Karla Powell

Karla Powell is an inspiration to young make-up artists that are trying to become known in the industry. Karla’s passion and determination is what got her to where she is today, it was her online social media which got her discovered and placed onto tumblr’s beauty spotlight – this shows how important it is for a make-up artist to brand themselves online, with the use of social media it is a easy and quick way to get your work seen by the public.

Karla has a unique style that likes to incorporate colour, texture and lots of glitter! I met Karla on March 1st at her Manchester Lip Art Workshop. She introduced me to different techniques and products which I am going to experiment with over my final semester and incorporate into some of my final looks.

Karla’s work doesn’t fall directly under the category of ‘destruction’, however some of her work could link to it on other ways. For example, at her lip art workshop she was talking about her ‘Colour Run’ lip art series and demonstrated it; this look shows the lips dripping with colour. In my research I have looked into destructive make-up in ways of purposely smudging the make-up, splattering/dripping make-up, and smeared make-up effects.

Gestural Abstraction, Karla Powell – This image displays smudges, splatters and smears within the make-up application

Rock Beauty, karla Powell – This image displays random strokes of colour across the face

Colour Run, Karla Powell – Colour dripping from the lips

Colour Run, Karla Powell – Colour dripping from the lips

Alex Box

Alex Box is one of the most influential make-up artists in the make-up industry, her style is like watching her bring a painting to life. Alex says that she has to react to the model infront of her and let the face lead her before applying the make-up, there aren’t many make-up artists in the business who can get away with being this vague before a shoot. But over the last decade, Box has steadily built up the kind of reputation which concludes that those who know her work, know that she delivers. “Over the years, it’s been hard to explain what I’ll create to people. You have to trust the magic moment will come for people to trust your success.”

It’s a platform where Box’s vision can come alive; she’s sent models down the catwalk with blue faces and LEDs under their tongues. “I love the integrity of art, but I love the transience of fashion. People look at it with an open mind. It’s about people opening a magazine, looking at an image and not having to feel like they have to understand it.”

Alex explains her style as a response to an impetus – whether it’s the direction of the photographer, the stylist, or the designer. I think her work challenges the convention of the need to be flawless; Alex isn’t scared to be adventurous with her make-up application and encourages the use of colour, texture and art. Its interesting that Alex started off as an installation artist doing make-up on her art, and now she’s a make-up artist doing art on her make-up.

http://www.stylist.co.uk/beauty/inside-the-world-of-alex-box#image-rotator-1

One of Alex Box Make-up works. This make-up slowly gets ‘destroyed’ in the process of adding more colour until the end result is black

Make-up Artists that ‘Destroy’ their Artwork

After researching Artists that destroy their artwork I began to research Make-up Artists whose make-up work could also fall under the ‘Destructive’ category. This has provided me with insight on how there are many styles of make-up and lots of different ways to display beauty. Some of the Make-up Artists that I liked most include:

Alex Box
Karla Powell
Pat McGrath
Gucci Westman
Luis Casco
Lisa Eldridge

John Baldessari

John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California

Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He has created thousands of works that demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His work influenced Cindy Sherman, David Salle, and Barbara Kruger among others.

In 1970 Baldessari and five friends burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled The Cremation Project. The ashes from these paintings were baked into cookies and placed into an urn, and the resulting art installation consists of a bronze commemorative plaque with the destroyed paintings’ birth and death dates, as well as the recipe for making the cookies. Through the ritual of cremation Baldessari draws a connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle. Thus the act of disavowal becomes generative as with the work of auto-destructive artist Jean Tinguely.

“You know, when you’re sitting in a dentist office or doctor’s office, and you look in a magazine and, and you go, ‘What was that?’ I would like people to have that feeling, you know, that, ‘Wait, what did I just see?'” – Baldessari

Like with the coloured dots pasted onto photographs — they’re actually price stickers. Over the years he’d been collecting black-and-white news images — pictures of people at various civic occasions. “I just got so tired of looking at these faces,” Baldessari

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baldessari
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-baldessari-687

Defacing – Baldessari

Defacing – Baldessari

Claude Monet

Oscar-Claude Monet 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926 was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term “Impressionism” is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.

Claude Monet struggled with his paintings so he shredded thirty of his water garden paintings. Whether by burning, cutting, shredding, or simply leaving them at the curb, artists have various reasons for destroying their own works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet

Water garden painting, Claude Monet

John Latham, Yoko Ono, Gustav Metzger

The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) was a gathering of a diverse group of international artists, poets, and scientists to London, from 9–11 September 1966. Included in this number were representatives of the counter-cultural underground who were there to speak on the theme of destruction in art.

The Honorary Committee, led by Gustav Metzger, attracted the attention of both the international media and international art community to the symposium.

In 1966 (DIAS) saw Artists like John Latham, Yoko Ono and Gustav Metzger constructing tower of books, just so they could burn them down. John Latham constructed three large “Skoob Towers” out of books, which they called “The laws of England”, and set fire to them outside of the British Museum.

“The main objective of DIAS was to focus attention on the element of destruction in Happenings and other art forms, and to relate this destruction in society.” – DIAS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_in_Art_Symposium

The Laws of England – John Latham

The Laws of England – John Latham

Heather Benning

The Dollhouse was an 8 year project, which reached completion on March 23rd, 2013. In 2005 Heather Benning acquired the use of a farmhouse, abandoned in the late 60’s. The house was located near Sinclair Manitoba on highway #2. For over 18 months the artist re-shingled the roof with recycled shingles and restored and furnished the house to the era the house was abandoned. The north-facing wall was removed and replaced with plexi-glass. The house was officially opened to the public June 9th, 2007. The house then stood tomb-like as a life-sized dollhouse for 6 years.

In October of 2012 the house began to show its age, the foundation was compromised. The house was only meant to stand as long as it remained safe. In March of 2013 it was decided that the The Dollhouse would be destroyed, the dollhouse met it’s death with fire.

http://www.heatherbenning.ca/the-dollhouse.html

Sarah Bennings Life-Size Dollhouse

Destruction of the Dollhouse

Destruction of the Dollhouse

Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting.

Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936 at an experimental workshop in New York City by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. He later used paint pouring as one of several techniques on canvases of the early 1940s, such as Male and Female and Composition with Pouring I. After his move to Springs, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, and he developed what was later called his “drip” technique.
He started using synthetic resin-based paints called alkyd enamels, which, at that time, was a novel medium. Pollock described this use of household paints, instead of artist’s paints, as “a natural growth out of a need”.

He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Pollock’s technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting. With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating art, the paint now literally flowing from his chosen tool onto the canvas. By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions.

“My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added. When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.” —Jackson Pollock, My Painting, 1956

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock

Jackson Pollock, painting

Jackson Pollock, painting

Sam Taylor-Wood

Sam Taylor wood is a filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist.

The video titled ‘Still Life’ is an installation art by Sam Taylor-Wood. The video presents a 3 minute time lapse of a traditional display of fruit as it decays over a period of time.

The video is dark and dull with a brown lifeless colour theme. The fruit itself isn’t all too colourful with a mix of dull green and red fruits which only stand out as the focal point. The fruit sit in a wooden plate on a wooden table with a wall in the background. As the video progresses it continues to get duller as the fruits fade and decay turning brown/grey towards the end mixing in with the overall theme.

During the video next to the display of fruit there is a biro pen, which remains in the same position for the entire duration untouched and unharmed. It stands out questionably as to why it’s there.

Many meanings can be taken away from the video: One meaning translated from the video could be that of the fruit representing the body as the pen represents the mind. The body (fruit) will break down; but we will all leave an imprint on the world after we are long gone. Another reading could be of the comparison between nature and manmade objects. Similar as nature will decay and die but the manmade pen on the other hand will not as it remains untouched. The object though is also something that is disposable to us, which could represent a further message about recycling and litter. I think the video was a successful one as it brings up many thought provoking questions and ideas to what the meaning of it all could be.

The fruit decaying in the fruitbowl is a type of destruction, one all living creatures will one day go through. The destruction of Life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Taylor-Wood
http://whitecube.com/artists/sam_taylor-johnson/

Sam Taylor-Wood: “Still Life” and the Acceptance of Mortality

Still Life, Stage 1 – Sam Taylor-Wood

Still Life, Stage 2 – Sam Taylor-Wood

Still Life, Stage 3 – Sam Taylor-Wood

Still Life, Stage 4 – Sam Taylor-Wood

Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni uses every part of her body in her work. For her famous 1992 sculpture Gnaw, she chewed away at 600-pound blocks of chocolate and lard—carving stand-alone sculptures, rough with tooth marks—until she was too tired to carry on. Antoni uses her mouth and the activity of eating or chewing to carve cubes, one made of chocolate, the other of lard, then used the chewed out bits to create chocolate boxes and lipstick tubes, which she then displayed in a mock store front. Antoni made a statement about her work saying “Lard is a stand-in for the female body, a feminine material,since female typically have a higher fat content than males, making the work somewhat cannibalistic”. In this work and others, Antoni often confronts issues such as materiality, process, the body, cultural perceptions of femininity, and her art historical roots.

The following year, she cast busts of her own face in chocolate and soap and licked and scrubbed at them for the aptly titled Lick and Lather—currently a hit at the New Museum’s “1993” exhibition. This exhibition showed several busts of herself out of chocolate and soap, she licked the sweet sculpture to re-mold herself and her image.

Elsewhere she has painted canvases with her eyelashes, and photographed her eyeballs. This work was known as ‘Butterfly Kisses’ (1996-1999), she covered a canvas with marks made by batting her eyelashes covered in Cover Girl Thick Lash Mascara. In this process Antoni explores the body as a means of creating art.

In Loving Care (1992), Antoni uses her hair as a paintbrush and hair dye as her paint. Antoni dips her hair in a bucket of hair dye and mops the gallery floor on her hands and knees and in the process pushes the viewers out of the gallery space. Once again, in this process Antoni explores the body, as well as themes of power, femininity, and the style of abstract expressionism. Her performance was at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, in 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_Antoni
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/janine_anotoni_stephen_petronio

Gnaw, 1992 – Janine Antoni

Loving Care, 1992 – Janine Antoni

Lick and Lather, 1993 – Janine Antoni

Butterfly Kisses, 1996-1999 – Janine Antoni