Thursday, June 21, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
Print Sale (Old Fantasy Art from 2008)
I’m runin’ a leftover print sale of my olderstuff, on DA, it’s older stuff, and in the same vein as my drawings. Fantasy etc.Check it: http://ageaus.deviantart.com/#/d506cqi Nothin’ much and the prices are all pretty reasonable, I think.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Senior Solo Show- Patterson Gallery
"Its Very Italian"
Senior Show Artists Statement:
“Into Dark Lands, Under Strange Moons”
The title of the show comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’, a book I read at an early age, but only recently reread. This quote is the desire to leave the comfort and steady pace of normal life, to see and experience something far different- this for me was Italy. Each piece in the show is the desire to travel, to foreign lands, with history and customs different from ours rushing by. Fighting through crowded crooked streets to lose your breath in front of a masterpiece of architecture, trying to capture that sense of awe is what this show intends to show. This goes back to trips in the family car as a child, I’d imagine great castles sitting over the fields or behind trees with pinnacles reaching up to claw the sky, or proud Roman ruins crumbling over the blue hills in the distance.
While I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, I’m drawn back to the old world, of stone and marble. It took a long time for any of this really to come out in my work, and for the most part; I never attempted to tackle architecture, until I went abroad with SACI. Those three and a half months changed my views on art, and how I wanted to make my own. Outside of class work, I spent most of my time in Italy wandering around the city making drawings of the buildings and the sculptures left behind by the masters that cast shadows on art for the last 500 years and beyond. My sketches, photos and impression from those places made a huge impression on my work, and provided me with a great deal of source material that I am still working from.
Carrying over from the Città Series, this show’s language is still the Italian Peninsula ranging from Roman to Baroque. These paintings and prints depict powerful buildings, both secular and religious. The main difference between this show and my past work with this subject is the use of painting as another media to get the same effect as the monotype process. I chose acrylic specifically to be able to experiment with many works in a short time, keeping the monochrome black to mimic the monotypes, which accompany the paintings. With Monotypes, I start working with brayers and razors, using pallet knives when begin the paintings to reflect that process.
Within the show, there are a group of pieces dealing with the Black Plague that came to Europe in 1348. Many cities across the world were sticken by it, but this series deals with the plague's effect on architecture. Of these myriad victims, Siena and San Gimignano were permanently scarred by the disease, which colors any visit to them even today. Two of the most haunting images from my experience were the empty towers in San Gimignano, looming over a population that is still lower than what it was before the plague hit, and Siena's unrealized cathedral, whose workers were struck down as they tried to enlarge it.
Another theme dealt with throughout the show is ruins. It is striking that although a city can thrive, certain areas within that city can become dilapidated. Even though Rome grew larger and grander in the Middle Ages, its foundations in the Forum rotted away. Those prints and paintings dealing with the subject are Roman, coming from the Forum and Pompeii, or in Ravenna, where Byzantine Churches and tombs echo softly in the rain.
Phil Lang
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Città: Old Main Solo Show
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Statement:
Città-Italian Cities
Monotype Prints
This series is the culmination of my semester abroad in Florence, completed last spring with Studio Arts Centers International (SACI). It consists of 20 monotype prints, each of a particular monument or series of architectural elements from cities in Italy. This series was prompted by the advanced drawing course’s final project, creating a piece that was based on our experience in Florence and abroad as a whole. What SACI offers is unbelievable--the courses, field trips, and location were wonderful. Palazzo dei Cartelloni is just three blocks from il Duomo, the heart of the city. The professors on staff are phenomenal, especially Gary, Helen and Dario. The program encouraged us to take advantage of the city and school resources— they often reminded us of the fact that we had the Renaissance at our fingertips.
The school and Helen’s connections allowed us to travel across Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Emilia-Romagna, Marche and Campania to see the cities. On these field trips I sketched the foundations for my monotypes. While SACI’s trips and my own travels took me to nearly forty towns and cities in Italy. I cut the series to twenty images, choosing eighteen of the most prominent cities that I visited the longest.
Most of the images are civic or religious hearts of the cities, massive temples labored over by the Romans, churches and palaces designed by renaissance geniuses, or monuments silenced by the plague. All of the prints are of buildings, except for two: the bay of Naples and the Marble Quarry of Carrara. Of the images, six are not physical sites. Rather, they are architectural pastiches of city elements, like the stairs of Siena’s Duomo, or the Leaning towers of Bologna. All the prints strive to capture the cities past and present character, laid out in black and white.
With this series, I wanted to make something that would keep the abroad semester with me when I came back to the states. These images are documents of a memory, of 115 days— more honest than my photos, made by my hands and ink. Whether walking in a dream in Venice or hurrying through the tourist-choked Milan streets, these prints capture the feeling of being there. Just as the memories they were pressed from, they will fade in time, already their details become hazy.
Phil Lang
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I'm currently remaking some of these prints, Lucca has a new version, Siena, San Gimignano and Milano are next. Show actually runs from Jan 30- April sometime.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Sunday, November 20, 2011
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