102-Politics and art, Do current events affect your artwork?

Today's show topic is Politics and Art. How do current events and politics affect your artwork? Are there topics you feel are too controversial to address in your art? What is the role of art in creating discussion around  current issues? Is there a certain style or genre you feel lends itself more to political work? What kind of positive or negative fall out has resulted from addressing a hot topic in your work?

Guest host Matt Sesow whose current show "Trickle Down" at Access Gallery is a nod to the buzzwords and posturing Matt sees everyday from his studio in Washington DC. Each day in July Matt takes a headline from the Washington Post and paints an entire painting based on the headline. Matt will help facilitate the discussion and touch on his own experiences.

"While some of his images might be considered brutal or brutish in the same way as, say, Francis Bacon, they are only real life with the beauty secrets stripped away, the cover girl make-up stuffed back into society's compacts. They are the skeletons, out of the closet, with the raw meat still attached. Sesow may very well be the most important artist working today. His paintings are explosions of color. Punk rock energy paired with the symbolism of alienation dressed in the finery of a rainbow. As he says, he is trying to create something that is funny, political and chaotic. In that quest he has been successful on a grand scale. "
-- (Ron Taylor, Demon Beach Records, November 2005)

AnnetteColemanArtist.com
Matt Sesow, Seso.com
SuzanneFrazier.com
Jim Caldwell, ArtworkNetwork.com

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