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Paintings with a Wow Factor

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1 minute ago, Marblehead said:

A red haired April.  Yeah, that's a "WoW!"

 

 

Stay back - I saw her first

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3 hours ago, Marblehead said:

A drawing by one of our members when he was 16 years old.

 

Limahong

 

 

Goddess of Mercy (1) (2).jpg

Wow he drew that @ 16?

That is pure awesome.

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Famous modern Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in artistic commentary toward the current Chinese government.

 

In response, the Chinese government demolished his art studio without warning.

 

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Edited by moment
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I apologize that this is not a painting. But, I believe that Ai Weiwei's statement above needs more elaboration.

Straight (2008-12)

Artwork description & Analysis: Both a stylized representation of an earthquake and an image of its effects, Straight is a statement about a specific instance of governmental corruption and negligence. The province of Sichuan suffered massive casualties in an earthquake of 2008, leaving 90,000 dead or missing. Over 5,000 were children killed when poorly constructed schools collapsed on top of them. Ai, a self-taught architect, was outraged to discover that this could have been avoided. Both a memorial and a call to action, Straight is part of the artist's broader effort to hold the Chinese government responsible and urge it to take preventative steps to avoid future disaster. It took him four years to complete this monumental floor sculpture --almost 40 feet long and 20 feet wide - weighing 200 tons. To construct it, he collected the bent and broken steel reinforcement bars that were part of the badly built schools. He commissioned metal workers to straighten and mend them until they looked as they would have before the earthquake. He arranged the bars in waves that resemble the oscillations in an earthquake on a seismograph. The fissures between them resemble fault lines. The thousands of individual components reference the individual lives lost, a typical feature of Ai's symbolism. 

The Chinese government did not appreciate the attention the artist drew to this national embarrassment and this marked the beginning of an especially turbulent period in Ai's adversarial relationship with Chinese authorities.

Steel reinforcing bars - Royal Academy of Arts, London

"Straight" upon completion in the workshop. (Screen capture from the video above.)

 

 

 

Edited by moment
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On 8/14/2018 at 4:53 AM, NOONE said:

malevich-2-edit-crop.jpg

 

It is like a combination of cubism and "watching paint dry."  I like it just because it is probably a good conversation starter. ;)

Edited by futuredaze

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