Post 8- Tomaselli

This is a piece (Expulsion) by Fred Tomaselli that is 84 x 120 inches. Fred Tomaselli seems to use a base technique for all of his pieces, usually combining a photo collage of images with paint and layered in resin. He had made other types of art, like his newspaper influenced pieces, but the majority of his work is photo collage and resin. This particular piece incorporates leaves, pills, insects, and acrylic. Technically, I didn't find this artist but his name was in a list of artists I could use in my compare and contrast essay for Art History. I didn't use this piece in that essay just so I could talk about it here in the blog. Everything seems to radiate out of that little vortex in the upper left hand corner of the piece. That vortex seems to be throwing out all sorts of debris like flowers, smiles, hands butterflies and even a couple of unidentified objects. The theme, though, seems to be that the vortex is shooting this stuff out as it shoots out Adam and Eve, or at least a man and a woman. All this goodness, smiles and butterflies, and flowers, seems to be lost to these two people getting expelled. The first thing I did when I saw this piece was say "Oh, hey this looks SUPER familiar." Of course that is because it IS super familiar. The figures walking away are almost identical to Masaccio's Expulsion of Adam and Eve which we looked at in Art History. What I like about how Tomaselli did his figures was that they were stripped of their flesh. That, to me, is almost making them more human. By comparing these two pieces, you can see that the angel in Massacio's piece is probably the vortex of goodness in Tomaselli's piece. I find it amazing that current artists can look back to earlier art, make their own interpretation of it, and then create such a beautiful unique piece of art.