Ben Heine Art and Music Blog: Artists

Showing posts with label Artists. Show all posts

Magic City - Street Art Show - 40 Artists - 40 Artworks (including Ben Heine Art)

Sketch Fight - Pencil Vs Camera

Collaboration with my friend Sébastien Del Grosso. I drew him in my style (left side) and he drew me in his style (right side). You can find posters, canvases and nice derivatives of this artwork at this link and you can also view my sketch in progress here below. © 2014 Ben Heine

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Exhibition at the Battersea
Affordable Art Fair (London)

(click to enlarge)

Several of my limited edition prints (in Pencil Vs Camera) already face mounted and bonded between 2 high quality acrylic glass panels (Diasec finishing) were exhibited at the Battersea Affordable Art Fair in London via The Art Movement from the 19th till the 23rd of October 2011. You can find more info about my limited editions prints and about Diasec here.

Exhibition - Appart Gallery's Loft

Enlarge HERE

Some of my creations ("Pencil Vs Camera" and "Digital Circlism", printed in limited editions) were exhibited the 20th and 21st of November 2010 at the Appart Gallery's Loft in Brussels, Belgium. 5 other artists were showing their works (Maelle André, Bruno Timmermans, Jean Marc Dumont, M. R. Itobate and Lucie Laverne).

Many thanks to Mathieu Ritter, Camille Bruneau, Rami and Antoine...

Ben Heine Interviewed

by Pandemia Fanzine (*)

Describe briefly who you are and what you've done so far.

Hello, I’m a Belgian visual artist. I invented “Pencil Vs Camera” and “Digital Circlism”. I’ve been painting and drawing since 1995 and I started taking photos in 2002.

What are your influences?

Mainly Surrealism and Pop Art.

Tranquility and silence, or movement and music while working?

Definitely music, I wouldn’t be the same person if I didn’t listen to all sorts of music. Music really feeds my soul. Silence makes me dizzy and sleepy…

Do you tend to have a clear idea of what you do in arts or your works are the result of millions of tests?

Each new creation is the result of a long personal evolution but I don’t make millions of tests. I only follow my daily inspirations. It works most of the time.

How did you come to the Pencil Vs Camera series?

By coincidence, one day, I saw something happening through a piece of paper. And I thought it would be great to develop this idea, to draw things on little pieces of paper and hold them in a specific environment.

Do you have a precise idea of what you want to achieve through your PvsC works?

I always have a clear idea of what I want to do before taking the picture and before making the drawing. I only made a few improvisations. I have lots of ideas in stock. It may sound weird, but I get stuck sometimes because of this.

How do you make the magic happen, are there any digital tricks in your PvsC works?

There are 4 methods to make “Pencil Vs Camera” creations. I’ve already explained them in a previous interview. All these traditional and digital techniques are quite basic and simple for me. It is the imagination and the messages you convey that matter more. It always is a real “hand made” drawing in all the PvsC works. My only goal is to make people dream and travel in other universes through creativity and visual innovation.

What tools do you usually use in your everyday work?

Pencils, paper, camera, computer, canvases, acrylic painting, oil painting, watercolor, ink, pastels... A bit of everything. It depends on what I’m working on. Now, I’m in a PvsC phase, but I'm sure it will be something totally different in a few months.

A spacecraft travelling at the speed of light, do you think the headlights will work?

I don’t know, nobody knows, no one has tried it yet...

Tell us only one word that describes your job.

Unexpected

Suppose that each person corresponds to an animal, what kind of animal are you, taking into account your work, your personality and style?

I’d definitely be a flying animal, I think I could be an owl.

Look at this picture and tell us what you see in it or what it means for you.

I see a face, 2 eyes, a nose, hair, mouth…

It’s a mysterious picture, a bit scary...

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(*) This interview also appeared in
Spanish on pandemiafanzine.com

Ben Heine Interviewed
by Michal Fanta (*)

Michal Fanta: What inspired you to become a photographer?

Ben Heine: I've been creating all sorts of images since a long time. I was first mainly a drawer and painter, my conception of art in general changed when I realized how powerful and illustrative photography could be. Flickr has somehow contributed in my evolution as photographer.

Who or what are your influences?

Gilad Benari, a great contemporary photographer, was my first influence in this discipline. Many other artists on FLickr have also given me insight and stimulation.

In your Flickr profile you say that you are mostly self-taught. What do you do to educate yourself?

Yes, I'm mainly a self-taught artist, I briefly studied sculpture and painting in England but Journalism is what I've been trained to do (I have a license in journalism), but I never really worked as a journalist… irony and nonsense, I know, but my passion for visual arts was always stronger. At the very beginning, it has been a little hard for me to handle all the technical devices associated to any artistic productions. But I think if you stay focused on your ideas and goals, you'll always manage to be heard in the crowd.

What has the “Pencil vs Camera” project given to you (so far)? Has it changed your perception of the world in any way?

No, it hasn't really changed my perception of the world, it has changed the way I’m working on my new artistic projects. This series has helped me being published in many countries, which is something great.

Has the Flickr community helped your photography? (if so, how?)

I would say: Yes, definitely, because the friendly community on Flickr is really helpful and proactive. When I started posting pictures on FLickr several years ago, I was sort of motivated to do each time better because I received useful critiques and feedbacks from other Flickr users. I see the Flickr platform as a huge and creative brainstorming laboratory that can lead to the most amazing experimental artistic projects…

What is more important in taking pictures: the gear (camera, lenses,...) or the photographer? And why?

In my opinion, the vision, the skills and the imagination of the person behind the camera is more effective than any powerful gear. It’s certainly true that very expensive lenses and camera bodies are often a guarantee of quality but I think photos taken with the most simple devices can also be interesting if they are creative, unexpected and innovative…

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This interview also appeared in Czech on odcloneno.com

Ben Heine was interviewed by Michal Fanta in October 2010.
(*) Michal Fanta is a photographer from Czech Republic.

Michael Jackson

Tribute Exhibition

(Poster design by Nicoleta Ionescu)

It happened in Bucharest, Romania and was organized by Nicoleta Ionescu and Alexandru Ifrim. It gathered 54 artworks by 38 creators from 17 countries. My 4 MJ portraits were exhibited.

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Photo of Nicoleta Ionescu by Dragos Jianu
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Portrait by Nicoleta Ionescu
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Photo by Dragos Jianu
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The participants were:
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Fabio Shin (Brazil) ; Klaas Op De Beéck (Belgium),
Gheorhe Matei (Romania) ; Bill Plympton (USA)
Oronde Kairi (USA) ; Ben Towle (USA)
Mike Greaney (USA) ; Joseba Morales (Spain)
Yamen Elgamal (Egypt) ; Kagan McLeod (Canada)
Scott Jones-McMahon (UK) ; Luis Eduardo Leon (Colombia)
Miroslav Gerencer (Croatia) ; Sal Navarro (USA)
Chris Wahl (Australia) ; Michaël Olivier (France)
Aswini&Abani (India) ; Jourdenais Jonathan (Canada)
Tónió (Hungary) ; Bogar Chancay (Ecuador)
Jaime Ramirez (UsA) ; George Williams (UK)
Mark van Olmen (The Netherlands) Francisco Medina (Venezuela)
Ben Heine (Belgium) Alessandro Grandinetti (Italy)
Guaico (Colombia) ; Turcios (Spain)
Gergely Bacsa (Hungary) ; Daihaa Wyrd (Belgium)
Kris Barz (Brazil) ; Radu Raileanu (Romania)
Abdul Salim (India) ; Craig Rogalski (UK)
Fabricio Pontes (Brazil) ; Vincent Altamore (USA)
Nicoleta Ionescu (Romania) Alexandru Ifrim (Romania)
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Ben by Other Artists

Ben Heine by Menekse, Turkish artist

Ben Heine by Bacsa, Hungarian artist.

Ben Heine by Zed, Croatian artist

Also this very nice poem my soulmate
Peter S. Quinn made for me:
.Through the Sweetness
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By Peter S. Quinn
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Through the sweetness of your smile
There is love in every beat
Doesn’t matter what is your style
In its inner most of treat
Feeling changes in what is real
Healing time close and near
You are everything that I did feel
Through emotions they did steer

Inside aching from the changes
Of pretending not to care
Tomorrow an opportunity rearranges
Of all clearances be aware
Time is precious through our waking
With so much to do and like
Never get enough in your making
When fate your beat will strike

Love is climbing through the sky
Every morning when you awake
From the low you will reach on high
With something better in the stake
Open wide like the opening books
You will find what you are looking for
In their prospects and their outlooks
In their layers and fresh metaphor

Through the sweetness of your smile
There is love in every beat
Doesn’t matter what is your style
In its inner most of treat
From the freshness of your inside
Where love pages open up wide
And your feelings are forever a guide
Through the days your emotions glide

You are love to find and give
With the dreams that go on by
Every waking up to again relive
In your realization out and try
Through moments that haven’t had enough
In their search and dialogue feel
When they start to become rough
In your hours that are for real

Love is climbing through the sky
Every morning when you awake
From the low you will reach on high
With something better in the stake
You are love with day and night
Turning on in the set off morning
Everything that the day shall light
Through its ways and in its yearning

Through the sweetness of your smile
There is love in every beat
Doesn’t matter what is your style
In its inner most of treat
Of coming hours and in their go
So much is still there to be seen
Anything that our differences know
And still lies there in between
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Peter also made this nice melody
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Thank you all!

Culture Festival
in Ravenna

From the 30th of May
till the 7th of June
in Ravenna, Italy

Visit the official blog reporting
this important event

"Art Brussels"
Contemporary Art Fair
Photo Report

"Artbrussels" is a contemporary art fair happening every year in Belgium. I was there for the 27th edition and made this little photo report. Considering the huge amount of artworks that were exhibited, this represents only a little insight of what I saw. For more information on the exhibitors and artists, please visit Artbrussels' official site: www.artbrussels.be

Every year in April, Artbrussels opens its doors and welcomes more than 30 000 professionals, collectors and art lovers from all over the world. Artbrussels is the European platform for upcoming talents in the field of contemporary art and focuses as well on strong established galleries representing a selection of their highest-quality paintings, sculptures, photography, video and installations.

Artbrussels attracts art enthusiasts, including a considerable number of art collectors, critics, journalists, curators and other decision makers; one in five visitors comes from outside Belgium. A VIP Privilege programme welcomes over 300 collectors from throughout the world, treating them to free overnight accommodation and a stimulating off-programme.

Artbrussels offers a strong selection of 172 galleries, nominated in accordance with a rigorous quality-based selection procedure. The international selection committee places particular emphasis on the work of young creatives in contemporary art. The fair has a most international profile, with 80% of its participants coming from over 20 countries.

The major part of the fair is dedicated to numerous established art galleries with both international profiles and programmes.

By Barry Deutsch

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Reading a post on “Positive Liberty” from back in August, I came across this comment from D. A. Ridgely:

And okay, so we’ll always have people writing bad poetry whether it is copyrighted or not. For the most part, copyright of bad poetry at least could be said to do no harm. The world does not suffer by my refusing to share my high school written poetry with it.

But the world does suffer if real works of good art go uncreated because self-interested artists decide there’s just no point in doing art, better to go get that MBA.

On another blog, Jim Glass wrote:

Say that without copyright you came up with a great, clever cartoon and put it on your web site. What would prevent the scouts from Disney or Fox from just taking it as their own, putting $1 million behind it, making $100 million, and saying screw you. Would you go on to make another cartoon then?

Defenders of our intellectual property system frequently bring this question up: Without intellectual property (in the form of copyrights and trademarks), what incentive will artists have to produce art?

I’m a cartoonist (you can see my cartoons here and here, if you’re curious), and the only art form I know a lot about is cartooning. Most cartoonists are big fans of intellectual property, and get hysterical if we believe copyright is threatened. But copyright and trademark, as they exist in the US, have been a mixed blessing for some of the best American cartoonists.

The problem is, once we have a system of law which says “only entity A can publish stories about such-and-such characters,” then it’s possible for the right of a creator to sell stories about her characters to be taken away. This has, in fact, been the rule for most of comics history. Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, didn’t own Superman – and, decades later, found themselves penniless and legally forbidden from selling comics featuring their most valuable creation.

Jack Kirby is the most commercially important creator in the history of American comic books. Kirby created or co-created Iron Man, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, Captain America, Thor, and The X-Men, among others. Collectively, Kirby’s creations are intellectual property worth billions, providing huge profits (and thousands of jobs) not only in comics but also on TV, in movies, and in toys.

But during Kirby’s commercial peak, in the early days of Marvel Comics, Kirby was often unhappy with his pay and with his rights as a creator. Furthermore, Marvel had a “gentleman’s agreement” with DC not to poach artists from each other, and no other comic book company had a stable of valuable superhero properties to hire Kirby to draw. As a result, Kirby’s pay wasn’t in line with the worth of his work.

Kirby didn’t stop working — how could he? He had a family to support. Plus, by all accounts, Kirby loved creating comics. But what Kirby did, according to Mark Evanier’s biography of Kirby, is stop creating new characters for Marvel. Instead, when Kirby thought of a new idea, he’d write it down on a scrap of paper and put the paper aside. Many of those papers got lost.

Eventually, Kirby was hired by DC comics, and he went on to create some powerful work. But DC rarely gave Kirby the support he needed (they even went so far as to have another artist redraw Kirby’s Superman faces, since Kirby’s faces didn’t look like DC’s then-existing house style). Even though his work remained artistically good, Kirby never again hit the same peak commercially, and his pay was still lousy. As soon as Kirby found work outside of comics — creating character sheets for Saturday morning animations — Kirby quit comics.

If the purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage the best artists to create as much of their best work as possible, then IP law failed Jack Kirby. Kirby’s interests weren’t protected. The value of his work made it essential to Marvel Comics to legally divorce Kirby from his creations (they even refused to return his original artwork for years). The fact that any character he made up, he would have been giving up the right to control, encouraged Kirby to withhold characters during his most fertile creative period — ideas that might have been worth millions.

Well, you may say, that’s Kirby’s fault for selling the copyright to his work, rather than holding on to ownership. But suppose Kirby had refused to work with Marvel Comics. Who would that have helped? The world would most likely not have had the X-Men, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, and many other Kirby creations. Again, IP law would have failed to encourage Kirby to create as much as he could create.

Probably if Jack Kirby were here, he would disagree with me. But I think Kirby would have been better off if it hadn’t been legally possible for Marvel Comics to own the exclusive right to publish the characters Jack Kirby created.

Suppose that instead of our current system, we had a system of compulsory licensing for fictional characters. What this means is that anyone could write or draw any fictional character they like — but if they aren’t the original creator, then they are legally obliged to pay the creator a royalty for use of their work.

So to return to Jack Kirby’s case. Yes, certainly, Kirby would have been pissed off because people were using his characters in ways he didn’t like — but that was frequently the case anyway. (For example, Kirby hated what Stan Lee did with the Silver Surfer character). The difference is, Kirby would have had no motive to withhold characters during his most commercially valuable period, because he wouldn’t have been giving those characters away forever by drawing them.

It’s also likely that Kirby would have been more successful at enticing another publisher to hire him, if Kirby could have offered not just his own services, but his own services on his hit creation The Fantastic Four. That, in turn, might have forced Marvel comics to pay Kirby what Kirby was worth, in order to keep Kirby from moving to another company.

The down side of this is, Kirby might have found himself in the position of competing against another creator’s version of The Fantastic Four. But would this be such a terrible outcome?

1) Kirby might have been better off being able to create The Fantastic Four, and competing with another version of the same characters, than he was in reality — in which, for his entire post-Marvel career, it would have been illegal for Kirby to create a Fantastic Four comic.

2) Kirby would have welcomed being paid for all the times that lesser creators used his creations in their work. This would have provided Kirby with an incentive to keep on creating new characters, rather than our current system, which motivated Kirby to withhold new characters.

3) Comic book consumers would be better off if publishers had to compete to produce the best Fantastic Four comic. This, in turn, would have raised Kirby’s value to his employers.

When I bring this topic up in conversation, I am inevitably asked how I’d feel if someone other than me started making up their own comics about Mirka, the protagonist of my comic book “Hereville.” Woudln’t that make me furious?

I don’t think it would. I think that my version of Mirka — my particular vision — is what makes “Hereville” worth reading (if it is worth reading). If our laws were set up for it, I’d be happy to compete with other creators, to see who’d produce a Mirka that readers want to read. In the end, I think that the best work sometimes has a competitive advantage, and will tend to be remembered most by readers.

And if someone else ends up having a hit best-seller based on my characters — well, at least I’d get royalties. But I might get more than that, because sales of character-based fiction are not a zero-sum game.

For instance, when popular movies are made of comic book characters, sales of that comic book go up. Suppose Joan draws a best-selling ExampleLass comic. That could easily cause the sales of David’s competing ExampleLass comic to go up, because interest in the character is increasing. If David is the creator of ExampleLass, then he’d benefit twice — once in increased sales of his own comic, and then again when Joan pays David royalties.

I’m sure that compulsory licensing would have problems. But so does any imaginable system. The real question is, might compulsory licensing be better than our current system? For many of the best creators, such as Jack Kirby, I think the answer might be “yes.” (Source: theartofthepossible.net)
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A Cartoon Becomes
a Painting...
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[A+Cartoon+Becomes+a+6m+wide+Painting+(Ben+Heine+-+Guillermo+Soria).jpg]

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I was recently contacted by Guillermo Soria, an Argentinian artist, who organized a workshop in Barcelona (Spain) which purpose was to create art against war. He and his teamwork realized a spray painting (about 2m high, 6m wide) based on one of my previous drawings. The result is quite astounding and so powerful. Many thanks and congratulations to the painting's authors.

Also check out the creations of the workshop's other organizer, the Colombian Cecilia Zamudio

Stars - Portraits

Click on image above
to see my new gallery
of famous people on
Stars-Portraits
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Warm thanks to
Camille Le Roux
for inviting me !
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