Constantin Werner

MIDNIGHT IN EDEN - Orange, Blue, Brown Adam and Eve in Surreal Garden at Night

2020

A companion painting to this piece, TECHNOLOGY OF DIRT is owned by the Knoxville Museum of Art. The painting "TECHNOLOGY OF DIRT & AIR" was inspired by an image glanced as I passed by a florist shop window. Inside the florist show was a vibrant floral arrangement overflowing with roses and foliage. On the surface of the window were reflections of architecture behind me and abstracted slivers of light and distorted shapes of things reflected though hardly recognizable. I snapped a few photographs at the time. Several months later, I returned to those images and was intrigued at how the flowers in the image seemed to be made out of crystal and how the reflections on the window "interrupted" the ability to easily make out the forms in the photograph. I was intrigued by the complexity of the image and how recognizable elements emerged and then faded into abstraction. As I worked on this painting, I wanted it to be as if it was coming into crisp focus, while also becoming a complicated tapestry of shapes and colors. I have made six paintings in this series thus far. Jered Sprecher is a visual artist who was born in Lincoln, Nebraska (1976). He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and his B.A. from Concordia University in Nebraska. He has taught at Princeton University and Cornell University. Mr. Sprecher currently lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee. Jered Sprecher’s studio practice explores the “handwriting” of humankind. The vocabulary that he draws from is focused on the vast array of marks and images in one’s surroundings. From this vocabulary he samples visual motifs and imports them into his paintings and drawings. These works continually focus on remnants and fragments that are captured in the midst of change, then edited and fused together in the space of painting. These images are pregnant with a longing to communicate. The success and failure of these “messages in a bottle” are the basis of his work. Mr. Sprecher has had solo exhibitions at Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; the Art Gallery of Knoxville; The Cress Gallery-UTC, Chattanooga; and Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music (Next Next Art), New York; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville; Des Moines Art Center; Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; Arthouse, Austin; Mark Moore Gallery...

"I don’t do enough red paintings. I like red, but somehow it doesn’t end up in my work all that often, or it ends up pretty muted and earthy by the end. When I was lighting the sculpture upon which this painting is based, I knew I wanted to do something with the red lights I had. As with previous work, this painting explores entanglement as both a compositional structure and as an artistic idea. The representational part of the painting is pushed as close to a photographic rendering as I could at the time. Meanwhile, I’ve contrasted that with flat graphic elements. I also wanted to do something interesting with the cast shadow of the form: whereas in some previous works in the series the main form either had a traditional cast shadow grounding the it to the illusion of a ground plane, or no cast shadow which left it floating within the shallow depth of the image, in Untitled Construct 5 I wanted to do something more specific with the cast shadow. The idea came to me to invert it to be pure white. Technically this was a bit of a challenge because the whitest oil paints take months to dry – so this work had quite a bit of ‘sit and wait time’ between layers. Personally, I enjoy the composition of this painting because the red attracts the eye towards the bottom left of the painting, but the contrasting movements in black, gray and white pull the eye up and over...

De Verwondering Amazement Oil Painting on Canvas Abstract Colorful In Stock John Nieland (1966) was born in Baflo, Groningen, the Netherlands en grew up in Friesland. As a young boy his creative talent was already recognized. For a brief period he attended the Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam. He felt the academic way of working obstructing his own style, so he decided to go his own way. His work is inspired by CoBrA, abstract, expressive and surreel. On his colourful and big canvasses he works with thick layers of paint, expressing emotions from the past. The multiple layers make the artwork more complex than you would expect it to be, at first sight. More paintings than one are hidden under the surface. Everyone with its own story, emotion, secret, powerful and renewing. Expression by art is a necessity of life for Nieland. In 1996 Nieland founded the artist group Lamütta, in Amsterdam. The group consisted of artists, composers, filmers, fashion designers and designers, like Herman Brood...

Clouds oil on canvas 50x40 cm Original Oil paint on canvas Ready to hang Marilina Marchica, born in 1984, was born in Agrigento, where she lives and works. She graduated in Painti...