Eroné

It's kind of hard to post about Amose one week without following up with Eroné the next. The two French artists share many common themes and interests. Although, Eroné's work is visually softer and has a more organic feel. The figures are more relaxed and the colour palette is reduced to earthy tones.

Like Amose, Eroné's characters are masked from ethnic and emotional description, but Eroné's figures have something of Amedeo Modigliani about them with their blank, haunting eyes. There is still, however, the visible influence of Southern American street art, like Os Gemeos.

For more, just go here...

Amose

French artist Amose hails from Lille in the north of France. He spent four years studying illustration in Belgium but has been more influenced by South American street art like that of Vitché and Vasko as well as traditional art history legends such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.

Amose takes the human figure and distorts and exaggerates postures and the size of limbs, taking care to keep the subject's humanity but remove any sense of nationality, sex or race. He keeps their faces neutral, as if they're wearing masks.

He works in a variety of mediums: ink on paper (sometimes with collage), screenprints on plexiglass, digitally, acrylic on wood and wood collage on paper as well as out on the streets. He's also a part of the Mercurocrom collective and together with Eroné and Spyre, runs a screenprint workshop called La Carpe.

 

You can find his website here...

Chris Silva

I first became aware of Chris Silva a few years ago when he was featured in Cody Hudson's spot on The Run Up; a DVD containing one-on-one interviews with a whole host of contemporary graffiti and street artists, desigers and photographers.

The great thing about Chris is, not just his artwork, but the fact that he really is about art as a collaborative and giving experience... collaborating not only with other artists, like on The Run Up with Cody and Mike Genovese in Chicago, but also working on projects like Yollocalli Arts Reach (last picture, below) which encourages youth creativity through experimental learning and collaboration with emerging artists.

Here are just a few examples of his great, upcycled collaborations with his wife, Lauren Feece. They totally inspire me to just create art out of anything, for anyone, in order to just give something of yourself and put something out there in the world.