Ryan Hewett Painter: Screaming for Freedom

With Antony Micallef as probably one of the most potent influences on my own artwork, I seem to gravitate to other artists in whom I detect traces of the man himself, like a damaging but intoxicatingly good smell. But before you attempt to have my career as an arts writer shut down, I am not insinuating that painter Ryan Hewett lacks his own aesthetic identity: Micallef conjures scenes of chaos, but Hewett injects the distorted, dehumanised style into portraits of poise. What makes his heads so engaging is their contained ordinariness and child-like innocence hemmed in behind tragic and hell-raising realities.

For me, Bio [above] is without question his most powerful piece. I can't stop looking at it. There's a raw tension between these apparently natural photographic poses and the rather unnatural deformation of them through striking and potentially destructive marks. I've always imagined Hewett's figures as brutalised war victims. But this notion goes beyond the physical: his figures are us, everyone, enduring some crushing emotional strife, drowned by a history of repression and, thanks to Hewett's art, they are finally screaming out to be heard.

Hewett employs highly painterly techniques, so much so that his process pieces are equally if not more intriguing to look at than the finished product: 

There's a very real sense of human identity in crisis here. Hewett plays with the depth of his surfaces, subduing an eye here or a lip there, whilst letting other features bleed through so that we are confronted with 1000 yard stares; vacant yet deeply soulful expressions which wrench at your heart. 

For me, Hewett is illustrating a violent, progressive onslaught on our generation, with deeply vulnerable and defenceless individuals barely able to resist and stay afloat. Identity, innocence, youth, beauty - something is being erased in the process, and it does not portend a prosperous future. Who are the culprits? I'm gonna go ahead and say The Only Way Is Essex, Geordie Shore, BigBrother, Jedward - those fuckers, just because they successfully demonstrate everything that's wrong with our society today. Consequently, through no fault of its own, the aspiring youth is reduced to a monstrous, rotten and unidentifiable core.

Depressive cynicism aside, this guy is seriously talented. Before Hewett discovered oils, he was accustomed to tight pencil drawing. His draftsmanship is still evident in his work, but you can feel how much he enjoys the liberation of free and experimental brush strokes. Everything about Hewett seems to be a narrative of liberation, of freedom: breaking out of incarcerating strictures, the struggle for release. The struggle to breathe.

http://ryanhewett.foliosnap.com/

Tom French Fine Art

Thus far my experience as an artist has taught me that it can be a pretty enduring process trying to create a successful portrait which is designed purely in black and white. If you've taken a look at my own work, you'll notice that my use of high contrast often features a nice splash of colour to create some compositional balance - whatever that means. So I'm pretty green with envy when I double take at fine artist Tom French whose illusory work seems to be created exclusively from a monochromatic palette:

How do you stave off boredom when working with just two colours? I don't suppose John Virtue ever asked himself that question, but...French is interesting because he's almost like an updated and modernised version of old traditional methods with his contemporary urban realism. If you've read my previous posts, you'll already be sick of hearing that I like art that plays with opposites, contrasts, juxtapositions, contradictions, paradoxes, oxymorons...Well, here's a new one: French handles a duality between the beautiful and the sinister which is in perfect equilibrium:

French studies exuberant relationships which by their very intimate gestures momentarily conjure the ultimate symbol of mortality: a human skull. But what do you see first? French's work is reminiscent of those online optical illusion games you played as a kid. But since his images are not a series of fleeting brain-bashers but permanent works of art, his illusions don't dispel. They stick, creating this eerie fixation between the living dead and the dead living: the embraced figures at once seem alive and amorous, yet the surrealist effect of the skeleton creeping through renders them ghostly and ethereal, causing the skull itself to become humanised.

It's an odd transformative effect for the viewer. For me, French isn't necessarily taking us on a painfully predictable "Oh look - it's a pretty picture but on closer inspection it's so much darker than that" journey. The 'pretty to dark' element is interchangeable: death can become life as much as life can become death. So I suppose the question it asks of you is quite simply, 'Life or Death?' In any case, French's art naturally revives ideas that life and death are closer than we think, that death is inevitable.  But since the two are so well 'balanced', there's also always a sense of rejoice in that these pieces can celebrate the value of life and togetherness in the morbid face of loss.

French's reality-bending aesthetic was recently picked up for the new custom artwork on the Donnie Darko soundtrack release. The result is wicked - it's seriously encouraging to see great young talent being recognised for large scale projects like this. 

We don't need to rely on Photoshop for everything.

http://tomfrenchart.wordpress.com/

Lora Zombie Illustrator

Lora Zombie is sick - and I'm not talking about that unforgettable tag-name.  With her use of dark satire and subversive pop references, the Russian-born "grunge" artist at first sight seems like another predictable product of the anti-capitalism urban art trend.

But there's something more digestible about Zombie's beautifully light and loose illustrative style which is no less impacting. Parodying Disney characters is nothing new I hear you scream, but Zombie designs in a way that is not excessive. She controls the chaos: initially what seems to be a random attack of splats and drips on a canvas turns out to be a masterful and disciplined application of paint.

There's nothing too deep or stifling about them either. They're not overloaded with political messages that will make your brain fry before you can even attempt to appreciate what they look like. They're just effortlessly cool, making them perfect to be appreciated purely for aesthetic beauty or for their Banksy-esque tongue-in-cheek rebelliousness.  Either way, her minimalist style comes to define the artistic cliché that less can be more. You get the sense that Zombie enjoys absolute liberation during her creative process. She should be applauded just for putting Spiderman in a tutu...

But while Zombie injects humour into almost all of her pieces, it is her more sensitive and touching work which I'm really drawn to.  I reviewed the portfolio of fine artist Joram Roukes recently, whose work I praised because of its terrifying beauty, its hilarious disaster... I could continue with the oxymorons until I buckled under my own pretentiousness. Anyway, Zombie (I have to stop referring to her like this) works in a similar fashion in terms of thematics, but uses a much more subtle and suggestive approach.

So many urban artists today seek out shock factor, and whilst they are still hugely effective, they can tend to force the viewer into submission by their subversive and violent imagery. They'll usually leave an aftertaste of bitter cynicism, too, which leaves not much room for any hope or redemption. But these pieces, despite their air of tragedy, always have some undefinable promise contained within them, as if to say, 'Yes, our situation is shit, but everything's going to be alright.'

Zombie recently exhibited at the Pandamonium show at Signal. With the current tidal wave of Superhero movies, it's no surprise that her own Depressed Superheroes collection was an instant hit. You could quite easily imagine these works as graphic prints for a gritty East London fashion label.

Also, visit her Facebook page at your peril, because you'll feel instant guilt once you're there. Not only does she have such a diverse range of works, but she's also got shit loads of them - up to 400 illustrations and oil paintings. I always thought her style was efficient, but jesus. It's no surprise her huge output of work has made her an international success.

All in all, Zombie uses her pop icons as clever metaphors for the absurdity of lofty ideals, the futility of  superheroic dreams and aspirations in a contemporary society reduced to supermodels and overpaid footballers. There's only so much we can achieve as real human beings.

Wasn't going to let you get off that easy.

http://www.lorazombie.com/ 

Joram Roukes Fine Artist

Wreckface 2
2012

The artwork of Netherlands based artist Joram Roukes is a literal 'car crash' of assorted western phenomena: Roukes perhaps creates his characters with such heavily layered imagery to hint at an identity swallowed underneath the chaotic iconography of consumerism. In fact, it seems that the only thing knitting the images together is Roukes' intriguing motif of destructive and violent collision, often depicted in his drawings by upended or at least severely damaged vehicles. 

Roukes is clearly obsessed by anthropomorphism, too: his pieces frequently depict grotesque human bodies with the heads of intensely vulnerable animals, producing images which pivot between terror and hilarity. What also makes these pieces so effective is that they don't preach; Roukes doesn't necessarily go out of his way to expose the flaws of his society, but instead he observes, allowing us to determine our own position amid the insanity.

In fact, Roukes' balance between the dark and the humorous is so pitch perfect that you just don't know whether to laugh or cry. That awkward tension is where the true success of his work lies. 

It's no surprise Roukes is becoming hugely popular over here in the UK, especially with his recent solo show, Oils, at urban art gallery Signal in East London. He's got that sardonic but playful and seductive air of Antony Micallef about him, whilst still producing his own unique and robust aesthetic identity. 

He's also a really cool guy to chat with, which is a bonus. He offered me some enlightening pearls of wisdom recently about the virtual impossibility of getting galleries to notice you...Thanks mate!

In the meantime, I have no doubt we will see big movements from this guy in the future, I can quite easily see him up in the ranks with the likes of Micallef and Dan Baldwin. 

Check him out: http://joramroukes.blogspot.co.uk/

Hello "Art World"

For a very long time I have felt under immense pressure from this invisible force goading me on to create a "blog" because, as a "creator" of things, I should also be "creating" in the virtual world. Yes, I am describing myself in inverted commas because I want to dispel any pompous self-righteousness before I even get started. I'm very wary of self-aggrandising titles and I prefer to think of myself as just having a strong passion and respect for many different forms of design: from fine art to fashion design and illustration, film to creative writing. 

I have a particular appetite for anything that strikes me as unconventional, extra-ordinary, subversive, challenging, controversial, shocking. Just anything that's going to snap me - and you - out of this sad, facebook-induced state of inertness. I'd like to think that's where my art comes from. If it's shocking, fine; at least you reacted.

I'm here to document both my own artistic projects and projects emerging from the realms of art, fashion, film, and anything else that's going to make you stop and think. At times, I might talk about something that's really pissing me off (like Big Brother), but that's probably because it's already hatched as a subconscious stimulus for my next project, so hopefully it'll be worth putting up with.

Nice to meet you,

Jonny Burt.