At first glance, local artist Jon Rappleye’s complex menageries of exotic and everyday animals can strike the viewer as flamboyant, saccharine, even playful. On repeated viewings, his work reveals an artist whose devotion to portraying the natural world borders on the religious.
Do you know the feeling when you unexpectedly stumble upon a hidden treasure, and it fundamentally changes — but completes — your day? That’s what happened to yours truly when this weekend I decided to take an inquisitive peek into the windows of 80 Grand Street and find out what the auspiciously illuminated colors meant. [...]
As a kid, Daly and his friends would escape to the swamps, wandering among the reeds and beside the creeks. He remembers the Meadowlands as a place where discarded pharmaceuticals were as likely to pop up as a great blue heron; this collision between mass industrialization and the natural world has been the basis of much of Daly’s paintings and drawings for the past three decades.
Sugar is addictive. So are the paintings of Jersey City-based artist Jamie M. Lee. At first glance, it is easy to see her paintings as eye candy, endlessly consumable. But to view her paintings as a confection alone would rob you of a rewarding visual experience.
“These things I’ve painted are impossible,” David Huggins says. “But I know they happened. If I didn’t know, I would never have painted them.”
Painter Laurie Riccadonna is the lone Jersey City artist to receive a Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts this year, the council announced last week. Riccadonna, who also works as a program coordinator and assistant professor of fine art at Hudson County Community College, will receive $7,000 of the $159,000 [...]
Over the centuries, flesh has enticed artists of every kind to capture its essence. From the Venus of Willendorf to Lucian Freud, artists have responded to call, depicting every part of the human body, from the infirm wattle of an old man’s turkey neck to the taut muscles of young boys in Caravaggio paintings. And now flesh is the subject of a big new exhibition, Flesh Art, at New Jersey City University.
The suffering artist full of maudlin self-pity is a well-known stereotype in pop culture. Mark Rothko slit his wrists. Arshile Gorky hung himself. Kurt Cobain blew his head off. But Bojana Coklyat is not your typical artist.
The Jersey City Artists Studio Tour celebrates its 20th anniversary this weekend, with hundreds of artists exhibiting work in more than 90 locations in the city, from Downtown Jersey City to Greenville, Journal Square to the Heights. One of those artists will be Graham McNamara, an emerging artist from London who has called Jersey City [...]
From Amy Tan and Marcel Proust to pole dancers and pinup girls, Bonnie Gloris does it all. This Jersey City-based fine artist and illustrator works on both sides of the much-discussed art/commerce divide, with her work appearing both in galleries and in commercial venues like magazines.
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