thick layers of paint that looked like frosting. He also did work with landscapes, paint cans, hot dogs, ice cream cones, etc. One thing to notice is almost all of his work is the blue shadow that he uses.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was perhaps one of the most recognized and important artists of the twentieth century and his influence with pop art has change the world of art. He is most famously recognized for his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, but he had many other pieces, films, and advertisements that he worked on throughout his career. He first tried Pop Art around the 1960's but he had a little trouble trying to figure out what to paint at first. he started with painting coke bottles and different comic strips, but it did not get as much recognition as he hoped it would. He finally came to a breakthrough when a friend of his told him to paint what he enjoyed most in the world. He painted cans of soup and money. In his first exibit in 1962 he displayed 32 canvases (one for each flavor of Campbell's soup). He sold the paintings for a total of $1000 for the set. Later on he painted many pictures of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, etc.

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons art is very puzzling to me at one point I see some of his work and think, wow, that's pretty cool, and then I will see something later that really doesn't mean a whole lot to me. He has a lot of variety in his work and many times one series is a completely different style than another. One thing that I think is safe to say about his work is that he is very detailed and wants everything to be absolutely perfect. He himself is an extreme perfectionist. In an Art21 video from PBS it interviews some people that work in his studio/ warehouse. One person commented that for one painting there were 141 different colors that were to be mixed to create the perfect outcome for the image Koons wanted. Some one else commented that he rarely actually works hands on with the pieces and that much of the time that he spends working with them is through the use of computers and directing and looking over the people who are putting it all together.

I think that the pieces that I like the most are the enormous metal balloon figures and the metal cracked eggs. They are simple concepts to most people and generally people wouldn't stop to take time to study objects like this but when they are exaggerated to much larger than life sizes it puts a new perspective on them and suddenly people are mesmerized by the beauty of what his team has created.

Many people dislike Jeff Koons because they believe that since he is not the one who is physically creating the art that he should not be able to take all the credit for it. I think that the point behind Jeff Koons' art is that he is the visionary person and the pieces would not exist without him.

Tom Friedman

In the article written by Jo Applin about Tom Friedman  and his process in his artwork the terms bricolage and braconnage are used to describe the process in which Tom Friedman goes about doing his work. The article says that bricolage is the strategy of "do it yourself" and braconnge is "poaching." Tom Friedman's art is very conceptual meaning that it does not resemble any one object or real life shape. Many of his pieces are formed from everyday objects that are then transformed into something entirely different. Take for instance a piece that he did in 1995 where he cut pencils up and then reformed them in to a continuous loop of pencil pieces. The end product resembles a sphere like shape and it is also very geometric because it has the angles of all the pencils glued together.

It seems like he likes to use repetition of smaller objects in many of his pieces to create one larger object. Most of his art is also very detailed and it seems like it would take him a considerable amount of time to complete all of them.