MATTRESS FACTORY ART MUSEUM, Pittsburgh, PA

        There is an awesome Art Museum in Pittsburgh, PA called The Mattress Factory, which is a museum of Contemporary Art that presents art that you can get into... meaning room sized environments called art installations.

         Created on site by artists from across the United States and around the world, with unique exhibitions that feature a variety of media that engage all the senses.

        The first thing you notice upon arriving at the facility is that the building itself is an abstract design with an unusual shape on one side that jets up into the sky and ivy on the face of the building that is creating it's own art work.

        Secondly the garden outside the front entrance is a permanent installation that is made to look like an overgrown building foundation.

        The museum's unusual galleries are located in three creatively reused buildings on Pittsburgh's historic North Side.

        Since 1977, the Mattress Factory has supported more that 600 artists through a world-renowned residency program.  Each year artists come to Pittsburgh, live at the museum and create new work.  During that time, the museum supports them completely while they experiment, take risks and explore the creative process.

        Each exhibition is paired with a variety of engaging and innovative educational programs including hands on art projects, workshops, lectures and tours.

        

        If you enjoy contemporary art on canvas, then you'll love the Mattress factory, it takes you to a place where you can actually be a part of the art, it's quite an experience.

        

ENJOY THE JOURNEY MY FRIENDS...ZMAKEY

ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY

VISIT US AT ZMAKEYART-GOOGLE SITES
FACEBOOK-ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY 
AND
FINE ART AMERICA.COM

WHY ADJECTIVE ART??

        I once had a website I named Adjective Art Gallery and Studio, and you probably wonder why called it Adjective Art.  

        Well an adjective is something that describes a noun, and ever since I first picked up a paint brush, my objective has always been to express myself, by being as descriptive as possible.  With that in mind, I have been on a mission of sorts my entire artist life to paint a message, or an experience.

  


          To achieve that end,  
          I have always used either
          color or shapes to make
          my point.




                                               

   

                

                

              

               Sometimes I would use

               a distorted view of an

               object or place.

   

        





           Other times I've used
           an experience or something
           I have witnessed.

  

            

              Or a retro look at the 
              suns rays on a distorted
              planet, some what like 
              our own planet but
              slightly different.








         What ever the occasion, or experience, I always use something descriptive or as I like to call it Adjective Art to make my point.

ENJOY THE JOURNEY MY FRIENDS...ZMAKEY

ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY

VISIT US AT ZMAKEYART-GOOGLE SITES
FACEBOOK-ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY 
AND
FINE ART AMERICA.COM

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH...AN ARTISTS PARADISE

        Back in the early 2000's we spent a short time in Colorado, namely Boulder and Estes Park.  If your not old enough to remember the 1960's, visit Boulder Colorado.  It is like a flash back to the old days where you can still see VW love vans with flowers and peace signs all over it, pop art and gray haired flower children walking around.

        There is of course rock climbing if that's your thing, it's not mine, I get sweaty palms just thinking about it, but the scenery is spectacular.  But I just wouldn't climb up there to paint it..

        We had friends there and they showed us every thing there was to see.  I always feel more creative when I'm in an environment like that, everything from sidewalk cafes to open air art galleries, it just gets the juices flowing.

        Below is the view you get of the Front Range Rocky Mountains while driving to Estes Park

        In the middle of Estes Park is Bear Lake, a beautiful lake way up in the mountains, it's like God painted it there

        Sitting right beside the lake is an old lodge, shown below, if it looks familiar it is the lodge they used when filming  The Shining in 1980, a psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson.

        What a great place to visit and don't forget to take your paint and brushes.

ENJOY THE JOURNEY MY FRIENDS...ZMAKEY

ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY

VISIT US AT ZMAKEYART-GOOGLE SITES
FACEBOOK-ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY 
AND
FINE ART AMERICA.COM

MATTER ANTI-MATTER

        World's colliding, cultures not co-existing?  What is this world coming to?  

        It  probably hasn't changed since the first civilization on the planet, but we think it is getting worse.

        I can remember my grandparents saying to me in the 1960's, boy am I glad that I'm not growing up in this generation, the world is getting worse by the day.  

        Well they were probably right, it is getting worse by the day from their prospective, but I think the correct observation is that it is just changing.  The world has been a mess from the very beginning, with no apparent end in sight.

        With that memory of what my grandparents said to me years earlier and thinking the same thoughts with my own children, and their future, I painted Matter Anti Matter , a combination of old blending into new, evil pushing into good.  

        No matter how you view it, the world is constantly changing, life is constantly changing, and for better or worse if we are to survive and thrive in it, we have to adapt to it or try to change it.

ENJOY THE JOURNEY MY FRIENDS...ZMAKEY

ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY

VISIT US AT ZMAKEYART-GOOGLE SITES
FACEBOOK-ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY 
AND
FINE ART AMERICA.COM

YOU HAVE GOT TO LOVE WASSILY KANDINSKY

   
        If you enjoy abstract art and appreciate abstract thinking, then you have got to love Wassily Kandinsky.  I guess that you have probably figured out by now, based on my previous blogs, that I love artists that view the world with an abstract slant, and use color to achieve it.
        

       Kandinsky once wrote "I remember that drawing and a little bit later painting lifted me out of reality".  In Kandinsky's works of his early period, we find specific color combinations, which he explained that "each color lives by it's mysterious life".

        Kandinsky once recollected two events, which affected his creative future; his visiting the French impressionists in Moscow in 1895, and an emotional shock he experienced from K Monet's "Haystacks", and an impression of Rihard Wagner's "Lohengin" at the Bolshoi Theatre

        In 1912 He published "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", turning upside down the established idea about art in general, this book became the first theoretical foundation for abstractionism.

        During the wartime, he named this period of his creativity,  "a really picturesque fairy tale".  Because of the shortage of materials the formats of his pictures became ever less, up to that moment when he was compelled to be content with gouache painting, which is a type of paint consisting of pigment, a binding agent (usually gum arabic) and sometimes added inert material, all on a cardboard format.

Below are three paintings from the period:Complex Simple 1939, Colorful Ensemble, 1938 and Sky Blue, 1940.

    To quote Kandinsky "Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with "reality" next to the"real" world.  Deeper down, it is subject to the common laws of the "cosmic world".  And so a "new world of art" is juxtaposed or placed side by side to the "world of nature'.  This "world of art" is just as real as concrete.  For this reason I prefer to call so-called "abstract art" "concrete art".

ENJOY THE JOURNEY MY FRIENDS...ZMAKEY

ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY

VISIT US AT ZMAKEYART-GOOGLE SITES
FACEBOOK-ZMAKEY ART STUDIO AND GALLERY 
AND
FINE ART AMERICA.COM