Tixinda + Nike

Tixinda for Nike

The unbelievable Tixinda team knock is straight out of the park with their Mayan stylings. The colours, lines and a spirited take on traditional art keep me going through these hot summer nights.

Read Full Post »

The Big Picture + art without commentary

"As part of the Danish and Nordic Pavilions' exhibition by Elmgreen & Dragset as curators/artists, a "body" floats in a pool outside a home which is being "sold" at the Biennale of Venice on Thursday, June 4, 2009."

A London artist once explained to me that art often doesn’t take on meaning to the artist until its completion – the press releases and exhibit handbills are composed solely for those who seek explanation.  If this is true, why do we care so much about what art ‘means’?

The Big Picture gets it just right with their coverage of this year’s Venice Biennale installations. The glossy photojournalism is almost as satisfying as the minimal commentary.

Read Full Post »

Irina Troitskaya + Russian dolls

Irina Troitskaya's set of most strange animals

Read Full Post »

Irina Troitskaya + River Styx

Irina Troitskaya's Norse Tale

Irina Troitskata's Norse Tale

“Two illustrations inspired with the legend of the River Styx”

Source: Irina Troitskaya

Read Full Post »

AJ Fosik + George Korsmit

AJ Fosik's Untitled Ghost

George Korsmit's Chemistry of Desire

AJ Fosik's Three Into One

George Korsmit's Chemistry of Desire (2nd version)

Soure: George Korsmit, Jonathan Levine Gallery

Read Full Post »

Degas + deviantart

cellar-fcp's Two Prostitutes

Edgar Degas' The Dance Examination

Edgar Degas' L'absinthe

I’m not very familiar with the deviantART culture but I love looking at people’s drawings and doodles, and an hour on the website is like rummaging through a yard sale of sketch books and textbook covers. One user profile I especially enjoy is Hong Kong’s Cellar-FCP whose Prostitute series lends a classic air to a somewhat sordid subject with lifelike brush strokes and Japanese portrait angles.

My first response to “Two Prostitutes” was a nostalgic reflection on first-year art history, landing immediately on the stylings of Edgar Degas’ ballerinas. No surprise, then, to see that the artists lists “Manet, Monet, klimt, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Schiele, Hiroaki Samura, Nihei Tsutomu [and] Yukito Kishiro” as inspirations.

Cellar-FCP deviates nicely from the abundance of anime/manga-style artists on the site with a nod towards the salon paintings of a formet time, before computer-based cultural interactions.

Source: CGFA, deviantART, Empty Easel

Read Full Post »

Sam Songailo + mola

Sam Songailo for Iain Dawson exhibition

Panamanian tapir mola

I’ve been especially hyped on South American art, textiles and illustration lately. Sam Songailo‘s paintings remind me of Panamanian molas, unfinished fabric panels embroidered with a reverse appliqué technique. A reverse appliqué involves several layers of fabric quilted together, the top layer being cut to reveal coloured fabrics underneath (a sort of textile equivalent to the tempera paint and wax crayon projects we did in elementary school).

Songailo approaches his abstract paintings from a similar mindset with an “intricate layering of visual systems, systems that draw you in with a particular intensity of colour, an obsession with surface, texture and colour.”

Source: Booooooooom, TPF

Read Full Post »

Scriptographer

Fageta's Boris The Climber (using Delauney Raster tool)

Hektor Draws a Landscape (using Hektor Interface)

Luna Maurer's Drawing Typologies design (using Text Pencil)

Scriptographer is beyond my grasp first thing in the morning. The Adobe Illustrator-based script plug in facilitates “the creation of mouse controlled drawing-tools” which appeals to all my vector-graphic-loving sides – the same aspects of myself that prefer to watch people play video games rather than take the controllers myself. I am always happy to discover tools that allow graphic designers to greater meet my aesthetic desires without my taking up the tablet.

Luna Maurer‘s design for the Drawing Typologies exhibit uses Text Pencil, a modern Microsoft Word Art, which pushes text up and down from grid lines, providing a more natural, cut-and-paste feel for computer-generated words and paragraphs. Hektor, “a portable Spray-paint Output Device for laptop computers,” uses Illustrator-based script to operate a robotic paint-and-pulley apparatus that creates mechanized sprays of ink similar to a large-scale laserjet printer.

User-generated Scriptographer as a whole embraces a more fluid sense of computer-based graphic design, lending a tactile hand to a potentially flat and two-dimensional discipline.

Source: Fageta, Scriptographer

Read Full Post »

Catucinno

Still from Hugo Glendinning and Paola Pivi's One Capuccino Then I Go

Still from Hugo Glendinning and Paola Pivi's One Capuccino Then I Go

“[...] what I will always remember of the work – the Leopard looking at me a split second before leaping at the camera, hitting the fence between us with unbelievable force. My heart and every heart in the room pounded with fear despite knowing we were perfectly safe.” – Hugo Glendinning

Source: Galerie Perrotin, Hugo Glendinning

Read Full Post »

High flight

Amy Bennett's Coming to Grips

Amy Baker's Evening News

Amy Bennett

I always take a window seat in airplanes, and can justify the cost of any flight for the first five minutes of take-off and landing when the world below shrinks to the size of Mr. Roger’s neighbourhood, semi-trucks become Micro RCs and loud humanity ceases to exist. Equally, I can justify the cost of admission to any museum or interpretive centre if they have scale dioramas of historical scenes.

Amy Bennett‘s oil paintings have a similar effect on me. As Boooooooom puts it, “At first glance they look like photographs of miniature models, which effectively forces you into an almost God-like point of view of each scene.”

Source: Boooooooom

Read Full Post »