Traver Dodorye making a killing in the art industry

Lately Traver Dodorye has been seriously creating some pieces that have shown his growth in the art industry. Being versatile is something he has been working on. He plans on going into sculptures sometimes soon as well. Traver speaks on how he has been studying a lot of successful artists and seeing how he can embed some of their techniques into his art work to make him a better artist. Above is some of his most recent works and they seem to be quite unique.

CYRCLE. “Struggle of Nations” Mural @ Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Puerto Rico

Never short of an escapade to some of the world’s most exciting destinations, LA art collective CYRCLE. recently ventured to Puerto Rico to paint at the fifth edition of the Santurce Es Ley Street Art Festival. Continuing their trademark “OVERTHRONE” theme — which has left its mark across the world this past year — the duo quickly worked a mural dubbed “Struggle of Nations.” Curated by JustKids and produced by c787studios, the mural took to the side of Contemporary Art Museum of Puerto Rico and features illustrations of cowboys and Indians entwined in one colorful rendition. Check our recap images here and stay updated with CYRCLE.’s work via their Instagram.

Smile we are Married by Traver Dodorye

                                                    Drawing  by artist Traver Dodorye

Traver Dodorye take South Florida with Abstract

                                         "I Posted this on Fort Lauderdale beach for almost two days and they probably trashed it I still go hard and don't lose sleep I did it as a marketing project. It's crazy how important location is but I know if it was in NYC it most likely would still be there smh . Now next on agenda"                          

George Condo: interview

Before meeting him, I’d long been unsure what to make of George Condo, with his fearsome, snarling canvases and glaring bug-eyed cartoon characters. On the one hand, his work can be unremittingly ugly and sometimes just plain bad; on the other, there are moments of painterly flair and surreal beauty, when I can’t seem to drag my eyes away from a grinning monster or some dreamy clouds in the background.
I needed to understand why so many younger artists were fans of the 50-year-old’s work – admirers include American artists John Currin and Dana Schutz as well as Glenn Brown and the Chapman Brothers over here, all of whom owe something to Condo’s crazy cast of critters that are inappropriately dripping in art history. I also had to know whether his lurid past spent hanging out with Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac somehow allowed him to bypass the rocky road to art-world acceptance or whether he had truly earned his place near the top of the tree of influence.

‘Being a young artist in the early ’80s was an uphill battle. There was a lot of pressure to work big – like Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel and David Salle – but a signature style was something I rebelled against.’ After the high times of New York, Condo switched to Paris, where he learnt the traditions of painting first-hand by copying Raphaels in the Louvre: ‘It brought me back to figure painting, which wasn’t fashionable at the time.’ He would set up and paint on the coffee-table in his hotel with a glass of wine: ‘In one place, I would come back every day and find the curtains drawn, and the maid said “We didn’t want to get the sunlight on the canvases.” In New York, they would just throw them out the window.’
Long after his friends Haring and Basquiat’s graffiti-tinged, signature styles burned out, Condo returned to New York, and has been applying the lost arts of the Old Masters to his toothy, pin-headed creations ever since.
Among the bogeymen in Condo’s latest London show (the clown-faced actor with Hamlet’s dagger stuck painfully in the square of his back, a drunk uncle with protruding phallus, the reclining but angrily upright women throwing rocks or sporting wooden legs) is something of a departure for him: a self-portrait. This ‘Smiling Sea Captain’ work refers specifically to the media reaction surrounding his last London visit when he painted a portrait of HM the Queen to hang in the Wrong Gallery at Tate Modern. Condo claims the picture ‘has the ability to make you smile, which she seems to have in real life’, but it was met with all sorts of outraged Daily Mail headlines such as ‘Queen Portrayed As Toothless Cabbage Patch Doll’.
‘Despite the harpoon through his chest, and this carrot dangling in front of him,’ says Condo of his self-portrait alter ego, ‘and against all odds, the sea captain is still smiling.’ Although the papers insinuated otherwise, Condo harbours no ill will towards the royal family, adding ‘I came to the conclusion that Prince Charles should run for President – we’d be better off.’
Mostly his subject matter is imagined, and in the early ’90s Condo began to call his creations ‘Pod people’ after reading about Aldous Huxley’s antipodal beings in ‘The Doors of Perception’; peripheral but independent entities that he believed lived in our brains and could only surface or be tapped into through the language of art (or perhaps mescaline). All of these ‘Pods’ – including the Queen – wear an expression that ‘goes between a scream and a smile,’ says Condo, ‘that reflects simultaneous emotions or conversations with the conflicting voices in your head.’ This ‘psychological cubism’, as he calls it, parallels our ability to channel-hop through increasingly fractured visual information and ‘exploits our own imperfections – the private, off-moments or unseen aspects of humanity – that often give way to some of painting’s most beautiful moments’.
The Surrealist dictum that ‘beauty will be convulsive or not all’ is perhaps the best way to approach Condo’s nerve-jangling work because, he says, ‘I like people to walk into one of my exhibitions and say “What happened?” ’ So, as with many previous interviews with artists, I left more confused than when I went in, but those damned clown Pods haven’t stopped following me yet.
George Condo is at Simon Lee Gallery February 7-April 21. 

Studio 57 update from Traver Dodorye

Recent works done by the abstract expressionist from Miami Florida. Traver Dodorye is an emerging artist and is one of a kind.

'The Most Beautiful Drawing Ever': 'Pegasus' (1987) by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Pegasus" (1987) has always intimidated me.
It was usually one of the last works I showed students when I taught Basquiat, and I never said much about it. Its massive size, allover writing and symbols, and almost total lack of negative space overwhelmed me.

It also felt like standing face-to-face with sadness and death. Basquiat made "Pegasus" during the last period of his life, when his use of heroin was increasing and he was devastated by the recent death of Andy Warhol. He was also isolating himself and feeling like he had no one he could talk to. And then there is the work itself. The black acrylic paint emerges like impending doom from the top right and the writing and symbols feel obsessive.

Yet whenever I think about Basquiat's work, it's usually "Pegasus" (and "Skull," 1981) which come to mind. So for the second entry of this series I thought I'd take a second look at this work to see what other things I could say about it. A few observations are below:
#1
I know I've said above that this work is a drawing but it's important to remember, since its size (7 x 7 ft.) suggests it's a painting and it's mounted to canvas. And the whole thing is mostly executed in graphite. (He also used oil stick, acrylic and colored pencil.)
#2
Alongside other Basquiat works, "Pegasus" has entered the world of mainstream fashion. Probably because of its allover surface it's a good fit for accessories and clothes. For example, you can buy a watch or a pair of shoes with Pegasus on them.
#3
"It's as if [Basquiat] were dripping letters," the art historian Robert Farris Thompson once wrote. One might argue that the written word and Basquiat's specific style of writing were the most important aspects of his work. (And Pegasus could be one of the most important examples of how the written word dominated his work.) Have we done enough to understand Basquiat's grasp of writing, his vocabulary and his script?
#4
Below are some of the words most often used in this work; many of them could be seen to reflect his emotions at the time: PEGASUS (In Greek mythology, Pegasus is the winged horse birthed from the blood of Medusa when Perseus beheaded her. It's become a symbol of fame and wisdom and is characteristically seen among the Muses. Also, in one of Basquiat's collaborative paintings with Andy Warhol, Warhol painted the image of Pegasus, which was then the Mobil logo.)
BROKEN WING
HEART AS ARENA
UNIT SHIFT
EROICA (Beethoven's Third Symphony)
NOTHING TO BE GAINED HERE
SCHWARZ (German for black. It appears 47 times in this work.)
#5
The major source for the diagrams and symbols used in this work was Henry Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook (1972). Among the symbols taken from Dreyfuss's book were so-called "hobo signs," used by homeless people during the Depression. Such symbols marked a house where people could receive food or indicate unfriendly neighborhoods. This is where Basquiat found the phrase "nothing to be gained here." Basquiat also used Dreyfuss's diagrams for a rotary or centrifugal pump (a circle with a line shooting out from the top right with a "G" at the end); a tape recorder and a loudspeaker--again, among various others.
#6
Looking at this work, you might conclude there is a possible circular path to Basquiat's thinking. You could think of him writing out a major theme of the work (i.e. "PEGASUS"), then drawing some diagrams from the Dreyfuss book and then coming back to "PEGASUS," and then moving back to the diagrams again. One might compare his process to the path of anxious thoughts or stream-of-consciousness thinking. Critics often see Basquiat's work as the visual counterpart to Jazz and Hip Hop. So one also might see the rhythm behind his writing as influenced by such music.
#7
Basquiat worked on "Pegasus" while he was in-between paintings and didn't know exactly what to work on next. Dealer Anina Nosei has commented that she witnessedPegasus's completion at his studio. She said Basquiat worked on the upper section as he talked to her. Then, she said, he "got bored and filled up the black" and it was done. Nosei has called Pegasus "the most beautiful drawing ever."