Leonid Afremov

Leonid Afremov is a talented painter. He has painted myriads and myriads of paintings. He is not your typical painter however. Instead of using a brush, he uses a pallet knife (for those who don't know what that is, it looks like a butter knife) to spread his oil paint on his canvas to produce a extravagant painting of pure genius. He paints many kinds of genres. He paints people, animals, nature, scenes, and many others.

When you look at his work, your mind gets awakened with a new sense and perspective forthe subject in the painting. My mind was blown away when I saw some of his work.

If I could meet and spend a day with any one in the world today, I would choose him. I would want to talk to him about his work, ask him how he does it and buy a few of his paintings to hang in my room. Just learning from him would be such an experience!

Elephant Painting

There are people all over the world who paint. There are also many people in world history who have painted many wonderful and many well known paintings in today's art memory, but have you ever heard of an Elephant painting pictures?

In Thailand, Indonesia, India and Cambodia there are elephants who paint pictures. They paint elephants, trees, fields, and probably a whole lot more different things, by just picking up the brush with their trunks. Each Elephant has a person to help them with the paint color, but the person will hand the brush to the elephant, the elephant will step up to the canvas and start painting.

An elephant is trained to paint by her mahout or her trainer. They practice for a long time until the elephant is able to paint a picture. before the training however quiet a few of these elephants were employed hauling timber around, but when they "lost" there job there, they had to come up with some talent to market in the economy that would help them to survive.

The links below show examples of Elephant Painting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7Ge7Sogrk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHiMz1v2vyE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz4CFAOY0R8&feature=related

Doggy Collage Pop Art

In our history we look back and we see paintings and statues and collages sculptures, and other inturesting art pieces, but in the art of today there is a new kind of art. Its called Doggy Collage Pop art. People take a picture of a dog and they use differt types, designs, colors, textures of fabric or paper to form the picture of the dog.

The Artist will cut the pieces and fit them together in such a manner that it turns out looking like a dog. There are some organization who have artists make these collages and sell them in a craft fair or gallery to earn money for different causes. There is an artist in Chicago who made a blog website where she blogs about her work and thanks any body who sends in pictures of their dog. She then takes the pictures of the dogs to make her collages where she sells them at her galleries. This website is http://moderndogart.wordpress.com/. It is very interting.

Coffee

When you think of Coffee you think of that warm caffinated drink that people drink to keep themselves awake. But have you ever thought of it being more then that? Coffee can be turned into an art. The ways it can be made and the different tastes is an art but the art I want to talk about is its presentation.

Some artistic coffee shops have started to decorate the top of the coffee like these:

Some places take moviescharacter's and transfer them onto their coffee:

This is the Character Kiki from Kiki's Delivery Service. A little witch going out on her own.

This kind of art takes time and skill. They pour steamed milk into a shot of espressoto create the pattern. They can also simply just draw in the foam at the top. The Barista, person who serves the espresso, is the one who creates the pattern and it deepends on his experience, skill and the quality of his espresso machine to make the espresso.

you have to have good experience with this art, professionally called Latte art, inorder to do it right. If you get it too much milk the top turns white and if there is not enough it will be a brownish color and with either these you can not create a pattern.

There is also another kind of art using coffe and it is coffee art wallpaper. This art is where you take the coffee and put it on paper to make a picture using the coffee's stain. With either art it looks awesome and takes people who are very talented.

Action Paintings

Action Painting is where the paint is dabbled, splashed, or smeared onto the canvas spontaneously. This kind of painting is sometimes called gestural abstraction. Most Art is carefully applied to the canvas or what ever the art might be, but this special type of art doesn't.

Some of these Painters who are action painters, don't even use brushes. Katsushika Hokusai, a Japanese artist, used animals or insects to as his tools to apply the paint. In the bottome picture was one of them. He used a maggot and covered him in paint placed them on the canvas and he watched them crawl around.

Action Painting in itself emphazises the point of the physical act of painting and that, that is the essential part of the artists concern and the end result.

Action Painting was very popluar in the 1940s until the early 1960s. It was mostly a product of World War II because of expressionism when all the quantum mechanics started to arise.

Some of the most well known of these action painters are Jackson Pollock, Jack Tworkov, Franz Cline, Albert Kotin, and many others.




Through these Action Paintings we see the most expression. The Expression and art from the mind.

Art That Kills

Andy Warhol Guns was painted by Andy Warhol with acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas in the 1981 or 1982. In the 80s, Warhol had been painting iconic objects. He described himself as "an American artist who was merely depicting his environment." The gun in this painting was a .32 snub-nosed pistol. This specific gun was once used on him by Valerie Salonas in her assassination attempt on him.

This painting reminds me of the Shooting at Fort Hood. An Army psychiatrist, who was faced with diployment to Iraq, took a gun and shot and killed 13 people and injured another 28. He was taken down by a Sergeant Munley. who gave and recieved many bullet wounds in the process.

Some unidentified people thought it fit the gunmens personality and they could see him doing it. Others, like General George Casey, said it was "a kick in the Gut." These violent actions remind me of this iconic painting.

The Scream

The Scream is an expressionist painting painted by Edvund Munch. The Painting was of a man that was agonized against a blood colored sky of Oslofjord in Oslo, Norway.

Munch did many version of the painting. There was two painted versions, pastel, and lithograph. The Scream has been the center of many art thefts. It was once stolen in 1994 from the National Gallery. It was recovered a little bit later. It was also stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004 but was recovered in 2006. after restoration it was put back on display in 2008.

The original title was german and was Der Schrei der Natur, which means The Scream of Nature. The painting was once was once called The Cry. Munch was inspired by a experience he had when he was with friends crossing the bridge. They were crossing the bridge at sunset and when the sky went red when it set he stopped on the bridge and his friends walked on and he felt like he wanted to scream. He thus came up with his inspiration.

Today it is group into popular culture. This photo is used often in movies, shows, or they would put in someone in the place of The Scream.