The Arteur

 Myung Nam An creates a new world in her ceramics. The crispness and clarity in her work reflects a new approach to clay. Her eye series delights. "Originally I am from Seoul, South Korea. Ceramics has always been close to my heart and in 2005 I decided to study further at University in London. I graduated from  University of Art London in London, achieved BA in Ceramics in 2009. My work is the human being and their everyday life. I find ceramic to be the most suitable material to express my ideas. The characteristics and limitations of the materials are a fundamental issue for me and my process is one based on analysis and experience. I approach my work in both a formal and aesthetic way. That does not mean that emotionality and sensuality are set aside – on the contrary. These pieces evoke cool expression with sensitive undertones and there by join an abstract, new formalistic movement in contemporary art."

Interested in cultural iconography, Will Cotton 's art makes use of the common language of consumer culture shared across geographical boundaries. He considers the visual threads in his work, drawn from imagery ranging from the Candy Land board game and gingerbread houses to pinup art and cotton candy, to be part of the popular culture lexicon.[2] Cotton’s work also builds upon and updates the idea of land of milk and honey in European literature and art. Cotton states “The dream of paradise, of a land of plenty, is a thread that runs through all of human history, not just in the affluent times but in fact very often in the lean as well.”[4] He has also been inspired by painters Frederic Edwin Church, François Boucher, and Fragonard, the photographer Carleton Watkins, as well as pin-up painters such as Gil Elvgren. Of his landscape painting influences, Cotton says, "I was initially drawn to the Hudson River School when I learned that many of the paintings were made specificall...

Helena Sofia (Helene) Schjerfbeck was a Finnish modernist painter known for her realist works and self-portraits, and also for her landscapes and still lifes. Throughout her long life her work changed dramatically, beginning with French-influenced realism and plein air painting. It gradually evolved towards portraits and still life paintings.  At the beginning of her career she often produced historical paintings, such as the Wounded Warrior in the Snow (1880), At the Door of Linköping Jail in 1600 (1882) and The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin (1886). Historical paintings were usually the realm of male painters, as was experimentation with modern influences and French radical naturalism, and her works from mostly the 1880s did not receive a favorable reception until later in her life. Her work starts with a dazzlingly skilled, somewhat melancholic version of late-19th-century academic realism.... It ends with distilled, nearly abstract images in which pure paint and cryptic descript...

  Juan Carlos Pinto (b. 1968) is a Guatemalan-born artist and art historian based in New York City. Having lived in Brooklyn for over 12 years, Carlos Pinto has made many public artworks, often creating with materials from the streets of New York, such as discarded glass, plastic, and pieces of pottery. Migration is a recurring theme throughout his work. Pinto leans towards motifs such as birds to portray the migration of animals and peoples across regions as a natural occurrence of life.  He is largely inspired by the birds he sees near his home in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Pinto’s works include portraits of celebrities and animals, mainly birds and fish. He renders them in collages created with recycled MTA MetroCards. His work encompasses other media such as tile work and painting. Pinto's striking mosaic collages serve as a response to an uptick in societal tensions related to migration, specifically relating to attitudes towards immigrants in New York City....

In his assemblage-style paintings, American artist Raymond Saunders (b. 1934) brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking and allow for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings.

Who says that ceramics is merely a craft and not an art? I disagree and use as an example the inventive pottery of Adams Puryear , whose fabulous ceramic vessels were on display at New York City's Greenwich House Pottery. His work has a great "low-brow art" look that is reminiscent of the vibrant creativity we see in graffiti and street art. His work stands out from standard utilitarian pots and bowls. See for yourself on his website.