I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it’s a painful, difficult search within.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Sky Landscape 1977-79

 

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson (born Leah Berliawsky, September 23, 1899, Kiev, Czarist Russia – d. April 17, 1988, New York, New York) was a Russian-born American artist.

Nevelson is known for her abstract expressionist “crates” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her “assemblages” or assemblies, one of which was three stories high: ”When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.” Louise married Charles Nevelson after she graduated from high school in 1918, and together they had a child named Myron Nevelson. Louise and Charles later separated in 1931.

Mercedes Ruehl played Nevelson in Edward Albee’s play “Occupant” at the Signature Theater in New York in summer 2008.

Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man’s reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn’t bore

Happy Birthday Jean Dubuffet

French avant-garde painter, born in Le Havre (1901-1985). Dubuffet took over his father’s wine business in 1925, and withdrew from the art world. He stayed in the wine business until 1942, when he returned to painting, having developed a distinctive style of simple, primitive images in a heavily encrusted canvas. This style helped Dubuffet gain a worldwide reputation. Fascinated by the art of children and the insane, for which he coined the term art brut (“raw art”), he emulated its crude, violent energy in his own work. Critics soon applied the term art brut to Dubuffet’s paintings, rather than to their stylistic source as he had intended.

Many of Dubuffet’s works are assemblages (combining found objects and other elements into a three-dimensional integrated whole), as for example Door with Couch-Grass (1957, Guggenheim Museum, New York City), which is composed chiefly of fragments of paintings, grass, and pebbles. During the early 1960s, Dubuffet produced a series of paintings that resemble jigsaw puzzles, such as Nunc Stans (1965, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), in which tiny, obscure, closely spaced figures and faces dominate. His later work consists of large painted polyester resin sculptures. In all of his work the violence is tempered with elements of vitality and broad humor.

http://www.dubuffet.com/bio.htm