Chairman of the Painting/Printmaking department at Kansas City Art Institute, Rosser moved to the United States from South Wales in 1972. Although trained as a painter, he has spent many of his productive years as an artist constructing sculptures and assemblages. However, in 1998 he returned to painting due to an unfortunate mishap in his studio. During a thunderstorm he was trying to make some repairs in his studio and fell from a stepladder. Rosser received a severe concussion and broke his wrist. These injuries put an end to his sculptures and assemblages since he could no longer use his power tools to create these works. In the fall of 1998 he took a year long sabbatical and began focusing on painting once again. During the past couple of years he has produced more than forty paintings. These new paintings are fresh and not overworked, but visually pleasing. He used palette knives, stencils, squeegees and masking tape in lieu of paintbrushes.
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Papers
Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma City, but headed for Southern California soon after his high school graduation. He started as a commercial artist, but wound up being famous for his works which record modern everyday life. He has a knack for taking typical things from ordinary daily life and elevating their status. Many declare that he pays homage to the Southern California lifestyle because of the way he elevates the oddness of its everyday images and turns them into icons. Californians claimed Ruscha as their own Pop artist while New York claimed Warhol. He and Andy Warhol have often been compared because they both use language as a major component of their work. The difference between the two lies in the fact that each uses language for totally different reasons. Warhol?s use of words was purely visual and sent a message about low-culture taste. Ruscha instead likes to use his wit to devise a humourous play on words in his often hilarious works filled with ambiquities. This difference is why some critics maintain that he should not be considered a Pop artist like Warhol, but rather he should be recognized as a conceptual artist who was ahead of his time.
Vaseline
Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma City, but headed for Southern California soon after his high school graduation. He started as a commercial artist, but wound up being famous for his works which record modern everyday life. He has a knack for taking typical things from ordinary daily life and elevating their status. Many declare that he pays homage to the Southern California lifestyle because of the way he elevates the oddness of its everyday images and turns them into icons. Californians claimed Ruscha as their own Pop artist while New York claimed Warhol. He and Andy Warhol have often been compared because they both use language as a major component of their work. The difference between the two lies in the fact that each uses language for totally different reasons. Warhol?s use of words was purely visual and sent a message about low-culture taste. Ruscha instead likes to use his wit to devise a humourous play on words in his often hilarious works filled with ambiquities. This difference is why some critics maintain that he should not be considered a Pop artist like Warhol, but rather he should be recognized as a conceptual artist who was ahead of his time.
Day Star
Well, My Dear
Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, Shields has exhibited his work extensively in the United States and throughout the world. His work appears in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of Modern Art. Shields is regarded as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. His close friends include well-known artists Chuck Close and the late Roy Lichtenstein. By using methods not traditionally associated with the medium, Shields succeeds in blurring the lines between painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation. An example of this is an installation where he constructed grids of unstretched strips of canvas and suspended them. Shields is perhaps best known for his handmade papers and his works on paper. In “Well, My Dear,” Shields executed this abstract work on homemade paper.
Hopi Flower Series
Slowinski currently serves as professor of painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. He received a Certificate of Art in painting from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. Thirty years later he had a twenty-five year retrospective at the Sheldon Memorial Gallery of Art at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. His works are a part of major museum collections such as the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Japan. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Advanced Grant to Japan and taught at Indiana University before coming to Kansas City. Inspired by a mere piece of pottery from First Mesa in Arizona from where all Hopi pottery comes, Slowinski created this entire series of paintings. In addition to the Hopi Flower Series, Slowinski completed two other series of paintings from his travels in Wyoming and Mexico. The subtle pinks and oranges in this painting are derived from the firing process used to make the pottery. The expressive spiral floating on the surface of the painting relates directly to the drawings the Hopi artist made on the surface of his jar. Slowinski liked using watercolors for this series since it allowed him the luminous characteristics of his visual experiences in the desert of Arizona.
Encountering Interior
Stackhouse grew up in the New York metropolitan area, but his summers were spent at his grandparents lake home in Peach Lake, New York. At the age of twelve he moved to Florida and continued to enjoy the adventures and pleasures of living near water. His experiences of growing up around water have directly influenced his work. All his works of art have a nautical or architectural reference even though they are intrinsically abstract. He was fortunate to have studied painting at the University of South Florida at a time when the Graphic Studio was founded. The appeal of the Graphic Studio lured artists to Tampa. Working artists who came there discussed art and passed along bits of advice to the students. Friedel Dzubas who had been associated with the New York School artists, also known as the Abstract Expressionists, was one of the visiting artists that left a big impression on the young Stackhouse. Dzubas allowed the students to watch him paint and shared stories of living in New York and his student days at the Bauhaus where he was taught by Paul Klee. Dzubas gave the young Stackhouse a piece of advice he never forgot. He told him that ?in a painting sometimes the most important activity took place right on the edge.? Stackhouse still takes the borders of his paintings very seriously. In order to prolong the life of his large temporal outdoor sculptures Stackhouse records the process of making these pieces on paper. He also documents completed works this way. In Encountering Interior he uses a neutral golden color of unpainted oak to create a variation of the A-frame structure. The intention of the artist is to create a nonthreatening space where the viewer can look within himself. The inviting passageway serves as an entry point to begin one?s journey of self-knowledge.
Untitled
Untitled (S-216MD)
Steiner was part of a group of artists called Bennington School because of his association with Bennington College. Many students from Bennington became imitators of the sculpture artist,Anthony Caro. Caro was influenced by the art critic Clement Greenberg and worked in a narrow aesthetic and formal style. Steiner?s work echoes elegance and reflects the formal qualities of his predecessor, Anthony Caro. The Vulcan is an example of the artist putting abstract theory into effect without regard to practical difficulties. One can see the impracticalities of this work and appreciate the skill and thought that went into making it. Instead of using scrap metal like many sculpture artists, Steiner makes his own pieces. He merges these hand-crafted pieces till they look like something. In his more recent works Steiner exhibits his use of hand-crafted objects by integrating them till they become a unified whole.
DA on P #4 Q1-73
Tworkov immigrated to the United States from Poland at the age of thirteen. He was among several of the New York School artists that worked with the Public Works of Art Project and then with the WPA. It was in the WPA where he met and befriended Willem de Kooning. In the late ?50s they shared a studio. The expressionistic brushstrokes in Untitled form a pattern of unrestrained energy. The interlocking reds and blues create a sense of unity. It appears to be some sort of grid or system similar to our own circulatory system. One can easily detect the influence that Cezanne and the Surrealists had on Tworkov. Cezanne?s expressionist brushstrokes certainly impressed Tworkov. The Surrealists favored the automatic method of painting and he seemed to employ this method in his work, too. This method required the artist to use his unconscious mind to paint. Pollock?s drip paintings were created in this fashion, too.