art shows & news

A diptych by Levan Kakabadze

Hydrogen, by Schühle Lewis, which Lewis says is good for Physicists and Scientists and bad for Creationists. The image is based off of a quote by Edward R. Harrison, which can be found here.

Artist Morgan Blair is all about bright colors and abstract shapes. Her website is dizzying, but a lot of her pieces intersperse geometric shapes with well-drawn figures, and it is these that are most interesting. See below.

Recoat’s Good Wives And Warriors.

Caitlin Hackett combines beauty with decay in this amazingly illustrated Vulpes Masquerade.

Digital collage by Katty Bouthier that is simple but otherworldly.

A drawing by Chris Scarborough that turns this deer into quite a mound of shapes.

Yesterday, someone clued me into Broken Picture Telephone, and I think it’s now my new favorite website. Remember playing Telephone as a kid? Remember how convoluted simple ideas got? Now imagine Telephone in visual form. Now imagine Telephone in visual DIGITAL form, and you have Broken Picture Telephone. Nothing short of genius. See an example below that made me literally laugh out loud. Many more gems where this came from. Go sign up and play!

www.brokenpicturetelephone.com

Greg Ferris is inspired by machines, architecture, and perhaps the mystical. Combine those things, and you get a shiny new .gif-fy take on what all those things might look like when worked together. Here’s what Ferris had to say about this piece:

“This particular work sprouted out of conversations with a local sea-faring veteran I often encounter during my daily routine. I’m a young man, and he has more than a few lifetimes on me… perhaps save this insight as the foundation for visual dialogue.

All the elements are piled about my studio: the wood blocks photocopied, angular rainbow cut outs, white-out, and the final collage hangs. I put it into the computer, then realized how much more it would convey as a 2 frame .gif animation. Like a circulating perspective, through the sextant? Macro/micro conditions? Not the most conventional medium, but undeniable I think.”

gregferris.info

UK-based illustrator (and former Redefine cover designer) Andrew Wheatley now has some pretty cool items available for sale through Envelop, a site that allows artists and designers to put their works on a wide array of cotton products (largely household items, for the domesticated art freak). Wheatley’s items include his almost Alice-in-Wonderland-like Tea Party Tote Bag and his amusingly political Love And Hate Apron, both of which make boring items completely desirable with their off-kilter designs.

www.andrewwheatley.co.uk
www.envelop.eu
www.envelop.eu/shop/articles/details/p/tea-party-2
www.envelop.eu/shop/articles/details/p/love-and-hate

Imagekind has just written up a blog post featuring 31 pieces from their various members who do photo manipulation. Most are great, a couple are not so great, and way too many seem to play off René Magritte.. and umbrellas! Why so many umbrellas?

Above, a piece by Vanessa Ho, which is available for purchase here. It would certainly be interesting to set this piece upon a textured floral background such as the one in the piece itself, wouldn’t it? I can’t say I feel much other than annoyance for her artist statement on the subject, though, but maybe it’ll speak to you.

“Me looking at me. Me on the wall, me in the fiery red room, me out in the cool blue room. Which is real? All is real, none is real. Imagination. That is real.”

www.imagekind.com

Talk about an awesome idea for a website, and a perfect thing art/music hybrid project for Redefine to cover: PAINTMYALBUM.NET!

Diarmuid and Anthony, who have a passion (if one can call it that) for redoing classic album covers using Microsoft Paint, are now challenging you to help them reach their goal of redoing 2,000 covers by December 23rd, 2009. The album covers range from completely ridiculous (such as Michael Jackson’s Bad, above) to fairly impressive (such as a rendition of a Flight of the Concords’ disc). Art styles of all types are absolutely welcome, and this duo has their eyes on the prize. Be a good person. Help them fulfill their completely juvenile yet fantastic dream.

Send your album covers to paintmyalbum@gmail.com!

www.paintmyalbum.net

Every once in a while, I get really excited about a new artist, and Dennis Zimmermann is one who has definitely sparked my interest as of late. Despite the fact that he’s been holed up on the generally fine art, mom and pop-friendly art Whidbey Island for the past three years, it’s about time to get Zimmermann’s work to the larger cities. He doesn’t seem to have one style, but does have the unique ability to do it all, from graphic design and hand-drawn works to computer rendered, multi-layered beauties. Ultra Libre VII, shown above, features inkjet projections onto vellum paper, which can be a frustrating task for those of us who have ever worked with vellum. But what’s even more interesting is Zimmermann’s ability to crank computer-created works out into formats that can be accentuated by or even mistaken for a more hands-on approach.

Below is one of his newer pieces, on display now at the goforaloop Gallery in San Francisco.

zimmermannstudio.blogspot.com
www.goforaloop.com

If you’re like me, you absolutely love hand-drawn and hand-written fonts. If you’re like me, you also recognize the fact that eventually all hand-drawn fonts look the same, or they’re all too simple, or they’re lacking the right character sets for them to be used in all situations.

Thankfully, the folks over at The Organic Type now have twenty brand new, totally… well, organic… fonts for you to use in all of your design pieces. Get rid of the redundancy of free handwritten fonts and embrace these diverse and stylish options.

www.theorganictype.com

Living in the Pacific Northwest, one becomes used to rain and gloom, and after a while, it’s just a part of life and seasonal disorders seem nonexistent. Puddletown at Compound Gallery will feature artists’ takes on rain from Thursday, December 4th, 2008 (First Thursday) through December 24th, 2008. Here are some notable artists from this opening:

Robert Fayze Pellicer seems to combine equal parts surrealism, nature, and spirituality in his works, such as in this piece, entitled Food Web.

Timothy Karpinski must be the type who pays attention to details. Graphic, acrylic, and hand-sewn papers join forces in the elegant I Dream of the Forest.

Colors bleed, swirl, and transform to join forces with unpredictable shapes in Max Kauffman’s The Block Is Hot.

Elliott Wall makes the simple female form intoxicatingly haunting and fascinating with ease, such as in this piece, Moth.

In the case of Eli Effenberger and this piece, Over The Rainbow, digital paints are just as good as the real thing.

Eatcho seems to prefer painting and drawing on recycled papers and wood panels, and for good reason. His illustrations and exceptional compositions exclusively hold their own, with no need for detailed backgrounds.

Sophie Franz, shown in the post below, will also be showing her illustrations and drawings at this group show.

Of Montreal is a band that has seen success as the result of good music (arguable), but also good marketing (possibly also arguable, but not as much).

First, their music video for “Wraith Pinned To The Mist And Other Games,” featuring cutsy-wootsy pop art animation, garnered wide attention from the web nerds. Then, the same song was used, slightly altered, for a obnoxious yet hypnotic Outback Steakhouse commercial.

And now comes of Montreal’s wonderful new shenanigan for their new album, Skeletal Lamping… Blik Surface Graphics inspired by the album artwork!!

A true of Montreal fan benefits hugely from this offer, as purchasing one $40 set also gives a code to download the whole album digitally. So, after doing the math, if each song is purchased at $0.99 apiece digitally and there are 15 songs, the graphics pretty much only cost $25. Which is not bad at all, especially when one considers that these are these are extremely intricate packages with many pieces.

The David Barnes package (click here to view) has 105 movable and reusable pieces, and the Gemini Tactics package (click here to view has 55 movable and reusable pieces.

Compare that to something like this Lacy Sunday package by Jan Habraken, which only comes with 4 colors in three packages, and you REALLY get an idea of what a good deal this is. If you’re an of Montreal fan.

Or maybe you just like their graphics and want to sell the code for the album download.