Nick Cave was born in Fulton, Missouri on February 4, 1959. He is known for his performance art in sculpture, specifically his sound suits. His Love for sound suits began as a response to the Rodney King beating. The sound suit that is worn is considered the second layer or skin on the body. This represented race, class, and gender allowing those who viewed Cave art work to view it without being influenced by the identity of the model in the suit. One thing about Cave that allows him to stand out among other artist is that he often executes his pubic appearances.

One of Nick Cave’s projects was Here Hear began in Detroit because he found it critical for him to expand his art career there. This project consist of 7 months of events throughout the city of Detroit. When this project was launched it was Caves largest series of events.

Knowing what lied ahead of him, his mother told him that being a black male in America could work against him, he knew he’d have to develop tough skin.

Sojourn is located in the Denver Art museum. It features almost forty art works including twenty-four sound suits. Cave’s sound suits in this exhibit allows viewers to have a surreal experience. Are made out of buttons, found objects and short films.

Josephine Halvorson grew up in Cape Cod and is still based in Massachusetts. She is an oil painter based on real life observations based on real time perceptions. She first studied art on the beaches of Provincetown at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She attended The Cooper Union School of Art, Yale Norfolk, and continued her interdisciplinary education at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Josephine Halvorson has taught at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Columbia University

Both of Halvorson’s parents were artists as well. Her father taught art and made kinetic metal sculptures. Her mother studied painting and metal became her medium upon meeting her father. In her childhood, her mother inspired her and being the only child with no one to compare herself to- it became her mission to be as good as her mother. Josephine’s competitiveness with her mother eventually lead to her mother stopping art to allow her daughter to just be able to draw and not compare herself to her mother. Because Cape Cod isn’t far from New York City, she spent most of her childhood summers in art galleries and attributes this context of her childhood as a factor in her success.

Upon the completion of her interdisciplinary education at The Cooper Union School of Art, she spent a year in Austria, in which she described the experience to be a tremendous period of growth for her as an artist. She described her goal going into it as, “My proposal was to paint portraits in relation to both psychology and expressionism in painting. In other words, what’s the relationship of me, the artist, to a subject—whether it’s a person, an object, an environment, or whatever—and how can painting address this question in ways that other forms of art can’t.”

Halvorson often completes her paintings in a single session because she works on site. She finds objects in their environment that feels “look back” at her. Her process includes prolonged closeness and shared experience with her chosen subject matter and the human quality of their tools, their graffiti, their wear and tear. One could conclude that she practices art in its most basic form, which is highlighting the human experience and perception of the environment around us.

Halvorson’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Mexico. Her solo New York exhibitions “What Looks Back” and “Clockwise From Window” at Monya Rowe were highly acclaimed.

Slow Burn is my favorite piece I came across. Upon discussing the selection, Halvorson described her process as, “My practice is one of understanding an object in time: its history, its function, its place in the world, its environment—and my own relationship to it,” the artist has said. The Southeastern Center for Contemporary art exclaimed that, “Halvorson’s twenty-three portraits of the inanimate world bear witness to a haptic encounter between herself, her subject, the material of paint, plus time.”

Taiwanese artist Han Hsu Tung focuses on creating intricately designed wood sculptures. Tung has been an artist for three decades, in which he has created over three-hundred pieces. He was educated at the prestigious National Taiwan University as an anthropologist. Since 2015, Han has worked under the nom-de guerre Donald Harn. His works are inspired by personal feelings and the observation of social evolution and the influence of digital culture. In his early career, he focused on historical contexts, reality vs. imagination, left vs. right, and light vs. dark.

Beginning in the beginning of the twenty-first century, Han introduced his modern artwork that features the well-known pixilated and ever dispersing forms in his artwork. His work has encompassed the use of line and contrast through “pixilating” that has parallels with contemporary social evolution. He is a “master of marrying old and new” according to Jessica Stewart of My Modern Met. He began to show the transition from historical thought and design to a more contemporary technological aspect. His pieces care successful through the use of great technique and detail. He utilizes line, color, and contrast to make his pieces more impactful on the viewer.

His unique style has made him widely popular by breaking the boundary of perfected wood carvings. His pieces are extremely well crafted yet interrupted by broken fragments of digitalization. For this reason, many of his works focus on a breaking was or disappearance of some sort. He does this to get people to understand the world we live in, and how over time, we are becoming more digitalized. With his works, he believes people are losing their sense of the past and are headed for a new fully digital and broken age.

Han’s futuristic take encompasses the use of pixilating wood carvings. He puzzles together different colored wooden blocks, making some of them indented and others protruding. He plays the contrast of raw wood and finished sculpture. Many of his pieces imply the disappearance of history due to the modern digital age we live in.

Many of Han’s works give off a sense of motion. For example, the piece “Catcher” shows the movement of the wood that seems as if you can see the ball hitting the glove.

His expertise in sculpture is evident in the piece, “Chess.”  The piece depicts a powerful horse standing for a knight on a chess board. The raw power of the horse is shown with intricate and smooth lines and curves, contrasted with the broken blocks of his digitalization.

With his piece, “Civil War” he reengages his 1994 “War Series.” This work shows the passing of time and shows a hint of melancholy for the man and woman in uniform. The gap shows the distance between people as well as distance between thoughts of this generation and that of the time of the piece.

The image of the influence of technology is shown through his pieces, “iFashion” and “Where is the Like?” Both show a man connected with a device, which shows the great impact that technology and social media have on people of this time and how technology shapes the way we look and think.

Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840. From a young age his father wanted him to take over the family business, but Monet wanted to be an artist. In 1851, he entered the Le Havre school of arts. He was known for his charcoal caricatures. He then met an artist, Eugéne Boudin, who taught him how to use oil paints. Monet is now known for being the founder of French impressionist paintings.

Monet uses oil paints to create his pieces. Many of his works are obviously based on the impressionist style. Impressionism being an artistic style that captures the moment. Rather than achieving a depiction, it wants to reveal the emotions and experience in the moment.

This is a painting of his wife Camille. This is one of his first paintings and it is a realist painting rather than an impressionist painting. It is a life sized painting which was peculiar at that time because life sized paintings were usually contain people of royalty. He painted the background dark to emphasize Camille and what she is wearing and the details of her dress.

Monet challenged himself and created an impressionist snow scene. The name wasn’t given to the painting until five years later when it was in an exhibition. It was named after the magpie perched on the wooden gate. The painting was recognized for using such pale and gloomy colors.

This is one of the the paintings in his series “Nympheas”. The series consists of 250 oil paintings that he created in the last 30 years of his life. Today they are on display in Museums around the world.

This painting of the Rouen Cathedral was another series of paintings he created. In these works, he broke painting tradition and only focuses primarily in one spot. Only a portion could be seen on the canvas. Everyday he would find a new detail he hadn’t prior, so this piece was near impossible for him to create.

When he was in London, Monet painted another series based on the home of the British Parliament. There are 19 painting that are the same size of the same image. However, each image was under different weather circumstances.

This painting is another image of Camille and their eldest son. Rather than focusing on line and shape he was attentive towards light and color.

Claude Monet passed due to lung cancer on December 5, 1926. He has many of his paintings in museums all across the world. His home then now serves as an attraction for the the French Academy of fine arts in Giverny, France.

http://www.claudemonetgallery.org/biography.html

http://www.monetpaintings.org/woman-in-the-green-dress/

http://giverny.org/monet/home/