What is a Concentration? (Tigran Tsitoghdzyan)

Tigran Tsitoghdzyan - http://www.tigran.ch/

This Armenian artist paints in oil (OIL!) even though his work looks like photographs.  He started painting with oil at age five and had his first show with 100 of his paintings when he was ten, which travelled all over the world.  He has lived, studied and worked all over the world and was considered a prodigy in his home country.

His work focuses mostly on people and his work reflects a photorealism to the tee.  In his more recent work, he has focused on younger women and their children.  

Tsitoghdzyan's work is visually coherent because all of the work has the same photorealistic, simple feel.  Especially in his latest body of work, each piece is large in scale and focuses on value.

Over and over, Tsitoghdzyan uses value to create deep shadows and contrast between the background and the foreground.  He also uses texture to enforce the realism of the subject's hair, etc. 

THESE ARE OIL PAINTINGS! 

What is a Concentration? (Arno Rafael Minkkinen)

Arno Rafael Minkkinen - http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/arno-rafael-minkkinen-photography 

This Finnish photographer uses his own body to create surrealist images with pure landscapes.  He poses his hands, legs, arms and feet in ways that go with the landscape in many cases to highlight it. 

The artist uses the common thread of his body in combination with landscapes to create visual coherence.

This artist uses a lot of space, texture, and line in his work as well as balance.  In many of his images he will place his hand at the top of the frame and a foot or another hand at the bottom [balance].

What is a Concentration? (Matt Wisniewski)

Matt Wisniewski- http://mattw.us/images/ 

Matt works with digital images of fashion portraits and combines them with images of elements of nature, architecture, etc. to produce a more dynamic, surrealist image.

He stays with the theme of portraits in combination with another element and image, thoughtfully placed to reflect the hair or body shape of the subject in the image properly.  Although he has several different collections of images, throughout all of them, they look cohesive.

He uses a lot of texture and value to fool the viewer into believing it is a normal portrait, then upon looking again you see that it is actually elements of nature.  Those are the two common elements and principles of art that I see in all of his work.  

summersummersummer

Helloooooo!  This summer I was all over the place.  I left for Costa Rica the day school ended with just my dad, who I call Pedro because his name is Peter.  Then I came home and nannied for some devil children for a little, then I left and went to Boston to visit schools and go to a Yankee/Red Sox game and then Cape Cod to go to the beach.  Then I nannied some more, then I left for Carmel, CA for a month to work at this really nice and pretty ranch/resort/country club place and made a lot of money.  This whole time I took a million pictures! Well not a million, actually like 1,400, which is still a lot.

My favorite pictures are from Costa Rica; two boys were play-fighting on the beach in a little town called Tamarindo and thought it was awesome that I was capturing their battle.  [The last one of the three is my favorite from the whole summer.]