Have you met…Peter Acheson?

Peter Acheson

An introduction can be a wonderful thing. You can meet interesting people, and make new friends. You can be introduced to your new favorite foods, books, music, or artist.

I’d like to introduce you to some of my favorite artists. Some of whom I’ve been familiar with for years, and others I’ve only recently been introduced to.

The person I’d like to introduce is the artist Peter Acheson.

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson was born Washington, D.C., and in lives Ghent, NY. Acheson received his BFA from Yale University.

Out of the Blue 2010 oil/panel 11 x 8

“Each of the artist’s diminutive abstract works are empatically unmysterious and direct.” – New York Magazine
“[Acheson’s paintings] are a striking and refreshingly strange contrast to the slick, overproduced and ostentatious Chelsea commodities we’re so accustomed to. Wandering through this exhibition was like listening to old bootleg records, those intimate albums composed of weird material, outtakes, mistakes, and occasionally a beautifully odd track that, although the fidelity is for shit, you can’t get enough of.” – Brooklyn Rail

Peter Acheson, Voice 2010

Other material relating to Peter Acheson.

Novella: Rusted Giacometti, Peter Acheson

James Kalm: Peter Acheson

Vimeo: Peter Acheson

Gorkey’s Granddaughter: Peter Acheson

The Brooklyn Rail: Peter Acheson

Painter’s Table: Peter Acheson

Gallery Travels: Peter Acheson

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Long Series #1442. The UK Box.

#1442

Have you met…Barbara Campbell Thomas?

Holes in the theory
2013
acrylic and fabric on canvas
20″x18″

An introduction can be a wonderful thing. You can meet interesting people, and make new friends. You can be introduced to your new favorite foods, books, music, or artist.

I’d like to introduce you to some of my favorite artists. Some of whom I’ve been familiar with for years, and others I’ve only recently been introduced to.

The person I’d like to introduce is the artist Barbara Campbell Thomas.

Theodora
2013
acrylic and fabric on canvas
18″x20″

Barbara Campbell Thomas lives and works in Climax, North Carolina. She is represented by Schulman Project in Baltimore, Maryland.

In it what’s in it
2013
acrylic and fabric on canvas
38″x36″

“Barbara Campbell Thomas’s work engages the daily challenge of locating ourselves amidst the barrage of imagery and information that is characteristic of 21st century life. Her paintings and collages are like a sieve moving through every moment of every day, distilling the onslaught of words, text and images, sounds, textures and stuff into fragmented layers of cloth, canvas, paint and paper. These nearly chaotic, adamantly physical works are a means of building some kind of ecstatic, exuberant, ever unfolding space analogous to our dense sensory existence.

Barbara’s work has been exhibited nationally, in such venues as the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. She received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley (2000) and her BFA from the Pennsylvania State University (1998). She has been an artist-in-residence three times at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia, as well as at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Additionally, she was a fellow at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut.”

Fake funny letters
2012
acrylic and fabric on canvas
17″x15″

Other material relating to Barbara Campbell Thomas.

Artist website: barbaracampbellthomas.com

Artist Blog: bctstudioindex.blogspot.ca

Youtube: Barbara Campbell Thomas

Studio Critical: Barbara Campbell Thomas

The Drawing Center-Viewing Program: Barbara Campbell Thomas

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Have you met…Jai Llewellyn?

‘T’ Bar 2
Oil on canvas
35 x 25 cm
2013

An introduction can be a wonderful thing. You can meet interesting people, and make new friends. You can be introduced to your new favorite foods, books, music, or artist.

I’d like to introduce you to some of my favorite artists. Some of whom I’ve been familiar with for years, and others I’ve only recently been introduced to.

The person I’d like to introduce is the artist Jai Llewellyn.

Untitled #6
Oil, oil based ink & graphite on paper
40 x 30 cm
2013

Jai Llewellyn was born in London, 1977.  He grew up in the muti-cultural borough of Camden.  Jai comes from a German/Jewish background on his mothers side and Welsh on his Fathers.  From a young age he was introduced to art, his father being a film maker, his mother a painter, his stepfather a celebrated photographer and his grandparents avid collectors of art.  At the age of eleven he moved away from London to live in the desolate, flat and rural landscape of the Lincolnshire coast.

Education

Camberwell College of Arts, Ma, Printmaking, 2009-10 (partially completed)

Camberwell College of Arts, Ba hons, Visual Arts, Drawing, 2000-03

Norwich School of Art & Design, Foundation, Art & Design, 1997-99

Other material relating to Jai Llewellyn.

Level ground
Intaglio
25 x 30 cm
2013

“I have spent my life split between the city and the countryside.  Experiencing both the architecture and crowds of urban life and  the solidarity of living in isolated areas of the English landscape has affected the way that I work.  I have always had to adapt to fit in with my surroundings.  I often move from one thing to another, approaching a piece from a different perspective depending on my frame of mind.”

Jai Llewellyn‘s paintings and prints are about the process of mark making, the history of a line seen through an abstract picture of the future. Llewellyn often works between painting and printmaking, both disciplines informing each other, both focussing in on relationships, juxtapositions of old and new, growth and decay, construction and deconstruction.

Llewellyn works intuitively and often begins by recycling or re-appropriating existing images – drawings, etchings and prints from old books – on which he layers his compositions with marks, lines, giving us, the viewer, a peek into the history of his process, the space to see the artist in action. His work is wonderfully graphic and it’s interesting to note that all his work has the most traditional of art practices at it’s foundation, the nude, life drawing. It’s clearly not something you’d alight upon when looking at his work however he has this to say about it:

The foundation of my work comes from an intensive study of the ‘nude’ and although the formal representation of the figure has completely vanished from my practice, there is an underlying system or structure that has it’s roots in the abstraction of the human form.

I for one love how he’s been able to combine his love of printmaking with painting, both informing each other. The result is a wonderful abstract expressionism that relies on graphic mark making and a clean use of line. Here’s what he has to say about his work:

I rarely plan or rehearse a piece, working intuitively I allow an image to evolve naturally, to have a life of its own. I am interested in the idea that when something is destroyed another is simultaneously created, as in reincarnation or rebirth.

I often use surfaces that have previously been worked on, rather than a blank canvas, I react to existing marks or images. Working in this way produces results that I could not plan for or even imagine and it is important that the ingredient which attracted me in the first instance is not completely lost but given a new life. Often I leave some of the original elements to pay respect to its contribution.” JL

Mask
Oil on found paper
22 x 18 cm
2013

Other material relating to Jai Llewellyn.

Artist website: jaillewellyn.com

ArtSlant: Jai Llewellyn

Artwork 100: Jai Llewellyn

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Long Series #1441.

#1441