Meghan Howland

Meghan is a young artist, born in 1985, living and working in Portland, Maine. She studied painting at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and studied in Italy for a year also. Meghan's close detail of figures clothes and hair is outstanding, but most interestingly she focuses many of her paintings around the obstruction of the face, most commonly birds with outstretched wings.

Meghan kindly sent me her statement:

"Meghan Howland is an emerging artist living and working in Portland, Maine. Her work offers a unique range of styles and observations, while often personal in their meaning, ventures to examine larger cultural and emotional issues.  Through a haze of oil paint, and sometimes animals, we are confronted by situations that are at once disarmingly beautiful, yet are infused with an implied sense of yearning, loss, or disaster. In recent work, subjects are bathed in nature in a subtly unnatural way. Naive to or unaffected by what is happening around them, figures are often used to explore issues of fragility, identity, and our individual understandings of nature within our own personal, somewhat obscure relationship to it." 

www.meghanhowland.com

Beth Galton

Beth Galton has made a series of, in her words, 'Conceptual' artworks in which she has examined the way we look at food amongst other things. 

Cut Food: Here Beth has taken apart the food we rarely see inside of, such as the favourite pot noodle or ice cream cone

Beth kindly sent me a statement about Cut Food: 


This series was inspired by an assignment in which we were asked to cut a burrito in half for a client.  Normally for a job, we photograph the surface of food occasionally taking a bite or a piece out but rarely the cross section of a finished dish.  Charlotte Omnès, the food stylist and I thought it would be interesting to explore the interiors of various foods particularly items commonplace to our everyday life.  By cutting these items in half we move past the simple appetite appeal we normally try to achieve and explore the interior worlds of these products. I chose to light them with a harder light, and to place them against black.  Daniel Hurlburt composited elements in retouching to achieve the final image. Both Charlotte and I felt that this approach helped highlight our exploration of the world within.

Landscapes: In this series of photographs, Beth zooms into food and captures the different textures we experience with sight instead of touch and taste, creating images which look like abstract landscapes.

Idioms: The last set of images I'm showing is perhaps the most interesting, called idioms. An idiom is a set of words in which the meaning isn't deductible if they are not put together, for example 'raining cats and dogs'. Beth has used this definition to place together  in photographs, things which we put together instantly in our minds, (much like my post on David Schwen a month ago).

Beth has posted loads more of her projects on her website so take a look!

Kiss

Some beautiful watercolours such as the one above can be found on fhgalland.tumblr.com

Le Carnet Noir

Nacho Ormaechea is a Spanish artist who resides in Paris. He says about places which motivate him the most:

'I'm mostly comfortable with cities which I see as perfect theaters full of inspiring yet anonymous characters.'

The people in his series 'Le Carnet Noir' are anonymous characters, a snapshot of a fleeting moment in their day, and taken away from this landscape and replaced with a contrasting image. These characters are the ones which inspire Ormaechea the most, anonymous people who, although they are unknown to most, are involved with and in the day to day running of the city.

lecarnetnoir.com

Light and faces

Being an art student, whenever I watch something on screen and there's good light on a person's face, I immediately think about how I would paint them. An artist has studied how light affects the perception of a face, it really is interesting how different this girl looks when the light is altered.

ITSAJACKAL: life drawings

'take pictures,  draw pictures (use a mechanical pencil .3mm) scan drawing. then darken and shadow in photoshop.' - itsajackal (tumblr)