Kaoruko

Artist Q&A with Kaoruko

Kaoruko’s painting process pays homage to both traditional and contemporary Japanese artistic methodologies by using water-based paint (acrylic), gold leaf, sumi-e (traditional calligraphy techniques), ukiyo-e (traditional Japanese woodblock prints) and silkscreened kimono patterns on canvas. By juxtaposing all these similar yet separate elements, Kaoruko weaves together narratives of the young and old, the bourgeoning and bygone to deliver poignant paintings that straddle cultural, sexual and geographic beliefs and stereotypes of feminine identity at a crucial time that is rewriting the narrative on what it is to be female both here and abroad.

“Teddy Bear”, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, 60 x 54 in | 152 x 137 cm, 2018

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

Gustav Klimt

How did you become a professional artist?

I was a Japanese pop singer when I was a teenager. Based on my experience of playing the “kawaii (pretty/cute)” character in Japan, I still keep expressing the beauty of women in the art world.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

I am currently inspired by the unique Japanese traditional crafts such as “Washi”, traditional Japanese paper, “Aizome”, Japanese indigo dye, and “Arita-yaki”, Japanese porcelain.

How is your work different than everything else out there?

I incorporate the Japanese culture, like Japanese paintings and manga with my works. I use a method of drawing in 2D with a “Mensoufude”, fine pointed brushes and using a 200-year-old kimono pattern into a silk screen to make it look like a collage.

When is a piece finished for you?

When I start drawing my work, my inspiration talks to me. Coincidence calls for the chance. Various colors and ideas are born by that voice. When the conversation stops, I finish the work.

What’s different

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Josh Rowell

Artist Q&A with Josh Rowell

Josh Rowell generates his artistic vision by focusing on technological advances that shape our contemporary lives, communicating our increasingly mediated human interactions within the confines of visual art. The artist balances analogue techniques with the instantaneous nature of the digital age. This juxtaposition produces a language that explores and reshapes information, and celebrates the hand-made in a time that is increasingly being enveloped by the virtual.

“Virtually Fragile #6”, acrylic on wooden panel, 47 x 71 in |120 x 180 cm, 2018

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

This is sort of an impossible question to answer! It’s hard to choose just one because I have admired, followed and idolised so many artists; all for different reasons, at different stages of my life. But if I had to give you my favourite artist right now, I think I would say Leonardo DaVinci, his work has been at the forefront of my mind ever since seeing some of his paintings on display at the Uffizi gallery in Florence last summer. I think it is the combination of creativity, skill, mathematics, science and so on that makes him such an important artist, perhaps the most important artist to have ever lived.

How did you become a professional artist?

I grew up in a fairly creative family, I remember as a child my grandmother would teach me to paint and draw at the weekends. That, combined with some inspirational art teachers at school, I felt inspired to follow a Fine Arts education to Degree and Master’s Degree level. Upon graduating from university, I actually took up a position as a gallery assistant for a contemporary art gallery in Mayfair, London. I always say that this was perhaps the most valuable experience of my career so far, … Click here to read more

Gregory Thielker

Artist Q&A with Gregory Thielker

Movement, territory, and memory shape the work of artist Gregory Thielker. He uses drawing and painting, as well as sound and installation, to unpack perceptions and narratives of specific places. Hyperrealistic representation serves as a tool for a slow, meticulous transcription of the physical sites, as well as documentation of the artist’s contact with each place. His images reveal a critical glance, give pause for contemplation, and allow memory to affect our impressions. He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Gregory currently lives in Switzerland.

“Remainder”, oil on linen, 34 x 50 in | 86 x 127cm, 2019

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

If I have to pick one who has continued to inspire me it would be Gerhard Richter.

How did you become a professional artist?

I have always loved art, but for most of my days in school, I tried hard to do other things. Eventually, the feeling that I needed to be an artist won out. And now I can’t imagine not making art.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

I am inspired and challenged by what I see around me. I think this started when I began to paint en plein air, and after I pulled out a canvas, that moment of paralysis when I had to decide how and why I was painting what I saw. For better or worse, I have moved around a lot too; living in New York and different cities in the US, to India, Bulgaria, and now Switzerland. It’s not easy to arrive in a new place, but I think that painting and drawing give me the means to understand how I see things. There is a saying I believe about India: that when you first arrive, you feel like you can … Click here to read more

Terry Rodgers

Artist Q&A with Terry Rodgers

Terry Rodgers is an internationally recognized artist who has worked and lived in Washington, DC, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Rodgers’ current work focuses on portraying contemporary body politics. His rendering of an imaginary leisure life stands as an iconic vision of the tensions and confusions endemic to today’s society. These images are not snapshots or slices of life, but rather a compression and dissection of our rampant imaginations and mediated influences. The seductive and marvelous glamour of the outer world jars against the vulnerability and delicacy of our inner and private selves.

“The Garden of Good and Evil”, oil on linen, 48 x 78 in | 122 x 198 cm, 2020

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

I have many artists that I admire for many different reasons. So, for me, it is impossible to choose one. Let me list a few in no particular order: Piero della Francesca, Max Beckmann, Joel Peter Witkin, John Singer Sargent, Toulouse-Lautrec, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Anders Zorn, Diego Velazquez, Agnolo Bronzino, Edgar Degas, Cy Twombly, Auguste Rodin Edouard Manet, Peter Paul Rubens, and Alice Neel.

How did you become a professional artist?

Interest and obsession have a lot to do with it, and looking and noticing carried me away.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

Perhaps more important is, what do I think about when I’m developing the Magwerks and the archival prints?

What are the effects of our super-photographic world, the miraculous, if not realistic, screen and magazine colors, the high impact graphic design of everything, the perfect plating requirements of the would-be food aficionados? What is it about the “best of, highest-rated, 5-star” that so commands our attention? Someone’s attention.

And then what is it about the sloosh of a sloppy smear of … Click here to read more

C. Michael Norton

Artist Q&A with C. Michael Norton

C. Michael Norton was born in North Dakota in 1951, and has been living and working in New York since 1987. He received an MA in 1979 in metal fabrication, and an MFA in mixed media plastic arts from San Jose State University in 1981. His large-scale abstract paintings echo the cacophony of urban life today. The competing surface tensions confront each other, creating a visual orchestration of discordant and harmonic tonalities. The compositions, resembling visual soundscapes, explore the notion of depth, both spatial and psychological.

He settled down permanently in Tribeca in 1992. The struggle to achieve maturity in painting came to fruition after the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001. The morning of September 11, the artist was in his studio when he heard the first plane hit. He immediately went to the street with his wife to see what happened. As he rounded the corner on West Broadway, looking ten blocks south just after the second tower was hit, he asked his wife, “How the fuck are we going to fix that?” This question remains central to his critical thinking today.

“Outside Time”, molded acrylic on linen, 55 x 91 x 9 in | 140 x 230 x 23 cm, 2020-2021

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

Vincent Van Gogh

How did you become a professional artist?

By default, I was unequipped to pursue any other vocation or profession. Although I love history, storytelling, music, I never found a way to articulate myself in those professions or disciplines. It was visual art all the way if I could see it I could do it. I climbed on the backs of many other artists through manipulating their techniques and their visions early on, but I eventually found my own … Click here to read more

Tali Rose Krupkin

Artist Q&A with Tali Rose Krupkin

Tali Rose Krupkin is an Israeli-American artist based in Jersey City, NJ. Krupkin attended the Year Course program in Israel, and received her BFA in Painting and Art History at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers. She draws inspiration for her work from her own experiences as they relate to topics of feminism, spirituality, and nature. In her recent collection of work, the artist pays homage to women reclaiming their voices to oppose forced societal pressures of objectification and expected domesticity.

“Deep in the Sushi”, collage, 14 x 11 in | 36 x 28 cm, 2020

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

Matt Bollinger is an artist that continues to be a great influence for me. Having initially viewed his work through a screen, I was drawn to his handling of paint and use of color. In 2015, I had the opportunity to experience his work in person at Zürcher Gallery and was blown away by his inclusion of collage in his paintings. When he spoke at New York Studio School in 2018, I was further intrigued by his depictions of personal narratives and his ability to de-idolize “finished” parts of his paintings, which he continuously paints over to create his animations.

How did you become a professional artist?

If you’re an artist, you’re an artist. You simply are. Growing up, I was at peace when I was creating, and that’s still true for me now. My creativity and self-expression are an integral part of who I am. From a career perspective, it’s much like any other path; you make a plan, and you work on that plan every single day.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

Inspirations for my work come from my female experience, an exploration … Click here to read more

Dan McCormack

Artist Q&A with Dan McCormack

Dan McCormack is a New York-based photographer who uses traditional 8 x 10 black-and-white film in a homemade oatmeal-box pinhole camera to create wide-angle distortions with the cylindrical focal plane. There is a sense of discovery and joy in his process, as the resulting images are unpredictable and surprising. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary. By then replacing the black-and-white values with subtle hues through successive pulling of curves in Photoshop, he interacts with and interprets the image. The “Nude at Home” is a subset of a larger pinhole-camera project that begun in 1998. In this series, he photographs the model nude in her own home, apartment, or studio, surrounded by her possessions for two-minute exposures. A collaboration between model and photographer, the images attempt to reveal an intimate portrait of the subject. He currently heads the photography program at Marist College.

“Caitlin_F_4-26-15–11AB”, pinhole camera image, 23 x 20 in | 58 x 51 cm, 2015

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

Photographer Aaron Siskind is my favorite artist of all time. He was my basic photographer teacher, but more importantly he showed me what a personal vision is all about. He also gave me the sense to trust myself. His work speaks to an audience.

How did you become a professional artist?

I was never concerned about being an artist. I was concerned about making better photographs. The more and more that I worked at making more and more successful images I looked back and saw that I had become an artist.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

When I was a student, I went to every photography exhibition in a gallery or museum in Chicago where I was studying. I went to every library that I could get … Click here to read more

Busser Howell

Artist Q&A with Busser Howell

Busser Howell is an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor who lives and works in New York City. His painting has undergone a steady and restless evolution, from the exploration of geometrical shapes as a vocabulary for generating harmony and luminosity, to a series of tar paper and mastic aerial-view collages evoking the landscape of night bombing at the beginning of the Iraq war, to a period of more densely-textured works that were both more formal in the rectilinear division of the canvas. Originally from Ohio, Howell attended the Dayton Art Institute, Wright State University, and Boston University School of Fine art.

“Untitled (201025)”, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in | 122 x 183 cm, 2020

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

I do not have one favorite artist. The first time I saw the Impressionists, Post Impressionists, and Fauves in Paris, I was blown away with their beauty, the colors, and use of paint. I love Egyptian wall paintings, sculpture, and design, Minoan art, Byzantine wall paintings, murals in Pompeii, Roman mosaic floors, Etruscan sarcophagi, 14th century Italian painting, Dutch painters of the 16th century, Chinese ancestral portraits, Primitive American portraits by itinerate artists, folk art, and children’s paintings. I like Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, Kline, Rothko, Klee, and Pollock. Obviously, I have forgotten many, but these all stand out in my mind.

How did you become a professional artist?

I believe the short answer to becoming a professional artist is that I was born that way. There was never a time in my life that I did not know that my being was meant to create. Fortunately, I had a supportive family that gave me the opportunity to study painting with an American impressionist at the age of 13, and I attended the … Click here to read more

Marc Stamas

Artist Q&A with Marc Stamas

A born and raised New Yorker whose work has graced the pages from some of the most respectable outlets from around the world: from fashion, modeling campaigns, catalogs, celebrity, sports, et cetera. Marc’s been a professional photographer for most of his career and his motto is short and sweet, ‘I just want to shoot better tomorrow than I did today.’ But it was around 15 years ago that he moved into art, and I’ve had the pleasure to work with him at one of my galleries. I remember what he wrote in his bio, ‘People call me an Artist. I believe I’m more of a poet paying tribute to Rembrandt; dark, chiaroscuro with the use of my camera and brushes.’ That’s when I realized that he was hiding something about his art, and the pain was quite obvious within his body of work, and every time I would try and get him to open up, he would just walk away almost in tears and whisper, ‘It’s not about me, it’s about the art.’

“Mon Amour”, mixed media, 20 x 27 | 51 x 67 cm, 2010

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

It should be you; you should be focused on you and nothing else. But if you want to know two artists that I can relate to: one is Monet, but Rembrandt is where I hide, where the true artist comes alive.

How did you become a professional artist?

By people believing in my work, my words and discipline. All I ask is to be left alone. Is that asking too much while I do what I do best? But with all of my success it meant nothing to me, while the world around me came crashing down as tragedy has a … Click here to read more