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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Rendered in colored pencil and graphite, the new works of David Jien expand his wild worlds in a show at Richard Heller Gallery. "All Is Not Lost," running through Nov. 2 at the Santa Monica space, moves between his strange scenes and shelves of curiosities. Jien was last featured on our site here.
William A. Hall was homeless for 18 years before his intricate colored pencil drawings of vehicles and futurescapes were discovered and brought to the public. During the past few years, his work has been displayed by Henry Boxer Gallery and brought to museum collections specializing in folk and outsider art.
In the past, Jillian Dickson’s colored pencil drawings blended flowers and female anatomy. With “My Undies,” the artist’s realistic, vibrant style highlights a different brand of intimate imagery. The artist says that “the reality of women’s underwear seems to be one big dirty secret.”
David Jien’s works on paper and sculptures blend modern pop culture and video games with historical iconography and imagery. These hyperdetailed works can feel both mythological and like a Nintendo RPG. The Los Angeles-based artist uses colored pencil and graphite on his paper works, along with occasional use of holographic film and other elements that add to their otherworldly nature.
Andrew Chuani Ho, a Los Angeles native, creates vibrant scenes with colored pencil on paper, with works that are both surreal and autobiographical. In his first solo show at Richard Heller Gallery, titled Days and Day, the artist brings his trademark insanity and blending components in a new set of works. The artist cites influences like Matisse, Marquez, and even Henry Darger. From the gallery: “Having a deeply spiritual upbringing, Ho’s work exhibits the use of patterns, colors and symbols to reinterpret myths and fables of yore into meditatively drawn colored pencil drawings.”
Paul White focuses on a single medium in creating his hyper-detailed works: colored pencil on paper. In particular, the artist is focused on the concepts of decay and objects becoming obsolete. In terms of source material, much of his work is derived from photographs taken of desertscapes and other scenes across the West Coast.
Eric Green's meticulously detailed drawings replicate life beautifully- but there is something off about them. "When you really begin to understand life, everything changes completely all the time. Nothing is ever the same again," he says. Working primarily in colored pencil, Green draws images that are meant to change our perceptions by illustrating the subtleties between moments as light changes and objects are mysteriously moved by unseen occupants.
Infused with ecstasy and a dark beauty, Marco Mazzoni's art underlines the connection between the natural world and our own. First featured on the cover of Hi-Fructose Vol. 20, and our blog, the Milan, Italy based artist uses nature as symbolism for his own observations about life, where ghostly figures often emerge in the final stage of drawing. Their eyes are never shown, as Mazzoni sees his work more like a composition of still life of small animals, flowers and leaves, rather than a portrait, rendered only using colored pencil.
Colored pencils haven't quite received the recognition of their counterparts as a fine art material- and yet over the years, we've featured artists from all over the world who have surprised us with what can be achieved by these utensils from our elementary school sets. CHG Circa in Los Angeles sent a group of international artists a set of their own and invited them to refer back to their child imagination.
Quebec native Alexandra Bastien (first posted in 2014) can spend over 40 hours on just one of her near hyper-realistic colored pencil drawings. She is currently working on an ongoing series of girls in a state of Metempsychosis, especially reincarnation. In other words, we are witnessing the moment after death where their souls move from one form to another. In Bastien's work, this is usually an animal skull or remains. Take a look at some of her recent drawings, after the jump!
The natural world is a never-ending source of inspiration for Italian artist Marco Mazzoni (Hi-Fructose Vol. 20 cover artist), whose colored pencil drawings explore the worlds of pagan healers, midwives and herbalists. These women were deemed witches at various points in history, for their knowledge threatened the patriarchal power structure of the Christian church. Mazzoni specifically culls his imagery from 16th-to-18th-century Sardinian folklore, studying the region's historically matriarchal culture. His latest exhibition of drawings, "Immune," will open at Thinkspace in Culver City on November 8 alongside Keita Morimoto's show "Tronie."