Wainer Vaccari, "FIGHT 13"
2009
When Dana Schutz made this painting in 2005, she was only a couple years out of college (she went to Columbia University in New York). She called this piece
Gravity Fanatic. The character she depicts here is a gravity-phobic person who has taped herself to the ground because she is afraid that she might float away. Dana has used the style of her painting to emphasize the whimsy of her imaginary scenario, but the way she's rendered both the figure and the objects which surround her character shows that she's used careful observation while making those stylistic decisions. Notice the way the cell phone is in almost perfect perspective, and the angle of the tape on every object shows a careful attention to the shape underneath it.
Jaime Scholnick, a young artist working today, used a little colored pencil in his graphite drawing to make a subtle change to an image he had seen in the news.
In this ink drawing of Highway 18, Warrington Colescott used both scale and style to show the chaos and ugliness of the scene he was trying to depict. He's made certain parts of his drawing larger to emphasize the way these figures exemplify the emotional tone of this traffic jam, and he's filled up the entire page to give the feeling of claustrephobia on the crowded road.
In this drawing, called
Chic People, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec drew a scene in a local restaurant (for him, local was Paris in the late 19th century). He emphasized the fashionable dress and figure of his time in the way he drew these figures, making this woman's waist especially small and her sleeves especially poofy to show that she was the ultimate hipster of her day.
Contemporary artist Alex Donis has used both fashion and current events to make a provocative statement in this drawing. He's outfitted these two dancers in the uniforms and hairstyles typical of Israeli and Palestinian soldiers, two groups who have traditionally been in conflict with one another.
This young artist, Jon Widman, used both precise observational pencil drawing and his imagination when he combined these objects and animals drawn from nature into a fanciful new scene.
Lisa Ruyter took an ordinary scene, seen from an upstairs window, and made it her own with an unsusal use of color. Notice that before she added color, this was a conventional contour drawing, made from life.
