Frodo 47, a.k.a. Javier S. Sañudo, was born in 1981and has lived all his life in Mexico City. Like many artists, music was the artist's introduction into personal creativity. "Since I was very young, music has been my curse, I've been playing guitar and listening to music all day and night. For more than eight years, I used to play in Death Metal bands," says Sañudo. He says he has always been interested in images like photography, paintings, video clips, movies. But, it was not until he saw Joel-Peter Witkin’s photos that he got became interested in taking photographs as a main means of expression. "The way he shows human ways of being made me try to do the same, but in my own way."
Sañudo is also influenced by H.R. Giger, John Santerineross, Herr Buchta , Jeffrey Scott, Floria Sigismondi, Misha Gordin among others.

Sañudo studied photography at Escuela Activa de Fotografía (EAF), taking courses about digital photo, developing personal projects and image analysis. He says he learned from the technical matters there, but has learned much more by by constantly viewing photographs, and practicing on his own. Sañudo says, "I'm always trying to get the best the shot, factoring the lighting, interesting perspectives and meaningful symbols."

Now days, he pays the bills as a free-lance commercial photographer, doing fashion shoots and band promotion. But don't let his day-job fool you. Although, the images are stunning in composition, it's his personal work that is his art. Sañudo states, "I take some photographs to make money. The more commercial stuff, I enjoy doing for the technical matters. But, I don't enjoy it as much as I do with my personal work because of the meaning in it.

Sañudo is still very influenced by music, I'm always listening to music while I’m shooting or working on the computer. I also enjoy working with bands, taking live concert photos, band photos and artwork for their album booklets. "I combine what I feel with the music I listen to when I'm working - sometimes taking the lyrics from some of my favorite songs and make my own representation of them."

Nudes are essential in Sañudo's work because, "nudity is the most pure and vulnerable way of existence. I've tried to get some actors, professional models, friends and even myself as model. I’m also starting to work on some portrait projects with real people who have suffered - had difficulties in their lives that make them do really strong and painful acts."

When asked why so many of his works are untitled, the artist responds "Normally, I prefer to not put titles to my work. it’s very interesting for me to know what people think and feel while watching my work unless they’ve misunderstood totally what I’m expressing. That’s my game when I leave my works untitled, and I’m ready to play it."

Sañudo explains the benefit of photo manipulation. "Sometimes having money is not enough to get a lot of production, locations, etc. Sometimes I want my photos to look surreal and match the ideas I have, so that's why photo-manipulation has been a great tool for me. I use photo-manipulation as a creative weapon, not a corrective one. I'm trying to be able to express what I'm interested - fear, pain, suffering, death, mental diseases, human behavior, anti-religion and psychology."

While his images are now represented on the Saatchi Gallery website and are gaining popularity, Sañudo remains humble. "I'm not bringing any important messages from outer space or anything, it's just my way to express myself through my main passion. I prefer to leave my work to the open interpretation of the viewer. I'm just working on representing surreality as realistically as I can. I'm glad that people are interested in what I do."

See more of Frodo's work at

www.flickr.com/photos/ciphoto

www.ciphotodesign.com

or on the Saatchi gallery website http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/photographers

Here, the use of human-derived materials makes a undeniable statement that undoubtedly attracts attention, even controversy. The artists have taken purposeful risks, in using unusual methods and materials, that might have jeopardized their credibility. I think that’s a successful work in itself.

The use of blood would seem a distasteful art medium, but for Marc Quinn, UK sculptor and member of the Young British Artists (shock-driven conceptual artists originating from the Saatchi gallery.) It has been as powerful than marble. Quinn emerged in 1991 with his signature work “Self”. This frozen sculpture of the artist's head was made from 9.5 US pints of the artist's own blood taken from his body over a period of five months. In this case, the materials are what literally convey the message- so much of what the artist is made of goes into his/her craft. The eye-widening work is almost anxiety provoking since it is as life-like as it is temperamental- it's temperature must be maintained at -12C/10F. The artist remakes “Self” every five years, but for the Tate Liverpool's exhibition he took the work in a new direction by, this time, recreating his baby son’s head.The role of the viewer is to question the work as to why he/she is emotionally affected. Successful art comes from a  perspective and unique process of the creator. 

Quinn has produced a diverse range of work, most of which is preoccupied with the changing physical states of the body, and addresses ideas about the beginnings of life, nature and death. Quinn is also known for a series of marble sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. This culminated in his most famous work, a 15 ton marble statue honoring a pregnant Allison Lapper, an artist who was born with no arms and deformed legs. It sits on a column in the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square in London.
 

Multi-thousands of individual human hairs comprise Chinese-American artist Wenda Gu's "United Nations" project, which he began in 1993. The massive installation pieces are "monuments" made from the discards collected from barbershops across the globe. He presses or weaves the hair into bricks, carpets, and curtains- as in "Kilometers" where Gu constructed a "temple" using thin, colored braids. These hair structures are often placed in conjunction with stone carvings, ink drawings and engraved metal pieces often including unintelligible text from his own imaginary, hybrid language.

"United Colors" is a braid roughly 71/2 miles long and made of hair purchased from wig factories in China and India. It rises from a coiled mass and hangs in long loops with stainless steel medallions attached to sections of the vividly dyed sculpture. Each medallion bears the name of one of 207 countries written backward. The purpose of blending hair collected from different nations is to show a metaphor for the mixture of races that he predicts will eventually unite humanity.

"The Green House"-one of his most-well known pieces- is an 80ft  X 13ft banner in the Baker-Berry Library of New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College. It runs the length of the vast foyer with its bright green lettering. The hair for this piece was collected over several months last year from over 42,000 haircuts of Dartmouth students, faculty and local residents in Hanover. This amounts to 430 pounds of human hair which was shipped to China, where workers in Gu's Shanghai studio dyed and shaped the locks into paper-thin panels held together by a film of Elmer's glue and tied together with twine. The banner spells the words "educations" and "advertises" superimposed on each other in an effort to show that education and capitalism are inseparable. Through imagination-defying works, Gu's message expresses the ideals of the Cultural Revolution in Mao-era Communist China. 

 
The notoriously controversial photograph “Piss Christ,” by Andres Serrano, is of a small crucifix submerged in a vessel of the artist's urine. Sadly, it is seen more as only the question it poses regarding artistic freedom, and not for what it actually is- an otherworldly photograph. The color filter effect of the medium and the angle of lighting lend an eerie amber translucency to one of the most prevalent images in history. It suggests many possibilities of interpretation to its viewer, not simply the commonly perceived concrete message of disrespect by an artist raised Catholic.

The piece caused a scandal when it was exhibited in 1989, with opponents accusing Serrano of blasphemy and others raising this as a major issue of artistic freedom. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition, which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects. Since the award is technically sponsored by taxpayer dollars, this caused grounds for outrage among conservative politicians. The year of its release, Senator Al D'Amato tore a reproduction of the photograph into pieces in the US Senate. While on the other side of the issue, famous art critic and devote Catholic Sister Wendy Beckett expressed approval of "Piss Christ". She regarded the work as a statement on "what we have done to Christ" - the way contemporary society has come to regard Christ and the values he represents.

The subject matter of Serrano's other photographs are similarly complicated and include aborted fetuses, the Ku Klux Klan and post-autopsy corpses.His work has continually provoked outrage, particularly among America's Christian Right, and even led one anonymous man to attack his work with a hammer during an exhibition.
Serrano’s creative mind delves into controversial subjects and his work demonstrates this. But we are left to wonder if it the subject matter is primarily for the sake of exposure, and does its statement outweigh the actual art. The image makes us so uncomfortable that we can't help but neglect to see the photograph.

Hannya II, 2007 Drawing - graphite and gouache on paper 15.5 x 10.5 inches

Bartow began creating art as a child and later decided to pursue art education, earning a Bachelors of Arts in Art Education from Western Oregon State University. Following over a year of service in Vietnam, the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and years of substance abuse to follow, Bartow began to use art as therapy.

“Drawing is medicine”, says artist Rick Bartow. “My work will never stop being therapy.”

His style of expression is self-taught. It wasn’t until 1979 that he began drawing and strictly in charcoal and graphite. He used images from newspapers as models for his first works. They were crude charcoal, monochromatic newsprint drawings. He noticed the Expressionist influence when the erasures were as important in determining the shapes of his images as the material applied. He often fixated on the symbolism of masks falling away from figures, literally representing the rediscovering of himself beneath his layers. By 1983, he slowly brought pastel to his drawings.

“Color took three years to begin to work,” says the artist.

Each drawings begin where he makes marks and erasures intuitively and the form takes the right shape. He often mixes mediums of graphite, pastel and acrylic paint creating disturbing color usage heightening the sometimes horrifying imagery.

After reading on Native American carvers, Bartow experimented with a new medium and eventually tried his hand at carving cedar masks. Since then, Bartow had explored themes in dozens of sculptures, presenting animals and humans in wood carvings or as assemblage of recycled materials take influence from Maori, African and Pacific Northwest coastal wood carving.

Opera, 2007 Sculpture - wood, joint compound 25.5 x 104 x 21 inches

The core of his work involves transformation mythology, both cultural and personal. The mythic images are clearly influenced by the Native American animal totem. For Bartow, this

“makes his own inner beasts visible.”

Though Bartow’s work has explored new areas, the common themes are often the animal totems of Bear, Deer, Owl, but he seems the most preoccupied with Coyote (which often symbolizes folly, wisdom, adaptation, importance of family) and Crow (which often symbolizes watchfulness, cunning, cooperation.) They seem very personal symbols to his life and relationship with art.

The recurrent use of animal totems, which comes from his Native American heritage, is the most common theme in his works. Although his father descended from the Yurok Indian tribe of northern California, and his family became involved with central coastal Oregon’s Siletz Indian community. He claims the totems are “personal symbols and not necessarily a reflection of ancestry.”

In his drawings, which I think is his most interesting work, we see the most transformation imagery- combinations like two faces creating one, man and animal sharing bodies, and the living spliced to the dead.

Bartow says,“I was exorcizing the demons that made me strange to myself.”

He regularly depicts not only man, or animal, but the transformation of man to animal.

Bartow’s warped, child-like characters are contrasted by jarring moments of realism. Each work grabs your eye as you scan the cluttered, but composed elements presented in the vivid, dissonant colors of each story-board.

Through often violent impressions of bandaged bodies and bared teeth in distorted faces we see less of the physical world, more the world of his imagination. I see the dark world of Bosch through the dreamlike combinations of Chagall, and sometimes the multiple perspectives of Picasso through ghost images. He claims these artists as influences, and also claims inspiration from Bacon, Diebenkorn, Janssen and Scholder

Over the last few years, Bartow’s work has taken a different road since collaborating with Master Printmaker Seiichi Hiroshima. The subject matter has common elements of his work from past shows, but in using a dramatically different medium, the appearances are crisper and more color-subdued smatterings of animal anatomical drawing combinations.

Over the decades, Rick Bartow's work is included in public, private and corporate collections throughout the world. He has had solo exhibitions in galleries in Japan, Mexico, Germany, New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest. He has received many honors such as a solo exhibit at The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, The Eiteljorg Museum's Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, a year-long installation in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden at The White House (97-98), as well as prestigious group shows, fellowships, awards. Through his artistic success, his life has come full circle in teaching through lectures, symposiums and workshops.

Kiefer was born in 1945, the year referred to as "zero hour,"or the beginning of the post-Nazi era and rebirth of independent German culture. His first recognized paintings symbolized the massive upheaval of the country’s citizens following WWII. He addresses the loss of cultural identity, socio-economic instability and guilt-stigma following the delusional enforcement of the Fascist campaign, and the Cold War to follow.

Kiefer was influenced by the abstract intellectual art of the 1970s. Although not easily classified, his genre is agreed upon as New Symbolism- an offshoot of Symbolism, first expressed in poetry, but later extended to other art forms. The movement stresses impressions by suggestion rather than by direct statement, such as seen in the painting’s of Edvard Munch, Odilon Redon, and Gustave Moreau. Although he is Symbolist in message and subject matter, his articulation is clearly Neo-expressionist- a movement of painters made popular in Europe and America in the 1980s, characterized by the artist’s intense emotional subjectivity and the aggressive handling of materials. Neo-Expressionist paintings are typically created rapidly, sometimes with found objects in their surfaces.

In his early years, he began creating typically massive, gestural paintings that contained figurative elements, but also layers of recognizable symbols. He explored his peoples’ uncertain cultural identity through the blatant use of Nazi images, German mythological figures and characters from Wagner’s epic operas.

He used new combinations of mixed media- underlying photographs, photo emulsion, lead, pottery shards, glass, sand, ash and plant materials that he knowingly chose to add a delicate and temporary aspect. This is evident in "Your Golden Hair, Margarete"(oil and straw) where he references "Death Fugue" a poem by Paul Celan about the experience of a German death camp. Here, strata of drab hues provide a backdrop for an abstract figure with straw representing the golden hair of the Nazi’s Aryan ideal.

In Resurrexit (oil on canvas, burlap), he depicts a path leading through dark woods leading to distant building. The serpent represents Satan occupying humanity’s travel. Above, there is a creaky staircase with a shut door which represents Heaven, and our lack of accessability to it.

Kiefer’s style evolved noticeably as he countered Germany’s cultural isolation with extensive traveling. He no longer focused solely on Germany's role in civilization, but the trauma experienced by entire societies throughout time. Through Nordic, Egyptian, Greek, early Christian, middle-eastern, as well as Jewish mystic imagery he explores more deeply human philosophical dilemmas- heaven and hell, thrise and fall of empires, death and rebirth.

An example is "Nero Paints"(oil on canvas), an almost violent landscape with a dark impressionistic quality from a distance, but up close buildings are burning in the upper right corner. Much of the image is obscured by a red, crudely drawn artists’ pallette. The title and imagery convey a leaders self-interest and indifference to his empire’s destruction, the case for Caesar Nero.

Kiefer later moves toward more general messages, and further refines his technique. As he becomes more elaborate and sculptural, his messages become more universal, less literal. In " The Milky Way,"(emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac with wires and lead) there are no stars present. We see a landscape that appears to be torched, giving an impression of devastation. In the foreground, a funnel hopes to capture the illuminating golden light of the scene and rejuvenate the land.

In "The Book"(oil, lead, photographic paper, straw, fabric on canvas) a large, lead tome floating over a dark, barren landscape. The book is open to, potentially, a bible passage marking disaster, but it could also symbolize the wisdom of humanity, our redemption.

"The Order of Angels"(oil on canvas, plane propellor, rocks) shows a plane propellor and rocks representing meteorites that have fallen to shore. The painting suggests the horrors of war, and Heaven itself falling from the sky.

Toward the end of the century, Kiefer seems to become more optimistic. Much of his symbolic imagery moves toward star charts, books, and ladders. This depicts his hope for humanity bettering itself. In "Falling Stars" (oil on canvas) a half-bare figure, similar to Kiefer himself, lies across his own signature barren landscape gazing at constellations.

In time, uncertainty eventually yields stability- for the artist, Germany and all people. Kiefer shows us the universal thread stitched through all cultures, and the beauty that can be seen in the ugliest parts of humanity. Through his work we develop a sense of possibility, while being made more aware of the debris none of us can shake loose.