I was recently looking through one of my collections of inspiring artists and artworks. Once again immersed in a few delicious moments of wonder at all the things humans think up and make, I spent some time thinking about how grateful I am for the countless contemporary creative visions we can experience with just a few clicks of a button. It’s remarkable.

From my earliest art crushes to my life-long creative love affairs, looking at my favorite artworks makes me dream and aspire and imagine and consider and question. As we ultimately only get to experience one particular life in our time on this planet,  I’m also fond of imagining if I were living a different creative life, which would I find inspiring (of course, looking from the outside and afar, I can completely make up what I think that life might be like). Here are a few artists that I like to think are romping with abandon through the vastness of life while completely rocking it out.

Antony Gormley and Spencer Tunick both work with combinations of the human form within natural environments and repeated pattern, but in very different ways, as you’ll see below.

Gormley’s simplified figures with exaggerated sections:

And his figures in nature:

In a different way of combining the human figure with environment, photographer Spencer Tunick creates massive installations involving large-scale photo shoots of multitudes of nude people in settings around the world.

The people and how Tunick arranges them creates patterns through the repeated shapes of the bodies.

This repetition of the human form in multitudes can be seen in some of Gormley’s sculptural installation works.

Sculptor Judy Fox was one of my very first contemporary art heroines. She initially burst onto the scene of my wow-o-meter with her life-sized, terra cotta sculptures of historical figures and storybook characters. The twist was that many were portrayed as children, before they became known to the world.

First: life-size, standing, fired clay figures – some on one foot? Yow! Technical wizardry.
Second: her no-holds-barred sensibilities of treading on cultural norms when necessary in the interest of content and story…yeah, fierce.
Third: Can we talk about reinvention? Just when you think you’ve seen enough to cogitate on for a very long time, you look again to find she’s making bulbous, luscious, sea-creature-esque forms that ooze with tactile sensuality, pairing them with human forms to create entirely new narratives. Mix all that with mastery of her medium and boom: Artist Powerhouse.

I didn’t intend to go here, but Fox’s fusion forms led me right down the path to another contemporary artist creating curiously bizarre combinations of human parts. Jonathan Payne’s “Fleshlettes” are at once beautiful in a very strange way, kind of icky, incredibly well done, disturbingly believable and somehow I just can’t look away.

To finish (for today anyway), one of my contemporary favs, Liu Xue’s work takes on a familiar and popular theme – the blending of human and animal – and wanders down his own magically curious path with it. Often blending whimsy and humor with a touch of melancholy, his works are startling, beautifully executed and, curiously, entirely believable.