Posted by Vivian HuaJune 25, 2012
I’m not sure what it is about our nature that makes us constantly want to mutilate faces — and maybe that is just the simplest explanation for all of our recent zombie activity — but sometimes there’s just nothing more carnally fulfilling than running paper faces under an acid bath of collage, painting, mixed media, whatever. Brazilian artist
Lucas Simões burns photographic portraits, to give them such personality that their remains sometimes come across as grotesque three-headed beasts (
ausência series) and sometimes remind us of sparking memories of the past (
quem brinca com fogo series). It takes skills to draw such diversity from such a simple and carnal concept, and for it to evoke such a suprising range of emotions, including sadness, fear, and compassion.
ausencia Series
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Posted by Tessa HullsMay 24, 2012
Stacey Page takes found photographs and adorns their subjects with elaborate thread headdresses and masks. Delving into notions of ego and avatar, Page creates a seamless melding of antiquated strangers and vague, archetypical monsters that stare out at the viewer with some understated promise of wisdom and secrecy.
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Posted by Vivian HuaMay 21, 2012
“Love and light. Everything should be treated with the utmost respect and understanding.” - Arn Gyssels
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Posted by Vivian HuaMay 18, 2012
Russian photographer Stansislav Markov is the first to work with REDEFINE in an audio-visual experiment of highlighting the musical inspiration that strikes one’s soul just as powerfully as visual cues might.
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Posted by Vivian HuaMay 12, 2012
Art expertly captured in the most fleeting of moments. European artists Berndnaut Smilde and Ryan Hopkinson manufacture weather for some truly awesome temporary installations.
Berndnaut Smilde
Hanging high up in the skies above us, we often forget that clouds are real things made out of materials and circumstances that are very much present in our daily lives. In his Nimbus series, Netherlands artist Berndnaut Smilde regulates temperatures and moisture in rooms to trap cloudy bodies within their walls. Truly a rare and appreciated sight and concept. You can see more unconventional works of art on his website.
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Posted by Vivian HuaMay 9, 2012
Coinciding with bright spring threads come a fascination with brightly-colored, geometrically-minded embroidered works! In this post, we examine works from artists who painstakingly thread through paper to vastly different ends.
Shaun Kardinal
This year, Seattle’s Shaun Kardinal has taken a bold leap from minimally embroidered postcards to more involved pieces set upon multi-layered collages. By reconstituting rare pages from 1950s LIFE magazines, Kardinal explains what he calls “a long-time fascination with radial compositions and mandalas” in his Connotations. Expect a joint interview between him and Erin Frost within the month.
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Posted by Vivian HuaMay 6, 2012
The dream-like figure paintings of Norwegian artist
Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen have been so striking to me that the above image has been my Facebook profile picture for the past half year, at least. Uldalen’s blue-tinged characters may be shaded like ghostly apparitions or bloodlet cadavers, but the weightlessness and lightness of spirit they possess seem to define serenity, even as they are being whisked off of buildings and freefalling in impossible positions.
As Uldalen was born only in 1986, it seems fair to say that these oil paintings are only the beginnings of a whimsical artistic career.
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Posted by Vivian HuaMay 1, 2012
VOLCANIC REMNANT, MAELIFELLSANDUR, ICELAND
Bright green moss has colonized a hill in the middle of Maelifellsandur, a black desert of lava and volcanic ash in Iceland. The hill is all what remains of a once active cinder cone, ground down by ice of the nearby retreating Maelifell glacier.
Bernhard Edmaier is an aerial photographer living in a small village in Germany, but his photography takes him to exquisite corners of the world, where his interest in natural phenoma thrives. There and beyond, he documents the colors and patterns of the Earth’s surface that are astounding, mind-blowing, and full of grandeur. All of the images below are paired with geologic explanations from
his website — where you can see more photos.
(via butitdoesfloat)
PAINTED HILLS, OREGON, USA
There have been volcanoes in the Oregon area for 30 Million years ago, blasting huge amounts of ash into the sky. Winds and rivers carried the ash to where the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument now lies. This volcanic ash built up, layer after layer, continually burying the marshes and forests that flourished in the moist and warm tropical climate of the period. The heavy stroms that rain down here today carve gullies into the soft layers of ash and, over time, have created the striped landscape of Painted Hills. The yellow and red layers owe their colour to eroded volcanic materials, while the dark blurry flecks are the remains of dead vegetation.
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Posted by Vivian HuaApril 27, 2012
With variation in degrees of shading and texture, the black and white watercolor and graphite pieces by Ottawa’s
Nimit Malavia seem to be caught in varying degrees of completion. The epic
26 Point Stag, above, seems like a page out of Greek mythology or a fantasy novel, while
Arranged, below, bleeds and combines geometries like a page out of a manga or graphic novel.
These pieces are showing now at Spoke Art (816 Sutter Street, San Francisco), through April 28th, 2012.
See more colorful and poetically romantic images, such as the ones on the bottom of this post, on her website, along with more black and white whimsies.
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Posted by Vivian HuaApril 26, 2012
UK musicians Amplifier are offering an insane limited edition treatment for their album,
The Octopus, complete with silver cover made of
KEVLAR, an animation, and a three-disc box set. Limited to 750 copies, below is a sampling of some associated graphics, created by artist
Goni Montes. Watch as a male character gets swallowed up in a burst, an infinity symbol, and an octopus — which, as a spirit animal, traditionally symbolizes the infinite. Incredible!
Says Goni of the project: “Sel [Balamir of Amplifier’s plan was to create a sequence of paintings inspired by fractal imagery. The process was exciting as Sel gave me this one solid starting point then urged me to run with any possible inspiration that came of it. Like walking a dog to the park and taking the leash off, I went crazy.”
Below, the full fractal sequence, followed by initial sketches and links where you can purchase the epic collection (for a fairly reasonable price, all things considered).
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Posted by Vivian HuaApril 25, 2012
Often by way of the unrefined medium of ballpoint pen, UK artist
Mark Powell turns vintage envelopes into portraits of the elderly. His high-contrast black-and-white images find their strength in wrinkles, as though making some sort of meta-commentary about aging faces upon aging trees. Creases separate mouths from noses and stamps and seals make fanciful bindis, stressing that there is a story to be found in every one of these century-old envelopes, whether infused with Powell’s artistic intentions of not.
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Posted by Vivian HuaApril 18, 2012
Oh, but of course Oakland’s
Randy Colosky is the main artist showing at this month’s
Gallery Hijinks (2309 Bryant St., San Francisco) show (stated in a knowing-yet-pleasantly-surprised way)!
Nondeterministic Algorithm. shown below, is a series of seven ink drawings on paper that use repetition of the same shapes to plot unique paths in three-dimensional space, like slithering cosmic Slinkys. Given their color palettes, one might almost expect for them to pop out and swallow you into a cascading vortex, upon one’s donning of a pair of 3-D glasses — or perhaps even without.
The show is on display through April 28th, 2012. Below, Colosky gives some insight into his artwork.
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