Archive for the ‘Portraits/People’ Category
Alia Penner
Above: Tim Groen: Alia Penner, New York
What Yayoi Kusama is to polka dots, Alia Penner is to multicolor anything. Not to oversimplify her talent, but everything she touches turns to rainbows. Or stripes or concentric squares or whatever else fits the surface.
In the time I’ve know her, Alia has painted on an old schoolbus as a background for an H&M campaign, created a teenage-girl’s-bedroom-set for a Vans event, flown to Paris to help create an installation at Colette, and designed a one-night environment at the Standard Hotel in LA (where she lives). Her graphic design is uniquely hers; a mixture of Peter Blake-meets-Haight Ashbury with beautiful, friendly hand type. Her non-commissioned art is currently (literally) going through a growth spurt: “It’s getting bigger and more abstract,” she explains, “And hopefully at some point I can fill up an entire room. No, make that a whole house.“
You know how, sometimes, when you’ve seen a really great movie, you keep thinking about it for a couple of days after the fact? That’s what happened to me when Alia walked in on the day I took her portrait.
CLICK FOR COMPLETE INTERVIEW
Eléonore Hendricks
Jacqueline Hassink
Bas Kosters
Scooter LaForge
Above: Tim Groen: Scooter LaForge, New York
Above: Tim Groen: Scooter LaForge, New York
Scooter LaForge, Artist
We all know that sex sells mascara, tabloids, cars, music, and hotels. That it sells art too, is something Scooter LaForge can tell you from experience.
Giant erections live happily with cuddly Little-Golden-Books-creatures, in a world that’s dark yet comical, figurative yet abstract, muddy yet bright. Scooter LaForge, painter/sculptor, is a man of dichotomies. He’s modest and soft-spoken in person, but certainly not too shy to pose for risqué photographs which find their way into the world through one of his X-rated tumblr blogs. Scooter’s studio is around the corner from me; in the midst of oil paint fumes, and surrounded by some canvases that had yet to find their way online, we talked.
CLICK FOR FULL INTERVIEW
Koos van den Akker
Above: Tim Groen: Koos van den Akker, New York
Koos van den Akker, Designer
“This is my life’” says Koos. “Could I have made more money? Absolutely. But that would have happened at the expense of what I wanted.” What Koos wanted was to travel, to be around glamour, and have an all-round fabulous life. Talking to Koos is fun; he curses like a sailor and, being in his early 70’s now, he has no patience for false modesty—which I love.
As a handsome gay young man in New York in the 1970’s, Koos had the right age, in the right place, at the right time. Not everyone got what he was doing, but once Koos set up shop, it didn’t take long for the celebrities (of the caliber he obsessed on as a kid) to take note. When times changed business sizzled out a bit, but within two decades a new generation of fashion designers, including Marc Jacobs and Nicholas Ghesquiere, rediscovered Koos and cited him as a major source of inspiration. There is so much to talk about with Koos that I feel like I’m leaving too much out, like the celebrities, or the amazing apartments he has lived in in New York. Or how much fun Koos has had with the love of his life. Recapping seven decades in less then 2000 words just isn’t feasible; here are some of the things we did talk about.
CLICK FOR FULL INTERVIEW
Charlotte Dumas
Above: Tim Groen: Charlotte Dumas, New York
Ask Dutch photographer Charlotte Dumas about her preference for animal portraiture and she’ll turn as enigmatic as the Scandinavian wolves she spent an entire year photographing. “It was an intuitive development,” she explains at one point.
The Amsterdam-based photographer and her American husband were in New York for half a week, to attend the opening reception for her solo show, Repose, at Julie Saul Gallery.
CLICK FOR FULL INTERVIEW
David van der Leer
Above: Tim Groen: David van der Leer, New York
David van der Leer, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, Guggenheim Museum
David van der Leer initially never pictured himself living in New York –he thought it would be London—but he’s here alright. And now that he is, this Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design is changing the way we look at architecture and design exhibitions. Thanks to David, you can’t even really call them exhibitions anymore, because he is blurring the very definition of that word by creating events that take place outside of museum walls. Events which may not even be about presenting the audience with anything tangible.
CLICK FOR FULL INTERVIEW
Will Lewis
Above: Tim Groen: Will Lewis, New York, 2010
“Shaving didn’t become the norm in the Western world until the 1920’s”, Will Lewis says, to make the point that “obviously the suit was predominantly worn by men with beards.” We’re discussing the somewhat square and ethnocentric reaction to his presence in a certain popular American catalog. “…Full beards on men in fashion shows just make us giggle,” Cathy Horyn recently wrote in The New York Times, another reference to a Will Lewis appearance; this time on the Jean Paul Gaultier runway.
CLICK FOR FULL INTERVIEW
Adam Cvijanovic
Above: Tim Groen: Adam Cvijanovic, New York 2010
Adam Cvijanovic, Artist