Monday, February 19, 2007

Laylah Ali


*“Laylah Ali is one of magnificant artist of this modern era. She was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968 and graduated from Williams College and Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (MFA). One outstanding thing from her style always reflect the social problem in nowadays espeacially in race and war problems. Ali also used an easy figures to fulfill her idea and maybe we can see it look like cartoon (like one of her famous work - green head) which get some influenced from hieroglyphics and American folk-art. The vision of her about race problem always show some gimmic in her works. Ali used many months to create her one painting because she used her thinking process to think about color and the brushes that she should use. When she needed to do her works, she locked herself in a studio room to participate in her work. And Ali always think as much as she can.

Ali’s former work, green head, had the same color in head and skin but she used a different kinds of dress and masks instead. She always think about the meaning of what this color means is. For the new work, she used varies color of face and had a lot of portraits more than she had ever used. Ali always took some ordinary things to used in her paintings. Like dodgeballs and belts because she thought these thing had some meanings behind what we have seen. For example, belts can be some kind of power like we have seen in Superheroes.

Most of all, Ali felt that her paintings were some kind of language especially hieroglyphics because they are visual language. As an alphabet, her work can communicate with people to show art is no limited, it is worldwide language. At least, it does not have race and war problems.”

No comments: