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Why do we often assume that art is not functional?  On the other hand, why do we rarely view the purely functional as a work of art?  Bayview artist Ian McDonald delves directly into the world of form and function in his bright and austere studio.  With ceramics as a current focus, McDonald also works with wood, textiles and various other materials that allow for direct manipulation.  When asked about his source of inspiration, McDonald revealed that it is the begun process of work itself that serves as his guide on where to go next.

Read an interesting interview and see more images of his beautiful artwork here.

Alvaro Sotomayor is an Amsterdam based Painter/Ad man who has spent the last decade feverishly painting portraits of bulls. Originally from Spain, he is passionately opposed to the cruelty of bullfighting and brings a vivid street-at look to his portraits of the 69 bulls that have succeeded in killing a Matador in recorded bullfighting history. Alvaro calls these bulls “heroes” and his studio is filled with their faces.

To read the full post, see images and video from his studio click here.

Samira Yamin’s work deals primarily with the narrativization and representation of war through an interrogation of documentary war photography. Recently she was a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, and while there she was working on two bodies of work: Geometries, a series in which she meticulously hand-cuts Islamic sacred geometries onto TIME Magazine articles about current wars in the Middle East; and a series of short stories called Charlie the repeatedly and obsessively narrate a single photograph of two soldiers dragging a dead Iraqi face-down in the dirt. She’s driven by a pressing necessity to confront the imagery of wartime photojournalism and its relationship to our systems of acquiring and distributing knowledge. Her engagement with this material is two-fold: analytical yet teeming with emotion.

To read the full post and see images from her studio click here.

Photo courtesy of Klea McKenna

Val Britton makes large collaged works on paper that draw on the language of maps. She began making this body of work as a way to connect with her father, a truck driver who drove eighteen-wheelers across the country; he died when she was a teenager. Based on road maps of the United States, routes her father often traveled, and an invented conglomeration, mutation, and fragmentation of those passageways, her works on paper are abstractions of loss and longing.

To read the full post and see images from her studio click here.

Photo courtesy of Klea McKenna