Artists Working in Contrasting Styles

I have struggled with this exercise for a long time, having been asked to find two artists, one of whom works in a rigorous and controlled way, and another whose style is expressive and loose. Eventually, while looking through “Vitamin D”, I isolated two of the featured artists which I felt met the criteria and could be compared.

The first is Spanish artist Ernesto Caivano, who works in New York. His drawing style is linear, precise, with the elements carefully plotted within the picture plane to arrive at a dynamic and interesting composition. His subject matter comes from a post-apocalyptic novel of his own writing, dealing with themes of bifurcation, polarity and duality, and he produces works in a non-linear order to the story. The works are of varied sizes and worked in black ink, and have a carefully crafted illustrative feel to them.

While the text mentions his occasional use of colour in vignette pieces, none are illustrated in the book. I found a couple of examples using colour, along with other works, on a gallery site here: http://whitecube.com/artists/ernesto_caivano/

The drawings are intricate and complex, with an incredible range of marks and a brilliantly inventive use of negative space. The landscapes e.g.The Land Inhibited (2003) show a strong Oriental stylistic influence, while a portrait of one of the main characters, Breathing the Code (2002) reminds me of the fantasy art of Chris Achilleos in the arrangement of elements and the pose.

The second artist is Lithuanian Mindaugas Lukosaitis. He has used factual accounts of partisans in the guerrilla war against the Red Army during the Soviet occupation to  produce a series of around 100 drawings, titled “Resistance”. His pencil drawings have a sketchy, slightly unfinished look, with variation in the amounts of tone employed rather than a consistent finish, and typically show one or a few figures involved in active conflict with an unseen enemy. The compositional style is very much like the story-boarding for a film or comic strip, utilising unusual angles and close-up figures to convey the dynamism in the scene.

I was unable to find a site with a representative example of his work, however typing his name into a Google image search brings up a wide range of pieces including some not directly relating to the Resistance series.

While these could be seen exclusively as a mythologized patriotic statement, they also beg the question of how we identify and generate resistance to our current world view. I find them particularly interesting as I work with a number of Lithuanians, and while being largely ignorant of their history, I am watching this new generation coming to grips with how to define their lives against their current reality.

So, two different artists, using different styles, but both telling a narrative to explore how the individual relates to the external.