Art Cannot Be Created in a Vacuum: Contemporaries
By Dayna Spinner
Has the work of one artist ever made you think of another? Or several? It’s interesting when you can trace an artist’s influences, and, I think, even more interesting when you discover that artist’s contemporaries who, through either coincidence or mutual inspiration, have created similar works. As a recent Bomo Arts post suggests, creativity is not about being 100% original, and I have always maintained that art cannot be created in a vacuum. With respect to this concept, I would like to present four artists: American artist, Pete Goldlust; Dutch artist, Peter Schuyff; Vietnamese-American artist, Diem Chau; and Brazilian-American artist, Dalton Ghetti. If these guys don’t know of each other already, they really need to drink some tea together and chat. What I appreciate is that although three of these artists have an American heritage, they also have other cultural heritages that reach to different corners of the globe. They are also inspired by different themes, even though they express them in similar media and processes. Goldlust is interested in “mutated, hybrid forms, and the disjunctive psychological states.” Schuyff finds his inspiration in music and began carving out of boredom. Chau explores “fleeting memory, gesture and form, resulting in works that combine egalitarian sensibility and minimalist restraint.” Ghetti found his motivation in his upbringing, when he used razors to sharpen pencils at school and at a young age began to make his own toys. In this respect, we have four distinct artists with four distinct viewpoints who are connected by their final products.
Art that can take something as mundane as a pencil, crayon or baseball bat and turn it into something interesting and unexpected is a process of elevation, not just transformation. The final product becomes conceptually greater than the original item.
- Reblogged from bomoarts
