Focus on the Artist: M.L. Van Nice

M. L. Van Nice is another book artist that alters the book to create sculpture and meaning. His piece I included above titled "Swiss Army Book" is intricate, complicated, with lots of meaning. He's got the book serving a much bigger purpose than just to contain words and pages.

Focus on the Artist: Brian Dettmer

Brian Dettmer is a book artist, who creates amazing sculpture pieces out of books and pages. His work reminds me of Tom Friedmans in a way because of the obsession that goes into each one. They are extremely intricate and confusing, but are very, very beautiful and crazy. Here are a couple examples that I highly recommend viewing larger to see all the crazy.

The more I see about book art, the more I understand why it's it's own genre of art. The book is beautiful and represents so many differing things to many different people. Art is all about meaning, so naturally art created out of books makes sense.

Focus on the Artist: Diane Cassidy

Diane Cassidy is a book artist I discovered on bayareabooks.com. She creates typical bound books, with some pretty extraordinary things. She does Jacob Ladder's books, books from chocolate wrappers, and more. I found her work to be really well done. She has amazing craft, and great ideas in keeping each one unique and inspiring.

Focus on the Artists: Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni, like Yoko Ono, used performance art using her entire body including hair, brain, arms, and legs. She is a contemporary artist who, through her performance, made people think, analyze, and ask questions.

I think its' really great that she puts herself into her art. One piece I read she did, she slept while a machine tracked her sleep. Then while she was awake, she sewed a blanket with  the guide from the EEG machine. She did this for eight days! Crazy, but really cool.

Focus on the Artists: RTmark

RTmark helped artists who had oppositions with giant corporations and other big business vs. the man type of narratives. It served as a website where people would vote on what they should do by providing the funding.

One piece they did, was replace the voice boxes in Barbies with G.I. Joes so that the G.I. Joes talked like girls, and the Barbies talked like men. I thought it was a good statement of how we expose our children to cliches. Men do it this way. Women do it this way. It's not always the case.

Focus on the Artist: Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono is a very popular conceptual artist who defined the genre even further. She performed lots of performance art, and displayed installations that put the viewer into the art. Some viewers would have to climb ladders all the way up to the ceiling jus to see the piece.

Another piece she performed was a performance piece where the viewer took turns cutting pieces of her clothing off. It had a striking narrative of how we treat women, how women allow themselves to be treated, and was both difficult and entrancing to watch.

Focus on the Artist: Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp completely revolutionized the way we view, question, and create art. By placing a urinal on a pedestal and calling it a fountain, he began this idea of conceptualization that had never been seen before. People began to question art, "What is art?""Is there rules for art" "Is art so because it is created by an artist?" "Who determines who an artist is?"

All these are amazing questions that stemmed from this one piece, which began a revolution in the conceptual art genre.

Focus on the Artist: Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman is an amazing conceptual artist that has done some very intricate sculptures. His work borders on obsession that will completely blow your mind. I'm just boggled with some of his work. Here he carved his self portrait out of an aspirin!

Conceptual art is something that can normally really make you think, for the sake of calling it art. But Friedman's art is something much more. You find yourself in thought about it because it has all the intrinsic qualities that can call it art, but also has this dimension of obsession that you instantly think of when you see it.

Here's a piece called "Untitled" that contains over 30,000 toothpicks. How amazing is this?! Who has the time to place 30,000 toothpicks together to form this beautiful, complex sculpture.

I couldn't find any pictures of his self portrait made from sugar cubes, but I can say I was immediately blown away. It's a life-size sculpture, in simple cubism, made entirely from sugar cubes. I think this is one of the things that inspired me the most to do the sculpture I'm working on now.

By the way, I did start the beef cube sculpture of the the cow. So far, so good. I've used almost 70 cubes and I've done hardly anything, so I will be need many, many more.

Focus on the Artist: Elizabeth Berrien

Elizabeth Berrien is a world class wire sculptor and illustrator who does some amazing work with wire. I googled looking for wire sculptor and found her stuff and was blown away by the detail.

While her work doesn't really go along with the assignment, she does work with wire and I found myself oogling her organic patterns and realistic pieces. Here are a couple from her website:

Just looking at her work makes me excited to work with the wire more and come up with something of my own.

http://www.wirelady.com/