brooklyn artist – Ann Street Studio

Natalie Frank

May 19, 2014December 10, 2017Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, artist studio, artist studio tour, brooklyn artist, brooklynartist, lifestyling, maria brito, mariabrito, natalie frank, natalie gwen frank, nataliefrank, nataliegwenfrank, paint, painter2 Comments

I truly love this series of studio tours we have been able to take with our friend and consultant, Maria Brito. It’s fascinating to walk into the world of another artist and, for a brief moment, see their lives, their ideas, and their passions poured out into their creations. Nowhere did we see this more than with our latest artist, Natalie Frank.

Influenced by magical realism books, the eccentric characters of her childhood, and her own fascinating imagination, Natalie creates pieces that are both striking and unsettling – images that have you waiting with bated breath for what happens next. We were able to sit down with her in her gorgeous, light-filled Bushwick studio and get a little peek to see what’s behind all these works of art…

What materials do you typically work with for your pieces?

I’m working with oil and oil enamel both, which is kind of new for me – the oil enamel – I’ve kind of been traditionally an oil painter on canvas, working from life, so all of this work is a big change. Moving into the 3D and the different materials. But I have some remnants of, I guess, my traditional training, one of which is working on wood.

Continue reading “Natalie Frank” →

Trudy Benson

December 13, 2013December 16, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, brooklyn artist, Trudy Benson, trudybenson1 Comment

Sometimes you look at a painting to appreciate a scene that someone has brought to life. And sometimes you look at a painting and you’re filled with a visceral, intense energy. Such is the work of talented abstract painter Trudy Benson. While still a relatively young artist, Trudy has already begun to stake her claim in the abstract art scene, and it’s easy to see why. Her work has – both physically and intellectually – several layers to it, mesmerizing the viewer.

We were lucky enough to get a tour of Trudy’s studio with our friend Maria Brito and to talk to her about her work, what it’s like to be written about in the New York Times, and how much paint she actually uses…

On her painting style:

I’m thinking about different iterations of things – to me, a red stroke there could be almost a 3D painting of [Roy Lichtenstein’s] brushstroke lithograph, which was a lithograph of a painting. So there’s different layers here. But as far as the process goes, I usually start off really simply…here, I started off with this really simple composition of the different windows…but from there, the rest of the painting is totally intuitive. It’s a slow process, so I’m not working like Jackson Pollock or anything.

I work on a lot [of pieces] at once, because I have to. There’s a lot of taping off over the oil paint. I use a hair pick, a plastic hair-pick, and once I’ve taped off a circle and filled it in with really thick oil paint, then I dragged the comb through it. And then these are squeezed out of the tube, and then I scraped them down with a squeegee.

Continue reading “Trudy Benson” →

Michael Dotson

December 12, 2013December 13, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, brooklyn artist, Michael Dotson, michaeldotson2 Comments

Our studio tours continue today with art buyer and lifestyle consultant extraordinaire Maria Brito, leading us to the saturated landscape that is Michael Dotson‘s studio…

I have to be honest, I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it into Michael’s studio when we first arrived. It involved climbing onto handmade ledges, ducking under pipes, and getting into a room that Michael himself described as “totally fine, as long as there aren’t more than five people in it at once.”

But once we stepped inside, we were transported to an entirely different world – one of magical colors, optical illusions, and familiar faces from our childhood transformed. It was so uplifting seeing such bright and cheerful pieces without a trace of irony. Michael himself was also open and generous, chatting with us about where this world comes from and what work he plans to create in the future…

Continue reading “Michael Dotson” →

Carrie Moyer

December 11, 2013December 13, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, brooklyn artist, carrie moyer, carriemoyer2 Comments

Our studio tours continue with art buyer and lifestyle consultant extraordinaire Maria Brito, leading us to the fascinating and prolific Carrie Moyer…

When you visit Carrie’s studio, you are struck by a wave of intense, bright colors – from paint spatters on the furniture to the bottles of paint on the shelf to the gorgeous, abstract paintings on the wall. It comes as no surprise, though, given Carrie’s colorful background – from her work in the nineties as part of the duo behind Dyke Action Machine! to her growing body of paintings where she refuses to use black, Carrie Moyer is no stranger to breaking rules and stretching boundaries.

Her work is not only full of color, but full of texture, inviting you in to ponder the abstract world she has created. In this world, we sat down to speak with her about her past work, future work, inspiration, and what she thinks about women in the art world…

How she would describe her style:

I’m interested in making things that feel familiar but you’re not exactly sure what they are. It’s the idea that it might be a landscape, but you’re also destabilized. You don’t know where you’re standing in relationship to it. So it’s the space that I want you to be able to keep unfolding and keep opening up. And of course, that contradicts the idea of a painting anyway because it’s totally flat.

Continue reading “Carrie Moyer” →

Ivan Navarro

December 10, 2013December 13, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, brooklyn artist, Ivan Navarro, IvanNavarro2 Comments

Our studio tours continue with art buyer and lifestyle consultant extraordinaire Maria Brito, who is a personal fan of today’s artist, Ivan Navarro…

Ivan’s work has many layers to it – not only via the optical illusions of mirrors and lights, but in his intentions and the motivation behind his materials. Ivan started to use electricity for his art simply “because it was a very available material in any space, through outlets. There was this literalism, this source of power. So I started making sculptures that would depend on this source.”

Since then, his work has explored electricity in various creative and intellectual ways and has been shown around the world. We were able to walk through his multi-leveled studio and talk to him about the intention behind certain pieces, his other job as a record label owner, and the beginnings of his art with electricity…

On his series of mirror and word pieces:

I started developing this kind of idea of fictional depth in very shallow pieces, in very thin sculptures. These…are only five inches deep, but they create this very endless space, just by combining two pieces of mirror.

On making art in Chile in the 1990s:

When I lived in Chile, during the mid-nineties, the dictatorship just ended only five years before. So in those five years still there was no place for young artists to show their work. My group of friends were always discussing what will be the way to make art in this context when there aren’t any institutions to show art, and my idea was to make pieces that can be used in ordinary places like living rooms or lobbies of hotels or whatever places that weren’t fine-art spaces as furniture but at the same time understood as sculptures. So they could use a space that wasn’t officially for contemporary art.

Continue reading “Ivan Navarro” →

Xaviera Simmons

December 9, 2013December 13, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, brooklyn artist, Xaviera Simmons, XavieraSimmons1 Comment

We continue our series today, traveling with art buyer and lifestyle consultant extraordinaire Maria Brito to the Brooklyn studio of multi-faceted artist Xaviera Simmons…

Xaviera is an artist in so many senses of the word: creating performance art, shooting large-format film and videos, and building textural sculptures are among some of the many facets of her art. While we may see each of these as separate practices, for Xaviera they are deeply connected:

“It is important to me to let sculptural ideas sit in photography and to let photographic ideas sit in the sculptural works, and then let performance kind of hold all those things together. I really like these things to fall into each other, to let the language of these things fall into each other.”

It was so inspiring to speak to her about each part of her work, her ideas of success, the thought and process behind her pieces, to hear the language of her work fall into and support each other…read more about Xaviera below:

On the inspiration for her series, Indexes:

I started making collections, and then trying to construct a narrative based on these collections of things. It was just inherent for me to put it on a figure and have this revealing happen. And also thinking about sculpture but letting it exist as a photograph. So this work, it’s really becoming some of my favorite work.

Continue reading “Xaviera Simmons” →

Ramon Vega

December 6, 2013December 13, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, brooklyn artist, ramon vega, ramonvegaLeave a comment

Today starts a new series, one where we had the opportunity to tag along with art buyer and lifestyle consultant extraordinaire Maria Brito for six different tours of artists’ studios. Our first tour landed us in the Brooklyn Navy Yard with the charming Ramon Vega…

“My work is primarily collage-based,” he told us. But this is no mere magazine cut-and-paste. By cropping and taping off images, Ramon takes a work you thought you knew and transforms it. It’s incredible how something so standard – advertisements, sports images, magazine covers – can become something so different when information is blocked. This is Ramon’s art: making us create a new interpretation with the information he leaves available to us.

We talked to Ramon about his process, his goals, and what he considers important as he makes his art…

Continue reading “Ramon Vega” →

FAILE Studio

April 23, 2013May 4, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, brooklyn artist, brooklyn artist ball, FAILE, FAILE Studio, patrick mcneil, patrick miller, patrickmcneil, patrickmiller6 Comments

You can’t think about New York City and not think about the incredible history of artists that have defined and redefined art through the ages. This year Kevin and I are cohosting the Brooklyn Artists Ball after-party, so the rest of this week we will be doing studio tours here of a few of the artists, all based in Brooklyn, who are creating special pieces to be on exhibition at each of the guests’ tables for the museum’s annual fundraising event.

Walking through Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood you pass food truck restaurants, junk stores that remind me of my childhood, and unremarkable doors with blacked out windows covered in rusted old bars… but then this unremarkable door opens and you walk into an absolute paradise of creative vision, color, passion, history, friendship and projects that begin here and reach the far corners of the globe: gracing the halls of Lincoln Center, parks in Mongolia, temples in Portugal, and in art galleries and on sidewalk walls all over the city.

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, the creative duo behind FAILE Studio, met in high school in Arizona. Their collaborations began with trading sketch books, which eventually led them to creating art on the street and ultimately to New York and this studio, where, on this afternoon, Tuba Skinny plays over the speakers as a handful of assistants help them work on ongoing projects, including their installation for the Brooklyn Artists Ball.

One thing inspires another in this space – an accident or how something is stored will manifest in a new body of work. Their works constantly evolves into itself.

Images are repeated like a universal thread in their work – a ballet dancer appears on large scale murals and smaller objects, like a story retold over time but worded differently.

Continue reading “FAILE Studio” →

José Parlá

April 22, 2013April 25, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, brooklyn artist, brooklyn artist ball, jose parla, joseparla5 Comments

José Parlá‘s studio is currently under renovation, so we instead opt to take a walk through Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park, which sits just outside. It’s one of those typically cold New York spring days as we chat about his Cuban parents, childhood growing up in Florida, and his talent and passion for art which took him to SCAD before he even graduated high school.

He shows us his latest book, Broken Language, where the artist, who is more well known for his calligraphy-meets-street-style mural paintings, has a series of photographs in print. Why photography? I ask him. “It’s a memory record. I take the color, the hand, the textures, and I memorize it and I start making paintings from the palettes. You can look at a photo like a poem, that’s why I chose to do the front of the book with photographs so you can see the palate that is going to inform the rest of the work.”

Continue reading “José Parlá” →

Alison Elizabeth Taylor

April 17, 2013April 25, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged alison elizabeth taylor, AlisonElizabethTaylor, artist, brooklyn artist, brooklyn artist ball4 Comments

When Alison Elizabeth Taylor opened the door to her studio in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg neighborhood, you couldn’t help but first notice her burgeoning baby bump. This is an important thing to point out only because, once familiar with her work, you quickly understand how labor intensive it is. The end product, an intricate collection of wood pieces, starts from a sketch, then a wash painting, on to a graphite drawing, followed by an ink drawing, until finally the actual textile piece begins.

Continue reading “Alison Elizabeth Taylor” →

Emily Noelle Lambert

April 16, 2013April 25, 2013Posted in LifestyleTagged artist, brooklyn artist, brooklyn artist ball, emily noelle lambert, emilynoellelambert, studio tour8 Comments

When you walk into Emily Noelle Lambert‘s studio in Greenpoint you instantly feel happier from the colors, the freedom of paint, and the joy of the artist. The walls explode with pieces ranging from paintings to found wooden structures to metal works, the result of collaborations with her brother, who is a blacksmith. The center of the room is filled with one long descending table with a beautiful range of height, texture, and saturations of color, where all the sculptures seem to dance with each other. She talks to us about her creation for the Brooklyn Artist Ball and her life as an artist…

Emily on her sculptures being “small gestures that turn into little moments that could live in a larger painting. I like to look at the texture and the history of each object and what each of the forms do and try to begin to have another conversation with what I pair them with. Once I started painting them them it really starts to feel like they are brush strokes themselves.”

On her centerpieces she is creating for the ball: “I really want the table to have more of a landscape feel. That is where I’m at now…I have all the pieces but I need to figure out the space between them, how they are going to speak to each other. ”

Continue reading “Emily Noelle Lambert” →