January 31st is Inspire Your Heart With Art Day, so I hope you take the opportunity to visit a local gallery or museum and find something you like!
To some people, art and museums have a certain amount of snob appeal attached to them. It's easy to picture some guy with a fancy glass of wine in hand waxing philosophical on some minimalist piece and feel like art isn't for you. Unfortunately, this view is more prevalent than it should be. More fortunately, this refined and highbrow view isn't representative of the art world.
While there are always going to be serious artists and serious art fans, a deeper look at the art out there reveals tons of quirky, oddball, or just plain different artists waiting to surprise you. A full list of these artists worth your time would be impossible, but the short list below contains a few of my favorites.
5. Giuseppe Arcimboldo
You've probably seen works by this guy before. He's an Italian painter from the 1500s who is best known for making portraits of people made out of fruit, fish, and other types of food, the most famous of which is shown below.
Any list of offbeat art works would be incomplete without him. Maybe not the sort of thing that you would want to hang in the dining room, but nobody could ever accuse his works of being derivative. You have to feel for all of the art critics who try and interpret what's going on in his works. They certainly have their work cut out for them.
4. Emily Carr
Emily Carr is a Canadian painter who was associated with, but not actually a member of, Canada's "Group of Seven," who wanted to create a unique artistic identity for the nation. Her works were influenced by Canada's indigenous peoples and this along with her unique use of color set her apart from other artists.
Landscape painting and more naturalistic works tend to get looked down upon by the art community as a whole, but this treatment is unfair. It's clear that works like the one shown below are visually stunning and deserve just as much praise as other types of painting.
3. James Grashow
I could probably write an entire article on this guy, as a few paragraphs here don't do him justice. James Grashow is a Brooklyn-based artist who is primarily known for working with cardboard, so much so that he has been dubbed the Bernini of the medium. And boy, is that description accurate.
He has stated that he likes the medium because of how temporary it is and has even incorporated this into some of his works. See below for one of his installations falling apart after being rained on.
Lest you think he's just some sort of one-trick pony, he also makes house plants.
Get it? House plants. He also does woodcuts and designed an album cover for Jethro Tull, so if I haven't sold you on him by this point, I'm not sure I can.
2. Melchior De Hondecoeter
Hodecoeter is a Dutch painter who goes to show that you can still be a great artist even if you only have a single talent. This single talent of his is the ability to paint birds. Just birds. He didn't paint anything else. Seriously. This guy's portfolio is entirely composed of bird paintings.
And my gosh are those some fabulous birds. Who needs to paint other things with birds like this?
Seeing all of these different birds kind of makes you wonder if he could paint anything else. Like, if he tried to do a portrait of a person it might just turn out like a stick figure. Unfortunately he died in 1695, so there's no way to know. All we are left with is the knowledge that this guy could paint a chicken better than anyone else could ever hope to.
1. Julian Stanczak
Julian Stanczak is a Polish-American artist whose works are full of visual tricks that fool the eye into seeing all sorts of things. He's one of the few "abstract" artists that isn't just three squares on some white space. His works also deserve an award for sensory impact, as a Google image search on his works will give you vertigo if you scroll through it too quickly.
Images on the internet don't really do him justice. A lot of these pieces are large and draw the eye all over the place in a trippy sort of visual maze. As he was based in Ohio, the Cleveland Museum of Art has a number of his works, as do some of the other museums in the area.
Hopefully you've seen something you like here, and if not, I challenge you to find something that is out of the ordinary for you. Everyone deserves to have these experiences, but you can't have them until you go out and look for that one piece that makes you think just a bit differently. Because life without art can be a very boring place.
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