The Chelsea Gallery

Here is a link to the Chelsea Gallery: http://chelseagallerymap.com/

This is a website that exhibits artists and galleries in Chelsea, New York. It has a great variety of these, and one such artist that I found particularly interesting was Robert Longo (http://www.metropictures.com/artists/robert-longo).
His art is very captivating; I especially like that so much of it is black and white, because it gives it a really interesting, vintage, and almost ghoulish appearance sometimes. The contrast really draws the eye. He has a lot of pieces that feature animals, I've noticed he has a particular affinity for sharks. Otherwise he also depicts a lot of people, often in very wild, erratic poses as if they were dancing or free falling. I find these really amazing because he so well captures such wild movement in a still, lone frame. He also draws a lot of crowds, too, and quite surreal pieces. Like I said, they look almost ghoulish sometimes. In the Chelsea Gallery, some of his art has a political meaning; he depicts cops in riot gear, and an American Flag dedicated to Howard Zinn. He uses all sorts of media, but the main ones are drawing, often in charcoal and photography . He sculpts as well. His art is extremely fluid and I quite like it.















This example below is my favorite; it looks so misty and ghostly. Call me predicable, I guess.

Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch was a German Dadaist artist who was born in 1889. She died at the age of 88 in 1978. Her art contained feminist themes and dissections of the concept of "the new woman." She worked in photomontage and collage. 

Other specific themes in her work include androgyny and gender roles, and politics as well. She was in Germany during the Third Reich and had to keep a low profile as her art was labelled as degenerate by the Nazi's, who of course had a famous dislike of new art and instead favored traditional European fine arts. 

As I mentioned before, she was a Dada artist; this is an art form that arose after the first world war and came to be because the artists of the time believed that a society that could create such a horrible tragedy as WWI had little to no value. Dada can also be described as anti-art. This art questioned authority and government and was obviously against war, so of course they were not fond of the Nazi party. 

Painting on Non-Canvas

Usually painting is done on canvas or paper of some sort. However, this is not to say this is how ALL paintings are done. Using non-traditional surfaces to paint on is quite popular, from bottles to stones, to a lot of other stuff. Here are some examples: 

(I own none of these)

Botanical Art

Botanical art is the art of drawing plant life. Often the subjet is a flower or leaves. It may sound a bit scientific, but it's actually mainly about aesthetics. It's somewhat modelled after illustrations from scientific journals, although it does not focus on the anatomy or functions of the plants in question.

Gorillaz: Humanz

The band Gorillaz is a collaboration of visual artist Jamie Hewlett and musician Damon Albarn. It is a fictional band that cinsists of four main animated characters, Murdoc, Russel, 2D, and Noodle.

They were created in 1998 and have released many animated music videos and four albums, with a fifth on the way. There was Gorillaz in 2001, Demon days in 2005, Plastic Beach in 2010, and The Fall in Fall in 2011. Their newest album will be coming out in 2017 and is entitled Humanz.

Their music videos are incredible and are known for being both very intricate and very weird. They usually include their characters animated traditionally with CGI here and there, although one of their albums included all of the characters as being CG animated. Some of the new videos for Humanz were recently released online. In Humanz the characters have gone back to two dimensions, although he videos include some heavy CGI. The CG used is designed specifically to look dated, so it looks very uncanny and is really fun and creepy. The plot of one of the videos, Saturnz Barz, is that the four of the band members are looking at an old house that is messy and creepy and they split up to take a look a la horror movie tropes.

They each find a room and of course strange things begin to happen. This is when a lot of the CGI comes in, in the form of two monsters attacking Russel and Noodle respectively and the haunted fridge with haunted food that attacks 2D. However, what happens to Murdoc is far stranger, as he had stripped naked to bath and found himself somehow in space. This is pretty normal fair for a Gorillaz music video.

 The videos Saturnz Barz was very well executed with some excellent visuals, as we have come to expect from Gorillaz. It moved the characters forward as usual, as in each album they age up more. It was fun, weird and definitely made me want to watch the other videos.

Flash Animation

Adobe Flash is a well known animation program created in the late 1990's. It's a digital software that is often used for web series, animated commercials, and cartoons. The first major use for the program was  in 1997 for The Goddamn George Liquor Program, by the same man (John K.) who created Ren and Stimpy, and it shortly after became a huge craze all over because of it's cost effectiveness and easy to use tools. It is often given a bad rep due to some of its less than stellar uses, leading it to be viewed as a bad software, but it's actually pretty good when used correctly. A famous example of a long running cartoon that used flash for animation is Cartoon Network's Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, which is well known for it's unique and well executed animation style.

 
Another example of well-used Flash animation would be El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera. It was the first time that Nickelodeon had created a show animated entirely in Flash, and it is certainly among the shows that use that to their advantage. Other fully Flash animated shows often look stiff, jerky and lifeless, but these two examples use their medium to their advantages and end up looking great (shows such as Fish Hooks are responsible for Flash's bad name because of it's overuse of shopped in photographs and such). Another famous show that uses Flash for its animation would be My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which rose quickly to popularity among weird, creepy 25 year old men and you know the rest if you are acquainted well enough with the internet, and I think it's high time we never speak of it again.
 
Of the many famous web series made with flash is Mike and Matt Chapman's creation Homestar Runner. It's style was much stiffer and closer to what people have become accustomed to with Flash shows, as were many internet videos. The rigid animation was actually used purposefully in a lot of internet videos as part of the humor. Plus stiff animation is more forgivable on low-budget web series made for the internet than with high budget shows made for major studios.

Another famous video made with the software is The End of  the World, posted online in 2003. Essentially this is a short released on YouTube that poked fun at the state of the world and the concept of a nuclear war. It is famous mostly for it's use of stereotypes of people from certain countries. Flash's popularity became quite intertwined with memes, as it was so easy to produce simple cartoons with to post online.
 It is still used today for major studio cartoons, advertisements, and memes alike, and looks to not be leaving anytime soon, for better or for worse. In my opinion it's a good program, especially for beginners in animation who want to learn.

Composite Creatures

A composite creature is a mythological animal that is a sort of mash-up of two or more types of creatures to make a hybrid. They are most often used in mythology, and some of the best known are associated with Greek mythology. Sirens (sometimes), mermaids, and fauns are quite commonly seen in myths and stories, and these are examples of composite creatures with human traits. Then there are ones that are only animal based with no human parts, such as the Griffin, Hyppogriff, and Pegasus. Composite creatures can be found in mythology and folk tales form many cultures all around the world. You may recognize the Sphinx of ancient Egypt. In fact, because most of the Egyptian gods are human bodied with animal heads, they would be considered composite creatures.

Tracy Butler's Lackadaisy

Tracy Butler is an American artist and comic illustrator. Her main project is a web comic called Lackadaisy, a story about a group of anthropomorphized cats living in St. Louis during the Great Depression. The main conflicts have to do with bootlegging alcohol and running the speakeasy Lackadaisy underneath the Little Daisy Cafe. It includes comedy, a very rich story and a set of lovable characters. The art is ecxellent and very complex. Butler also posts, along with the main story, comedic strips and big, beautiful digital paintings. Lakadaisy started in 2006 and is still being released.

Animation

I am an animator, specifically one who works in 2D animation, so I thought it would be interesting to write a post about it. There are many different types of animation, from traditional hand drawn, to stop-motion, to CG, but for now I will specifically be touching on 2D animation, as it is the type I am most experienced in doing (and also this blog is about 2D art). Animation is the art form of bringing the illusion of life to a still image by drawing very similar frames and then relaying them back very quickly. It is very difficult. This art form is used in everything from children's television and films, to video games, to advertisements and more. Most professional pieces of animated media use from 12 to 24 frames per second, but it depends on the project. There are two major types of 2D animation that you are likely to see, which are traditional (on paper) and digital (which is done in something like photoshop or some other drawing program generally). I personally use both types of animation in my own artwork, but not everybody does. There are also some types of two-dimensional stop motion animation, like when somebody uses paper cutouts. There are many ways to go about doing animation; most people these days just go straight into the animation process after storyboarding, but some like rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is a process in which an animator traces over live action footage to capture realism. It was invented in the early days of animation, but isn't often used these days because it looks sort of uncanny and off. Most 2D animation in America as of recently has been used for television and not film because of the rise of popularity of CG animation in the film industry.

These are two gifs from the Disney show Gravity Falls, pencil animation vs. finished product

 Underneath are some pencil animations from Dreamworks' Road to Eldorado and Disney's Tarzan

And here is a shot from Cartoon Saloon's film the Secret of Kells, which uses a very distinct and time-consuming to animate style; the characters may look simplistic, but in reality they are quite complex.

Here are some examples of rotoscoping; the top gif is from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the lower one is from Don Bluth's Anastasia. These movies are agreed upon as being a good use of rotoscoping. In my opinion, Don Bluth's rotoscoping still looks a bit uncanny sometimes, but it looks fine for the most part. But it's a bit off. Snow White is a very good example of rotoscoping done right.

These are from Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings movie, which is generally agreed upon as an atrocious use of rotoscoping, and to be honest I agree that it looks really bad. It looks really, really uncomfortable. How could we let this happen?

And here is some non-western animation, because this post is overwhelmingly taken up by American animation (although the Secret of Kells is a French-Belgian-Irish film). The below gif is from Hayao Miyazaki's film Kiki's Delivery Service (you should watch it). This is done by Studio Ghibli, probably one of the most famous animation companies in the world. It is stationed in Japan.

Anyways. this post is getting really long because I went on a tangent about rotoscoping (which can work, it doesn't have to look bad, but it has that reputation because of SOME movies) so I think I'll call it a day and end this now.