Broken glass portraits, marginal paintings, and other strange techniques by contemporary artists

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Getting to know the modern portrait art, we can say with complete confidence that, although today's artists have moved far away from realism, they have outdone the old masters in originality, uniqueness and ingenuity. Our publication contains an astounding selection of works by contemporary portrait painters who, using incredible methods and tools, amaze and impress the public with their work.

What is art? As a rule, by this word we mean the expression of the artist's internal or external perception of the world through pictorial means. And, speaking about art in general, everyone has their own specific associations. Contemporary artists have long gone beyond traditional media and traditional techniques in art. And today even the most unusual things can be used as an alternative to canvas and painting tools.

We imagine an artist, as a rule, with a brush against a canvas, and a sculptor with a block of marble or with clay in his hands. But hardly any of us could imagine an artist with a hammer, breaking glass, or sowing herbs and other agricultural plants in the field. However, I dare to assure you - in the modern world of art there are also such. And some of them work in the most difficult genre - the portrait genre.

With a hammer and chisel

Swiss artist Simon Berger creates amazing works of art with a hammer and chisel, which he uses to cut glass surfaces. The cracks resulting from the blows result in magnificent portraits. Thus, glass serves as a canvas for the artist, and a hammer as a brush.

An innovative artist beats glass in the name of art. And more often than not, Simon prefers to work with automotive laminated glass or laminated glass panels, since this type of glass does not crumble into pieces so easily, but retains its shape after impact. The results of his labors are really impressive. For the self-taught artist, glass is a material with tremendous potential in art, and he believes he has found a technique that is perhaps the most unique in the entire world.

If you look at Berger's works up close, they seem to be the result of vandalism. And it is worth taking a few steps back, and in the chaos of cracks, a laconic image of a human face begins to be seen - without unnecessary details and strokes, all the most important.

Berger's work is painstaking work with an idea thought out to the smallest detail. One wrong move or an incorrectly calculated impact force - and the work must be started all over again. Berger is adept at using tools, because he is very well versed in carpentry.

Swiss painter and sculptor Simon Berger (Simon Berger) born in 1976, raised in Herzogenbuchs, a commune in Switzerland, in the canton of Bern. After graduating from primary and secondary school, like many young men in the commune, he was educated as a carpenter. Although he had considerable drawing ability. - says Simon Berger about himself.

Simon also talked about the complex process of his creation. First, he photographs the person he wants to make a portrait of. Then, after processing the image on a computer, it prints the final version. And then proceeds directly to work on the glass, noting with a marker where it is necessary to strike and which areas should be left untouched. Then he strikes in strictly defined places, accurately calculating his strength. At the same time, he uses a sledgehammer, hammer, chisel, chisels and other tools. And, as you yourself understand, one inaccurate movement can ruin everything.

Berger first became famous throughout the country thanks to one of his works - a portrait on the window of one of the shops in Basel. Photos of this showcase quickly spread across the Internet and went viral on social networks. Simon Berger says that as an artist he wants to be taken seriously, he wants to attract attention with his work. And the easiest way to achieve this is by applying a technique that no one else has used before. He also claims that laminated glass is a great material for innovation. After all, the cracks on it really become works of art.

Simon's art project of broken glass, titled Defekt, was recently exhibited at the Philipp Brogli Artstbli in Basel, Switzerland. And photographs of the unusual glass portrait scattered across social networks like wildfire. And curiously, the viewer at first thinks that the glass portrait is a sticker. But on closer inspection, he realizes that the portrait is indeed painted with cracks on the glass.

Agro-painting. Landscape portraits by Stan Heard

Stan Herd is an unusual artist, his canvases are the largest in the world and he paints them not with brushes and paints, but with his tractor, but instead of canvas he has whole fields … More than four decades, American artist Stan Heard in the truest sense of the word sows and plows in the field of fine arts. At the same time, the artist calls his unusual landscape art "earthworks" ("Earthworks").

The unusual panoramic paintings "painted" by the Kansa field artist Stan Hurd are good to look at from the cockpit of an airplane, helicopter or from a hot air balloon. Since the creation of his first successful landscape paintings, Stan Hurd "painted" about 40 works. His collection of unusual works consists of still lifes, landscapes, various emblems and portraits. The latter are the most impressive.

So, starting in the 1980s, American artist Stan Heard has been creating giant images in the fields. And he creates works of art, plowing, planting and mowing large tracts of agricultural land, not only in his homeland in Kansas, but around the world. He selects future canvases in advance, thinking over everything to the smallest detail.

His creative process is incredibly complex, but very interesting. At first, like any other artist Stan Hurd, inspired by his idea, makes a sketch of a future painting, laying out its contour with bricks, then begins plowing a part of the earth, giving his exposition a kind of picture space.

Then work begins on digging furrows that should cast shadows at the right angle, mulching the soil, planting plants or using indoor flowers in pots, thinning and pruning meadow grasses at different heights and much more.

If any other artist has the right to make mistakes, it is not Stan. A small incorrect movement of the tractor and all the ingenious work of the author will lose its meaning. The most important thing is to correctly subtract unnecessary plants from the plants available in the field and leave those that can be included in the composition. He then uses a tractor, which pulls a bunch of disc rotors with it to capture the final image in the soil.

One of his most recent projects is to recreate Van Gogh's famous Olive Trees on a 1.2-acre site in Minneapolis. The work was commissioned by the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and required weeks of mowing, digging, planting and earthmoving to create a work that can be seen from the air near Minneapolis Airport.

Stan was once called "the father of artistic crop production" by journalists. Indeed, it was Hurd who inspired farmers in Japan's Inakadate province to create large-scale drawings in their rice fields after Stan Heard's earthworks were featured on two highly popular Japanese TV shows.

Craig Alan's unique portraits

American artist Craig Alan is known for his creative versatility. Although his presentation of images is partly traditional - he writes on canvas with paints using brushes, but his manner is so unusual and amazing that it is simply impossible not to talk about it.

Craig Alan's portraits of people, consisting of pixel figures, are simply amazing, and even seasoned lovers of modern art. He works in many styles and directions in his portfolio you can find both works related to abstract impressionism and examples of graphic realism. But the most original paintings by this artist are still large-scale portraits of famous people, created … from a crowd of little people.

This is what people look like from a bird's eye view, walking, for example, over a large area. They seemed to be randomly arranged in space in such a way that they made up the contours of the portrait drawing.

Looking at the portraits of Craig, it is not immediately possible to understand what is happening on the canvas. Then the eyes begin to distinguish figures: standing, moving, lying, hanging, as well as shadows falling from the figures. It is from such human-pixels that the artist forms portraits of such celebrities as Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley and other recognizable characters.

The illusion is so realistic that it does not "disintegrate" even on very close examination. In fact, he creates amazingly detailed pictures by drawing tiny people. You can look at such pictures for hours on a flight.

Alan Craig (born 1971) is from California, USA. Since childhood, he gravitated towards drawing, modeling and other artistic pampering. In his youth, he and his parents moved to New Orleans, and it was at this time that the full power of the young Craig's talent began to unfold.

First of all, this was facilitated by the atmosphere of the city located by the sea, rich in cultural traditions, moreover, it offered many ways for creative self-expression. And young Alan, inspired by the artistic aura of New Orleans contemporary art, began his many and varied art experiments. Today he is 50, he works productively and regularly exhibits his work in America. The artist's unique portraits are pretty well appreciated. Some were sold for $ 50,000.

Truly, what tricks our contemporary artists do not go to in order to surprise and win their audience. Some even turn to food and are quite successful. And today we bring to your attention gallery of works by the young master Pavel Bondar from the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, which are created from the most common food.