Tag Archives: MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN

ARTIST OF THE WEEK : ADRIAN NEGENBORN

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Adrian Negenborn is a painter and 2010 MFA graduate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Whether isolating thick swipes of paint or mingling fluid lines with chancy splices, Adrian Negenborn strives to find the significance in gesture and mark making. “My process is characterized by excavation,” says Negenborn. “Oscillating from visceral to analytic, spontaneous to meditated, I respond to the initial flurry of marks laid on the canvas. I am always trying to make something from nothing, to dig something out of the mass of gestures.”

Interested in transparency and contrast, Negenborn’s paintings can also give the illusion of exuding light or being lit from behind. His method of layering various colors or shades of colors allow his works to possess a distinctive push-pull effect. In more than one work, I almost thought that a brush stroke was floating in front of the painting itself – which of course it’s not.

Primarily using acrylic paint on canvas and/or paper, Negenborn’s works are at once abstract, energetic and spontaneous. “I never fully know when a painting is done until it feels right; it reaches an in between state somewhere amidst harmony and disharmony. Eventually, a glance at an experience coming into being reveals itself out of the mass of gestures.”

Beautifully put, Negenborn. We’re excited to see what ‘reveals’ itself next!

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ARTIST OF THE WEEK: JOHANNA WARWICK

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Johanna Warwick is a photographer and a 2010 MFA graduate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Quiet, understated beauty. That’s the thought that ran through my head when glimpsing Johanna Warwick’s photographs. Focusing on the contrast between lightness vs. darkness, heaviness vs. emptiness and life vs. death, Johanna Warwick is able to capture the delicate balance of life’s opposing forces. Whether it be to document an empty quarry or her own family, Warwick’s use of color and light gives one the sense of muted comfort. The last image shown (image #12) is actually a series of four separate photographs in which Warwick focuses on ceilings. These images are part of a larger series entitled The Weight of the World where Warwick tries to capture the feeling of being a young adult and trying to find out who you are:

“The pictures are portraying that internal space that we all have and I think for me they come from this time in our early 20s, where you’re trying to figure out what you’re doing and where your going and that sense of being lost….We are always going to know that place. We are always going to know that feeling and that sense of being lost. To me that’s where it came from.” -Johanna Warwick as quoted from Function Magazine. 

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