Hibiki Miyazaki

"(Un)seaworthy"  24" x 25"  painting on panel  2010

"Last Day of Summer"  24" x 25"  oil on panel

"Mirror"  23.5" x 26"  print - sandblast ground, spit bite, roulette, aquatint, drypoint  2010

"Don't Look Up"  2010

"Dreams of Travel"  15" x 18"  acrylic and colored pencil on paper  2012

Hibiki Miyazaki's work is like a secret code. Somewhere between the lands of pop-culture and her own interior psychological landscape there must be a de-coder ring hidden in the bottom of a box of very curious breakfast cereal. Alas, I have not found it. But that does not keep me from gazing in fascination at her work. She is an extraordinary print-maker employing a dizzying array of techniques. She's also a fine painter. In either medium, or in any of the others she's likely to employ, it is the idiosyncratic nature of her collage-like style that draws you in. Her art hangs in a delicate balance between finished product and work in progress, recalling to mind Picasso's blithe comment that if he ever finished a painting he'd be finished as a painter. Perhaps mention of Picasso is apt, for Miyazaki seems to be interested in continuing to explore some early modernist ideas. In the past artistic movements came into and then went out of fashion. Many of those movements faded long before they were fully explored, a fact I once lamented, for it seemed to me that each one was in theory an infinite playground for artistic ideas. Now there are seven billion of us on the planet and visual information flows freely back and forth. It warms my heart to see this kind of work (and every other that might have once faded into mere historical context) being worked in new and meaningful ways. Now if I could just figure out what those meanings were....
You can see loads of stuff on both her Flickr page and at her gallery's website: www.augengallery.com

Steve Huston

"Straight Shot"  2011

"Whizzer"  oil on panel  24" x 36"  2009

"Headshot"  2003

study for Heave  oil on linen  24" x 24"

Study for Passing It Up #2

OK. Keywords: Manly. Masculine. Muscular. Right? Very. When trying to think how to describe these paintings one can't help but go toward the phrase "They're like ______ on steroids." Don't even bother filling in the blank. These paintings are like steroids. To be fair he has some lovely landscapes and some very sensual female nudes as well. But MAN OH MAN does this guy like men or what? All that rippling flesh piled up over heaving muscles painted with vivid vibrating brushwork. To top it all off the artist's name is Steve Huston! Sounds awfully close to Steve Austin. You know, the six million dollar man? So... with all that, the work might - just might - seem a little over the top. But damn. The top for this guy is a pretty high bar. He can paint and he can draw and if he's not going to apologize for painting manly flesh in all it's mighty extremes I'm not going to force him to apologize. Are you? And what what's wrong with over the top anyway. I think it has that in common with two key sources. First, it embodies the heroic common man vision that was so much a part of the early twentieth century. Echoes of George Bellows' savage boxing paintings are hard to miss, although these figures are loftier, more idealized like something out of WPA propaganda art. And that work has had much influence on the second source, which is the American comic book form. These figures are not just heroic. They're super-heroic. 

Looking just online I find that I'm often more drawn to the studies than the more polished final paintings that follow them. This is because the rough more aggressive gestural nature of a study seems more suited to the subject matter. But looking at work only online has serious drawbacks and it is impossible to compare the different impacts that two might have in real life. Either way plenty of energy and raw talent comes through and there's lots to look at on his website:
http://stevehuston.com

R. L. Rische-Baird

"Square Thinker"  oil on panel, 17.5"x 12", 2011

"A Fern Collector"  oil on panel, 17.5"x 12", 2011

"Trance Logic"  acrylic on panel, 17.5"x 12", 2011

"Two Worlds"  acrylic on canvas, 24"x 17.5", 2011

"River"  oil on canvas, 24" x 20"/14.5", 2009

R. L. Rische-Baird (or sometimes Rocky) has this to say about his what motivates him: 

a.) I acknowledge I do not understand and wish to.
b.) I attempt to understand and eventually believe I do.
c.) I realize I do not.
(repeat)

His work often plays with dualities and mysteries, objects or figures take on multiple roles, shadows become solid and reality becomes ephemeral. It is in short, unabashedly mystical, reflecting the artist's self-reflection in the face of nature. A recurring character in his paintings is a hiker/traveler figure who brings to mind the oft quoted JRR Tolkien line "...not all those who wander are lost" although the artist himself describes the figure as "acceptably lost". Both could be true, for it is exactly this kind of duality and seeming contradiction that is being engaged here. Contradictions and paradoxes are not problems that need solutions. They are the very fountain of his motivation as an artist (see above). You can view much more of his work at his website: www.rische-baird.com

Apologies

I'll be back next week with more art. Promise.
In the mean time here's some very old art that I personally never get tired of looking at.
"Moonlit Winter Landscape" Remi Van Haanan (Dutch 1812 - 1894)