Amor Fati (Love of Fate)

Amor Fati is translated as (love of fate).

Not only accepting but loving everything that happens in my life. It’s a pretty radical mindset that has its origins in Stoic philosophy and was coined by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Amor Fati is a mindset I am adopting for own life and I believe it is a good start to living a more meaningful life. If we can love everything that happens to us there is no room for excuses and instead we can get to work on living the best life we can manage and putting in the work that is going to make us happier.

I also believe that the Amor Fati mindset is a good starting point for positive self talk and being more resilient. When we love everything that happens to us the origin of our positive self talk feels less contaminated by the “Eyeore” syndrome.  Sense we know that the stories we tell ourselves make us either optimistic or pessimistic, changing our stories can change us.

Adopting an Amor Fati mindset like most worthwhile things in life will take work and daily practice but I am excited about putting the mindset into practice and sharing the mindset with others.

Inspiration: Ken Kewley, painter

Impressive small paintings of people and things. I am always a little fascinated by powerful images created by employing the elements of art, Shape, Form, Value, Color, Line, Space and Texture. Ken Kewley makes small simple paintings over and over again.

Kewley said the following in his artist statement about his work;

“I make some shapes either in two or three dimensions and then adjust them until together they excite. There seems to be no end to the ways things can be adjusted: in shape, size, color, value, and texture, and/or turned around or turned over.

I find that whatever is true, most times, the opposite is also true. This makes things easy and it make things hard. At least enough to fill a lifetime.”

http://www.kenkewley.com/

Inspiration: Judith Henry, Photographer

“Henry incorporates photography and other documentary tools to explore the misalignments between cultural representation and inner psychology.   In her most recent projects, Henry continues her practice of self-disclosure through increasingly complex manipulations of found sources. Rebirth (2012) is a collage series made by layering fragments of celebrity faces onto obituary photos. These hybrid portraits obscure their subjects and speak to collective experiences of uncertainty and disappearance. ”                                                                                                                              

http://www.judithhenry.net/theme/

Inspiration: Sarah Ball, painter

Sarah Ball is a painter working and living in Wales. Ball talks about being absorbed by the portraits of the people she paints and she has a fascination with groups of people she paints and often she has a gut reaction when looking at the images she uses for her paintings. A lot of what Ball says about her work and process resonates with me in terms of my work and process so there is connection when I look at her work.

“Ball’s most recent works are intricate and diminutive painted portraits taken from police ‘mugshots’. These delve into ideas surrounding 19th Century physiognomy – which was a widely explored and believed notion that there was a connection between an individual’s outward appearance and their inner character – in essence good people ‘looked good’ and bad people ‘looked bad’.” – Millennium gallery

http://www.sarah-ball.co.uk/

Inspiration: Jonas Wood, Painter

Jonas Wood’s work is beautiful, his images provide a look at the reality of everyday life which is often mundane but Wood manages to inject these scenes with interest and energy. Wood’s stylized imagery initially appear to be simply rendered but a closer examination reveals intricate details thoughtfully executed.

His work is described as “negotiat[ing] an uneasy truce among the abstract, the representational, the photographic and the just plain weird. They achieve this with a dour yet lavish palette, tactile but implacably workmanlike surfaces and a subtly perturbed sense of space in which seemingly flattened planes and shapes undergo shifts in tone and angle that continually declare their constructed, considered, carefully wrought artifice.” – Roberta Smith, NY Times article

http://www.antonkerngallery.com/artist/jonas-wood/#/dinosaur-pots-still-life

Fahamu Pecou, Artist and Scholar

Pecou’s work is about black male identity and can be thought of as a mashup of hip hop and high art.

Pecou is an emerging young artist living and working in Atlanta pursuing a PhD in Liberal Arts at Emory University.

His work has been described as having “a really nice, long conversation and critique about not only black culture, but American culture, along with the potential to help young black men — and women — to believe there is a greater, broader set of opportunities available to them.”

                                

http://www.fahamupecouart.com/

Robert Frank, photographer

I happened upon the work of Photographer Robert Frank while looking for something else. Frank’s work is held in high regard with the likes of Photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, essentially, he is seen as an american master of photography.

His work is described as “develop[ing] a template where you have one or two individuals who are trapped by pictorial forces that ends up being a very elegant metaphor for lonely people trapped in social circumstances.”

Below is short video that looks an exhibition of his unseen photographs taken when shooting for his seminal work, “The Americans”

http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2014/09/12/in-unseen-photos-a-clearer-picture-of-robert-franks-america/

Inspiration: Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Using his camera to record his culture is what photographer Andreas Laszlo Konrath does from his place in Brooklyn. Konrath started taking photos of his skater friends in the early 2000’s since then he has garnered awards and now shoots celebrities and magazine layouts for top publications around the world. His work has a quality that arrests the viewer while maintaining a candid and almost casual feel.

Jennifer Packer, painter

Jennifer Packer, painter lives and works in New York, NY. I discovered Jennifer’s work early this year and rediscovered her and her work through a Hyperallergic exhibition post. http://hyperallergic.com/185921/8-figurative-painters-in-an-atemporal-world/

What does Jennifer Say about her work?

“I’m interested in meaningful contradictions, especially the ones that distract us from the truth….I think about images that resist, that attempt to retain their secrets or maintain their composure, that put you to work. I feel that way about someone like Billie Holiday: her voice and love versus the content of her life and her music. I hope to make contradictory paintings, works that suggest how dynamic and complex our lives and relationships really are.” 

Well said.

I like the idea that Jennifer is interested in revealing the lives of the people and objects she paints. The idea that we work to understand and see when experiencing her work is a concept that I would like to apply my own work.

http://jenniferpacker.tumblr.com/

Elizabeth Peyton, painter

“Painting becomes an opportunity to transform your ideas about an object or a thing into a mediative container and they become the occasion for my thoughts about things and feelings about things” ~ Elizabeth Peyton