09 Omen Magazine is a showcase for multi-medium International creativity. It is a visual online magazine that is a homage to Art and Fashion that may not be necessarily mainstream. It will be a hybrid of talent from up and coming to famous.The focus is on the image, not the buzz. Omen wants to explore and expose to the cyber world, all the amazing work that is off the commercial radar. www.theomenmag.com Cover Photo : Thomas Woodruff © 2010-2012 theOMENmag. All Rights Reserved. 09 Mário Correia - Graphic editor Marcus Leatherdale - Art Director / Art Editor Pedro Matos - Photo editor Jorge Serio - Fashion editor + Art Correspondents: Paul Bridgewater – NYC Amabel Barraclough – London Martin Belk – Paris / Glasgow Dan Bazuin – Toronto Patric Lehman – Toronto Jennifer Leskiw –Antwerp Anne McDonald – Prague Muga Miyahara –Tokyo Elizabeth Rogers – New Delhi Hector Ramsay - Florence Andrea Splisgar – Berlin Jorge Soccaras – Barcelona / NYC Arturo Toulanov - NYC Sheba Legend – NYC Jose Maria Bustos - Singapore + Fashion Correspondents: Michael Schmidt – Los Angeles Rebecca Weinberg – NYC Zuleika Ponsen - Paris + Literary Correspondent: Christina Oxenberg Mark Sink- Denver www.gallerysink.com Born in 1958, Sink’s photographic destiny was partly shaped by his family history. From a long family line of artists, Sink’s great-great-uncle was Samuel Finley Breese Morse, who is known as America’s “Father of Photography” and introduced the daguerreotype to this country in the 1850s. Sink’s great-grandfather was James L. Breese, a famous photographer who made waves in turn of the century New York. His mother is Denver painter Ann White and Sink’s father is a well known Denver architect. Sink says when he received his first Diana camera as a child, his future was clear. After art school, the 1980s found Sink in the heady boom days of the New York art scene, experimenting with plastic toy cameras, working professionally as both a commercial and fine art photographer, and hanging out in Andy Warhol’s famous Factory scene. In the early 1990s, Sink returned to his hometown of Denver, where he worked with early digital cameras and created a series of still life photographs inspired by Old Master Dutch paintings. The latter half of the decade brought Sink into museum administration, as he was co-founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and formed his own community based art center, Gallery Sink. Inspired by the pictorialist traditions of his great grandfather, Sink made traditional landscapes and cyanotypes, as well as camera-less photograms. Photograms are made by laying objects directly on photographic paper and exposing it to sunlight. With the closing of Gallery Sink, the artist returned to making photography full time in the new century. Sink embarked on a new series with his partner, Kristen Hatgi, using a 150 year old lens to create dreamy collodion wet plates with the technology of the 1860s. All of these chapters will be on view in the Gallery with techniques ranging from photo silkscreen, Polaroid’s, cyanotypes, silver prints, gravure, collodion wet plate and digital. Mark Sink Photographs with diverse techniques, eras and experiments come together under Sink’s unifying vision of beauty. “I am a gushy romantic,” Sink says. “The theme of this survey is to show my obsession and passion for capturing beauty.” Sink’s work is in numerous museum collections as well as gallery solo and group shows in the US, South America and Europe. He is currently represented by G. Ray Hawkins in California, Robin Rice in New York, and Rule Gallery in Denver. THOMAS WOODRUFF NYC THOMAS WOODRUFF Thomas Woodruff is a painter who always works in series. His visionary works have dealt with issues of health and wellness, emotional loss, and personal discovery. His themes often have esoteric underpinnings, archetypal formats, and hybrid visual vocabularies from history. He likens his work to “structures of contemplation.” Woodruff’s latest opus, The Four Temperament Variations, are not only an exploration of the archaic medical theory of the humors but are also a riff on the figurative painting genres of still life, portrait, landscape, and wildlife. Using his manically excessive pictorial mash-up of visual motifs, this series is a celebration of the emotive value of color, the storytelling potential of character and costume, and a contemporary revision of the enigmatic and arcane mysteries of our collective past. His tableaus have a slippery resonance and are mysterious yet plausible. By creating richly ornamented works, Woodruff rejects the modernist penchant for the withholding of pleasure and believes that lack of ornament is akin to a lack of adjectives in literature or a lack of seasoning in cooking. Yet, their “over the top” design serves the images; their intention is to transport and bring the viewer into a heightened sense of looking and reading the carefully constructed iconography. The artist is well aware that his paintings are more complex than most created today, and are not for the timid. His artistic heroes are on the fringe of art history and are often not included in the traditional surveys of world art. He has said he would “rather own an Ensor over a Picasso, a Pierro di Cosimo over a Botticelli, a Ferdinand Knopff over an Edward Manet, and a Gustave Moreau much more than a Paul Cezanne.” His belief in the idiosyncratic personal vision as the highest form of art making is apparent in his approach to making pictures. Woodruff’s process is simple: it is all made by hand; paint on linen, with no assistance. The Four Temperament Variations took three years to complete. Over the years, Thomas Woodruff has worked as an artist, illustrator, educator, and curator. He has designed works for theatre, dance, opera, and television, and has worked as a tattooist. He has been a chair at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for the past 12 years, and continues to inspire young artists with his paintings informed by his love of art history, story-telling, popular culture, and all things imagistic. His other series are: The Turning Heads (2008); Freak Parade (2000-2006); All Systems Go (1996- 1999); Apple Canon (1995-1997); and The Secret Charts (1995). Mr. Woodruff has had over thirty exhibitions in his thirty- year career and shows with P.P.O.W Gallery. His work is in public and museum collections all over the world. www.thomaswoodruff.com MUNSIF MOLU DUBAI TAJ MAHAL Robert Russell The first image I saw of a Robert Russell painting was on an iPhone, and it says quite a bit that even at such a reduced scale it proved immediately captivating. It was a portrait of the actress Jill Clayburgh elegantly dressed in black, standing demurely, almost awkwardly, against a slate gray background. The painting is just this side of monochromatic, the subject’s skin and hair rendered in the same muted pinks, her moist eyes tinged slightly blue. The unassuming repose of her face upon zooming in discloses something more. She looks as if she could be on the verge of tears, yet the restraint of her mouth says she will maintain for as long as necessary - the kind of expressive complexity that made Jill Clayburgh so startling on film. Inevitably, there dawns the existential reality that this is a woman facing her mortality. In the past, this theme might have utilized the depiction of a skull or some symbol of earthly vanity, the closest thing to that here being perhaps the diamond necklace she wears. In Russell’s painting, no accessory is required other than the viewer, whom Miss Clayburgh gazes at unflinchingly, and who in turn mirrors back her own mortality. That the portrait manages to convey all this is a tribute to both the actress and the artist, and Russell effects it with a fluid ease of brushwork – just enough paint and attention to light not to obscure the depth of his subject. Robert Russell painted Jill Clayburgh from a photograph he took of her two years before her death from the leukemia she had lived with for twenty. No doubt the knowledge of this makes the portrait especially poignant. Nonetheless, a heightened and complex self-awareness permeates much of Russell’s work, however deceptively simple the surface gesture, whatever the subject. Whether a close-up of a crying child, or a drove of tightly penned pigs, the fundament is always a deft use of paint and light. His rendering of flesh and human features invites comparison to Lucien Freud’s brushwork, if perhaps less frenetic, and it would seem predictable enough if Russell were to dedicate himself entirely to the human figure. But the point at which comparisons begin is precisely the point where Russell takes charge of them, steering them in an entirely new direction. In a rather startling thematic progression, he introduces a new level of complexity and wryness by turning his and the viewer’s gaze onto the subject of art itself. In Russell’s portrait of yet another famous actress, we are confronted with a tour de force of a different color. If we do not immediately recognize Scarlett Johansson, it is likely because her own identity is subsumed by her portrayal of Johannes Vermeer’s iconic “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (c. 1665) in Peter Webber’s eponymous film (2003). Having traded his muted palette for the richer hues of a Vermeer (in Technicolor), Russell deflects the viewer’s gaze back and forth via a mirrored hall of impersonations. The portrait’s subject is destabilized, its source and endpoint ironic ellipses. In its place, the viewer’s own contemplation of fame, perception and preconception - how they reciprocally inform and alter one another.