Luke Hillestad’s recent show of oils at Copro Gallery in Los Angeles was full of medicine and magic, an offering of herbal healing through images of pagan and Christian mythology and lore. His figurative paintings reach into the past, weaving the spells of the ancients into his images, telling tales of trust and tradition, each image tying people and plants together.
The floral fingers of the long tradition of botanical art reach back to the paleolithic caves of prehistory, where fearless hunter-gatherers painted their lamp-lit shamanic visions onto the dark faces of rock walls beside the snoring bulk of hibernating bears, inextricably linking herbal medicine and spirituality into the earliest moments of art history. Delicate mushrooms and flowers hide among their primordial paintings of beautifully rendered charcoal herds of black buffalo and red ochre prides of lions. Hillestad binds his work into this lineage of health and therapy, using texts like “The Epic of Gilgamesh” and “The Iliad” and Pliny the Elder as sources.
His small emblem painting, Gilgamesh’s Flower, was inspired by the hero of the ancient epic written about 2000 B.C. In it, a Noah-like character told King Gilgamesh where he could find the flower of youth hidden at the bottom of the sea, but warned him that it had thorns like a rose. Fearlessly, Gilgamesh tied stones to his feet and dove into the depths, and despite the thorns, he grasped the flower and brought it to the surface. Worried about the consequences of eating it, he decided to return to Uruk, the capital of his kingdom, planning to test some of the flower on an old man to see its effects, then eat it himself to return to his youth. However, on his journey home Gilgamesh decided to take a dip in a spring to prepare for his arrival. While he washed in the cool waters, a snake stole the flower, and shed its skin. Gilgamesh wept.
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Denne historien er fra Brilliant Blooms-utgaven av American Art Collector.
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Guardians of the Temple – Simon Dinnerstein reflects on The Fulbright Triptych 50 years later.
The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University exhibits Simon Dinnerstein's The Fulbright Triptych haunts the visual lexicon of 20th century American representational art. Fifty years have passed since Dinnerstein completed the painting in 1974.
A City Perspective
Leslie Gaduzo has always been interIested in art. Since childhood, he has been drawing constantly, from single point perspective drawings at age 10 to complex architectural drawings.
Living Legacy
The Butler Institue hosts Allied Artists of America's 110th Annual Juried Exhibition.
Elegant yet Approachable
The second edition of the RTIA Show presents even more art to explore and expanded special programming.
Figuratively Speaking
New York has always been an epicenter of artists on the edge of excellence, pushing the envelope and finding their voices.
JAMES AYERS: The Importance of Play
Like many artists, James Ayers' work took a turn during the Covid-19 pandemic. Seeing the enjoyment his kids took from playing with paint in his studio and exploring their creativity inspired him.
GINA MINICHINO: Playing with Food
Gina Minichino started her journey in visual arts because of Charles Schulz. \"He was my earliest influence for drawing and the reason I wanted to be a cartoonist,\" she says.
Island Light
The Cuttyhunk Island Artists' Residency is held in a sprawling, 100-year-old house on an island off the southern coast of Massachusetts.
Solitary Forms
Hogan Brown has been working with Arcadia Contemporary for two and half years and is excited to be featured in his first solo show at the gallery. He doesn't take for granted the many talented figurative painters Arcadia represents and is thrilled to be among them.
Living the Dream
Counterintuitively, David Gluck was a painter before taking up tattooing little more than a decade ago. While skin is a completely different substrate and ink a far cry from oil paint, the skills must be transferrable to some degree because there is a wait-time of nine months to get an appointment with him.