Creativity at Work
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BY LORENZA CERBINI
Language level: B2 UPPER INTERMEDIATE
It is said that New York has been the center of the art world since the end of the Second World War, when it effectively replaced Paris. Over the last seven decades it has continuously given us exciting new forms of art and that is still the case today.
Let’s take the examples of these contemporary artists, all of whom moved to “the Big Apple, all of whom moved so “the Big Apple” in order to further their careers. The first thing that strikes an observer is their unusual choice of materials, which include leather, one dollar bills and the components of old typewriters.
CONCEPTUAL ART
Mark Evans ( www.markevansart.com ), a young Welsh artist, and Mark Wagner ( www.pavelzoubok.com ), who is from Wisconsin, are two artists whose work requires the patience, attention to detail and skill of a craftsman. Evans engraves in leather and has a collection of knives that would be the envy of any butcher. Yet he makes sure that his incisions are only a tenth of a millimeter deep. Wagner, on the other hand, uses razors, scissors and penknives to transform dollar bills into highly complicated collages. If Evans and Wagner are both conceptual artists, then Californian Sono Osato ( www.sonoosato.com ) belongs to a different category. She has been creating art for some 20 years and her work has been exhibited in such institutions as il DeYounf Fine Art Museum DeYoung in San Francisco (http://www.famsf.org/deyoung/), the Laguna Art Museum
( http://www.lagunaartmuseum.org/ ), The Oakland Museum ( http://www.museumca.org/ ) and Di Rosa Preserve ( http://www.dirosaart.org/oldindex.html ).
Osato’s enormous sculpture paintings, which can weigh as much as 220 pounds (100 kilos), are made up of colors snake bones, teeth and typewriter parts. In her collages, Osato takes a look at human history and her work could be described as a tribute to anthropology and the development of language.
MARK EVANS
Mark Evans is 34 years old. He grew up on farm in the Welsh mountains, prior to heading to London, where he studied Fine Art ant Middlesex University. He doesn’t draw or paint; instead he creates portraits by scratching and engraving large pieces of leather. He has been interested in creating art with knives ever since the age of seven, when his grandfather gave him a small pocket knife. This he would use for carving images on trees around the farm.
And another present, which he received in his early 20s, would also change his life. One Christmas he was given a new leather jacket, but disaster struck! As he helped prepare Christmas dinner in the kitchen a spot of blood accidentally ended up on the jacket. He tried to scratch it off with a knife, but he scratched too hard. Instead of get angry, he decided to use the surface of the jacket to draw a to-tone rendering of Jimi-Hendrix.
MY EUREKA MOMENT
“It was,” He says, “my own private Archimedes ‘Eureka’ moment. It was as if an explosion went off in my mind. I then spent the next few years focused on developing this technique at my studio. I was living as part artist and part mad scientist, trying to perfect the process which I’d accidentally discovered.”
Today Mark works with animal hides from around the world. His subjects often include cultural icons, like reggae star Bob Marley and boxing legend Muhammad Ali, Evans also likes bulls: one piece featuring these animals recently sold for £70.000. His work is collected connoisseurs, it can be found in British stately homes, Los Angeles penthouses and Saud Royal Palaces.
