Anne's Art Blog

getting inspired by other artists’ work

 

I’ve seen some artwork by a couple of really interesting artists in the last week. The first is a man named Brian Dettmer who makes amazing sculptures out of books which are intricately glued, carved, otherwise altered, etc. One of his works is shown above; if you want to see more, here is the link to his website: http://briandettmer.com/ . His work is very inspiring - it makes me want to cut up books and see where that takes me (and I just happen to have a number of old unwanted books lying around at present). Whatever I do will be totally different than Brian’s work, of course. Even though I greatly admire what he does with all of the different layers I’d never have the patience to do it myself (nor do I want to closely emulate any artist’s work - that just seems like theft).

The other artist is Alexa Meade, a young woman artist who creates “reverse trompe l’oeil” figure paintings by applying paint directly to the figure – that is, the model! In some cases the setting/background consists of 3-D objects which she has also painted, but not always. She then takes photos and/or videos of her work. The results are extremely striking; you have to see it to really get it, and I suggest watching a short PBS Newshour video about the artist and her work – here’s the link: http://ow.ly/4b2FU (there’s a text article about Alexa there as well). Also, this is the link to her website: http://alexameade.com/index.html

I found Alexa’s work inspiring, too – I may try painting on some of my sculptures. Actually I have sometimes painted them, but that was generally in a way meant to make plaster or ceramic castings look like they are made of bronze, etc. – a different sort of trompe l’oeil. Now I’m moved to try some bolder colors, and more painterly methods.. stay tuned!

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