Germs

Germs’ latest mixed media print, Purgatory Mary, (see above top) is a fine art giclee foundation with 4 silkscreen colors laid on top including a high gloss coating and 3 hand painted separations.

He is a genuinely positive and gifted artist who seems to be channeling the great spirits of surrealist predecessors, while simultaneously slapping our eyeballs in the face with his infamous allusions to the LA/Chicano culture. He is known for his Luchador masks brought to life by their protruding tentacles and floating amoebas that playfully flirt with their viewers’ imaginations. Each painting is admirable and a true labor of love.

Germs was born and raised in South Central LA amidst the violence and chaos of gang culture that left an indelible mark on him creatively. In his own words "I am Jaime Zacarias, the youngest of three. My two siblings have moved out of our house and left my father and me to live together in Los Angeles. My mother passed away a few years back and it has been a challenge to live without her because she was my guidance and the number one fan of my artwork. I was born and raised in south central Los Angeles' gang infested neighborhoods. I have seen lots of violence and drug abuse along with ignorance and many individuals who drop out of school. Los Angeles has presented me with good and bad experiences that have shaped my life and views. I continue to live in Los Angeles, with a supportive friend and my father."

"My artwork is truly spontaneous and unplanned. I trust my instincts and when I want to create something, the image appears. Because most of my work is unplanned, it is difficult to say when it is finished, so I go by feelings and instinct to guide me to a finished product. Since elements of my work include spontaneity and randomness, my finished product may be simple or insanely complicated. It is as if I do not think about what I am doing until I do it. My thought process and hand-to-paper process flow simultaneously. I use narrative imagery, graffiti art and found surfaces. I work in an audience-friendly style that allows the viewer to experience the piece."

SABER - Pepper's World

Los Angeles based graffiti legend SABER has made a film about a homeless street artist called Pepper. The two then went on to collaborate on a print(above)called 'Pepper's World'.

SABER was already a fixture in the Los Angeles graffiti scene, but in 1997 when he completed the largest graffiti piece ever created he was catapulted to global legend. His piece (see top image above) on the sloping cement bank of the Los Angeles River is nearly the size of a professional football field, and can be read clear as day from a satellite photo. It took 97 gallons of paint and 35 nights to complete.

SABER had this to say about his work with Pepper. “Pepper is a true street artist in the purist sense. Hes known to some by his altar ego; the Mayor of Skid Row, and hes proud to proclaim that hes the last homeless person on the forefront of downtown LAs gentrification. He lives on Santa Fe Ave. where years ago a large tent city used to be, the last holdout.

When I was younger and creeping around downtown, I would notice these colorful, bold, and scrappy art instillations. Pepper has a habit of decorating his immediate surroundings, wherever that might be, with multi-colored paint splats, piled on discarded toys, and other purposefully arranged found objects. You can frequently catch him running around the city with his red shopping cart full of freshly discarded trinkets.

The print Peppers World, and the mural I painted on 7th and Mateo that it inspired, is in homage to his existence. I have enormous respect for those who can survive in such extreme conditions yet still be able to express themselves creatively.”

Julius Shulman

Julius Shulman (October 10, 1910 – July 15, 2009) was an American architectural photographer best known for his photograph "Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960. Pierre Koenig, Architect."(Top picture above). The house is also known as The Stahl House.

Shulman's photography spread California modernism around the world. The clarity of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form.

Each Shulman image unites perception and understanding for the buildings and their place in the landscape. The precise compositions reveal not just the architectural ideas behind a building's surface, but also the visions and hopes of an entire age. A sense of humanity is always present in his work, even when the human figure is absent from the actual photographs.

Through his many books, exhibits and personal appearances his work ushered in a new appreciation for the movement beginning in the 1990s. His vast library of images currently reside at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia - Hustlers

‘Brent Booth, 21 years old, Des Moines, Iowa $30'

'Ike Cole, 38 years old, Los Angeles, CA, $25’

'Mike Miller, 24 years, Allentown, PA, $25'

'William Charles Everlove; 26 years old; Stockholm, Sweden, via Arizona; $40,'

“Ralph Smith; 21 years old; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; $25.”

'It might be said that twilight is a muddled form of clarity. The warm glow that suffuses the ' golden hour' in Los Angeles acts to filter the grim realities, the outright lies, the self-deceptions, which allow Hollywood, and by extension, America to flourish. 'Twilight' provides the rose-coloured glasses that make it possible to see out but not see in.'
Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (born 1951) is an American photographer. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Afterwards diCorcia attended Yale University where he received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography in 1979. He now lives and works in New York, and teaches at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

"Hustlers," his best-known series, contains shots of  young men strutting their stuff along Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. Made from 1990 to 1992 and funded with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (which led to a governmental complaint), diCorcia's breakout series features men posing for their portraits in motel rooms, parking lots and laundromats, outside fast-food restaurants, gas stations and boarded-up buildings, and simply sitting at bus stops or on street corners, usually at dusk.

The guys are fantastic for their individuality. Although many are clearly pretending to be someone they've seen in the movies, most can't be bothered with such silly fantasies and stand, matter-of-factly, for the camera. Not one elicits pity. Or begs for sympathy. Or for anything at all. A here-I-stand, this-is-it groundedness suffuses the strongest. It's an attractive quality.

diCorcia has labeled each portrait with the man's name and age, the city he came to L.A. from and the amount of money he would charge for his time an therefore was paid for the picture (from $20 to $50). The bare-bones info speaks volumes, but it's no match for the riveting intensity and haunting complexity of the pictures.

Matt Logue - Empty L.A.

Matt Logue is a Los Angeles based artist, photographer, his latest work ‘Empty L.A.’ is an eerily beautiful vision of a world without people.

“The inspiration for the series came, perhaps predictably, while on the freeway, driving to work. The thoughts that kept coming back was, “How did we get here? Why did we do it like this?” From there, I imagined an empty city, the sounds you would hear in the skyscraper canyons, the animals returning to make their homes in the shelters we’d built. After that, I simply had to see it, I couldn’t not do it, so after working out a technique to do it through trial and error, spend most of my free time for the past four years working on the images.” Says Logue interviewed by ‘the art life’.

Logue’s images are digital composites. “They’re mosaics of anywhere from thirty to well over one hundred images, all taken as close as possible to each other in time, and hand-blended in such a way as to remove the cars and people.” Knowing this it’s easy to understand that Logue has previously worked for over three years in New Zealand working on effects for the ‘Lord of the Rings’ films.

http://artlife.blogspot.com/2010/03/there-is-no-there-there.html

Jim McHugh

Famous for these recent large format Polaroid prints of Los Angeles, Jim McHugh has been photographing common things in an uncommon manner for thirty years. These LA pictures have a noir-ness that portray the LA of Raymond Chandler by showing the architecture and fading glamour of the Hollywood of a different era.

McHugh attended the Masters Program the UCLA Film School. He has since been a contributing photographer to People Magazine, the official photographer for the Grammy Awards and is currently on the masthead of Architectural Digest.

Jim's photography has garnered many awards and is included in prominent collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and The Polaroid Collection. Jim has exhibited widely; nationally and internationally, with large solo exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles. A selection of these pictures was shown at Art Miami 2009 presented by Timothy Yarger Fine Art. An exhibition of new work will be shown at Timothy Yarger Fine Art in Beverly Hills opening March 27th through May 1, 2010.

Known equally for his portraiture, McHugh has published several books of artists portraits including "The Art of Light and Space" by Abbeyville Press and "California Artists: New Work" by Chronicle Press. His portrait of David Hockney is the cover of Hockney’s book "That’s the Way I See It." Jim Mchugh won the International Photography Awards’ First Prize for Fine Art Photography 2007 and The George Eastman House Best of Show for Architectural imagery of Los Angeles.
http://www.jimmchugh.com/