May 2009

Some suggestions to satisfy your reading, viewing and listening appetite throughout the weekend… Read more…

“Every artist was first an amateur.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Conversation With Marcelo Daldoce,
Celebrating Women, Wine and Words on Canvas

For Marcelo Daldoce, a mostly self-taught artist from São Paulo, Brazil, the maxim “bigger is better” definitely applies.

His preference for large-scale paintings (mostly on 98-inch-tall-by-49-inch-wide canvases) has resulted in a series of simultaneoulsy imposing and enchanting nude female portraits. Size, in this case, matters. But it’s not just size that will have you gawking. His unique style—influenced by such disparate artists as John Singer Sargent and Jackson Pollock, shaped also by his own experience as an illustrator—yields lively, seemingly three-dimensional celebrations of the female form, accentuating the sensual, hinting at the erotic. His paintings, many of which are inspired by his girlfriend (and muse) Ali, combine realistic-yet-idealized lines and figures with playful splatters of paint, fluid brushstrokes and vibrant-yet-soft fanciful colors.

Daldoce’s portraitures evoke the essence of vintage pin-up artwork and echo elements of pop art. The latter impression can be attributed to the artist’s recurrent employment of words, as characters in their own right, in much of his work—perhaps the most visible way in which his “day job” influences his paintings. And Daldoce’s mastery of typography is immediately evident and unfailingly effective, his integration of words and phrases—sometimes nonsensical, others meaningful—always create another layer of suggestiveness, along with adding a distinctive stamp, to his portraits.

And while Daldoce is certainly adept with either watercolors or acrylics on his brush, it is another more unconventional medium that sets him apart, and what first brought him to my attention. Daldoce paints with wine. Yes, wine! He’s completed a series featuring his iconic female portraits using a variety of varietals—a different type of wine, from Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon to Chardonny (though he seems to prefer reds, and I couldn’t agree more), for each one. He also painted the portraits of four famous Brazilian sommeliers using wine to accompany an article in one of the country’s largest newspapers, Folha de São Paulo. Daldoce has also recently embarked on a new series of wine paintings. While the technique is unique, it is the amazing outcome that make his wine paintings noteworthy. Here’s the YouTube video that alerted me to this virtuoso (Bukowski would be proud, as long as a majority of the wine was consumed by the painter and not the painting, and Daldoce assured me that was indeed the case):

Marcelo Daldoce, who held a solo exhibition in a New York gallery in 2007 and one in Brazil the following year, is currently preparing for a show of his wine work in July. On the threshold of a major breakthrough, the 29-year-old artist recently took time to discuss the roots of his creativity, the inspiration for his ingenious work, his process and style, the struggles of balancing the demands of his job and his desire to paint, his ambition to improve, and much more with The Madness of Art. Read more…

Some suggestions to satisfy your reading, viewing and listening appetite throughout the weekend… Read more…

Once Destined for Dump, Street and Traffic Signs
in Disrepair Upcycled by Savannah Artists

What do you think of when you see a stop sign? Stop, of course. What runs through your mind when you pass a speed limit sign? I better slow down. Such signs are intended to force instinctive reaction, with little or no conscious thought. Beyond the instructions they provide us as drivers, street and traffic signs are not exactly fodder for much musing. Unless you’re Miriam and Jacob Hodesh. Read more…