photo: ugo mulas
What the sculptor David Smith could do with with simple squares and rectangles…
….
…his studio is as inspiring… read more…
art
the scar project
photo: david jay 'the scar project'
We can’t stop thinking about The Scar Project, a series of photographs by fashion photographer David Jay of women under 40 who have survived breast cancer; they openly reveal the dramatic scars left by surgery. The photos are completely arresting: very beautiful and at times difficult to look at.
But it’s that difficulty that makes them important. They challenge the usual view: of what’s beautiful and what’s private and what’s sexy. read more…
painting kits from 100,000 years ago, and today
photo © science/aaas
Remember the beautiful Chauvet cave paintings we wrote about a few months ago? Well every artist needs his or her toolkit, and archeologists recently discovered what appear to be “artist kits” in a South African cave. The kits, which date back 100,000 years, are made of abalone shells, perfect for holding and transporting essential painting materials: a quartzite stone for grinding up pigments like charcoal and ochre – which produces rich reds and yellows – and the pigments themselves. The ground pigments were poured into the shell and mixed with a liquid to make paint. One of the kits held a slender bone from the front leg of a wolf or dog with one end dipped in ochre: a possible paint brush. The kits are the first known instance of homo sapiens compounding a painting medium. Charcoal and ochre are the same materials used in the Chauvet cave, but those paintings are only 30,000 years old.
The desire to create is built into our very DNA. Our lineage is full of artists… read more…
myeongbeom kim’s forest bed
myeongbeom kim
myeongbeom kim
Conceptual Artist Myeongbeom Kim makes eerily beautiful and evocative work that fuses manmade things with big doses of nature. We can totally see ourselves lying down on this bed, and feeling like we are in a mossy woods…
…we can imagine how we’d feel riding an elevator like this one: read more…
modern art gallery as halloween costume
Over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, we found a how-to for a swell group Halloween costume: a traveling exhibition of modern art… Here, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, and Jackson Pollock are represented because…
“… the best choices are iconic artists whose distinctive styles may be recognizable even in third-rate attempts (like ours) to mimic their styles.”
The only tweak we’d make to the concept is to wear some sort of face mask, which is much of the pleasure of Halloween: being anonymous…or someone/something other than yourself.
They suggest other alternatives to making a copy of a painting on a piece of canvas. Our favorite: “Have everyone dress up with a blank canvas and carry colored ink squirt guns.”
COLORED INK SQUIRT GUNS?!!!
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has a trove of Halloween d-i-y costume, decor, and fun, including bat wings made from broken umbrellas…
Related posts: happy halloween!!!!! (2010)
happy halloween!!! (2009)
halloween inspiration: cardboard box as the empire state building
theo jansen’s ‘life forms’ evolve!
(Video link here.) We’ve posted before about artist Theo Jansen’s remarkable Strandbeests, creatures made entirely from PVC pipe that move on their own using wind-power. Watching them scurry across the beach like enormous prehistoric insects never ceases to delight us.
Jansen, who has been working on his beasts for over 20 years, has often referred to their genetic code and ability to reproduce. His ultimate goal is enabling them to live on their own on the beaches of Holland. As he shows in this charmingly awkward Ted talk, his creatures are indeed evolving. The Strandbeests, made entirely of ordinary materials, now have what Jansen calls “a simple brain.” read more…
role model? the inimitable frida kahlo completely self-possessed
george eastman house, international museum of photography and film © nickolas muray photo archives
Found on the New Yorker’s online Photo Booth: Frida Kahlo, photographed by the great Nickolas Muray….
johnny swing’s welded coin chair
We’ve always loved the Butterfly Chair made by the great Johnny Swing. He welded 1,500 half dollar coins at 7,000 points. It makes us want to pick up a welding torch…(we actually googled “how to weld“…)
Check out more Swing brilliance (made out of all sorts of coins) here. His story is quite something, too. We found a great article about him at Art Works Magazine:
“… he puts these ordinary things together in more interesting ways. It’s repurposing at its best. He says he likes to ‘take a worthless thing and make it beautiful.’ In discarded baby food jars, he sees chairs or chandeliers. A wheelbarrow is easily fashioned into a table. Nickels compose a couch. Dollar bills become the fabric for a teddy bear or a pillow.”
He’s been at it since he was a kid…
via Unconsumption
Related posts: paint a chair like gaetano pesce did
everyday brancusi: mailbox, lamps, platters…
“guest” chair: a charming play on “guest book”
bang out a chair! (marjin van der poll’s do hit chair)
alexander calder’s breakthrough year
Herbert Matter, Calder Foundation, New York
Last night we were lucky enough to see a jewel of an exhibit of Alexander Calder’s work that will be on view at The Pace Gallery in New York City until December 23rd. It features works from a single, seminal year in the sculptor’s life – 1941 – that marked the start of a very new cycle of work. The disparate ideas about abstract art that Calder had formed during seven years of living in Paris seemed to coalesce; he began using them in much more complex ways. The New York Times tells the story and offers a slideshow of some of the rarely seen works, including the eight foot “Tree”, whose parts had lain dormant in different places for decades until the artist’s grandson A.S.C. Rower tracked them down and made the piece whole again.
But what interested us most in the Times story is the constraints that particular year seem to have imposed upon Calder, pushing him into a new visual vocabulary as he worked with the materials at hand:
holton rower-inspired artwork screensaver
6ac6g by holton rower
Our favorite painting of late is Holton Rower’s ’6ac6g’, which, for a blessed few weeks was right around the corner from us at Pace Gallery. It caused quite a stir and has recently been written about in Art and Antiques with good reason; it is BEAUTIFUL.
We walked over several times to visit ’6ac6g’ – happy to hang out with it in person. We’d stand back to kind of bask in it, then walk up close to look at the complex layers and swirls of color that seemed to pool onto the floor.
Since we can’t afford to BUY the huge, wondrous painting (and even if we could, it wouldn’t fit in our space), we took a picture, and now wake up to it every morning on our computer screen – it’s our screensaver. It brings to mind the feeling we had standing in front of the real thing. Awesome.
Though we are great believers in EXPERIENCING art first hand, read more…
color/pattern meditation break
We are big fans of davidope, a designer and amazing gif artist. We just found this beautiful gif on his tumblr DVDP, “his visual Chinatown”.
…offered as a sparkly break in your day…
Related posts: (green) porno break! (+ porno house gift???!!!)
“can do” (maira kalman)
Here’s one of our favorite pictures from “Can Do”, a riff about the nature of invention from the great Maira Kalman’s New York Times Blog “And the Pursuit of Happiness“. It’s of the inventor Nikola Tesla “who talked to pigeons and worked with electricity while calmly reading a book.”
We see it as a picture of big ideas happening…actually how we feel when an idea ignites…like it has a life of its own and we get to “sureness”…like all we have to do is follow it along…
…
…it’s like nothing else!
(For more of Kalman’s posts, scroll down to the very bottom of the Times post.)
Related posts:
maira kalman on invention and ingenuity (and napping)
ok go channels rube goldberg: “having good ideas and making cool shit”
free guide for (secret) inventors
tinkering schools for kids and adults
the role of magic in the creative process
El Anatsui/Metropolitan Museum of Art
We are smitten with this short, illuminating online slideshow in which Marco Leona, chief scientist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, talks about the role of magic in the creation of art. It is so delightful and illuminating, we’ve watched it several times: a rich 4 minutes.
“Magic traditionally was about transformation: taking something baser, less refined, less valuable and making it something resplendent.”
He shows a wide array of artworks to illustrate this transformation, ranging from Ghanaian El Anatsui’s stunning tapestries made of twist-off bottle caps, to Hokusai’s famous blue wave to Anish Kapoor’s high-tech wonder. We particularly love slides 14 through 17 where Leona speaks about the process an anonymous 12th century Persian artist went through to make a gorgeous frieze tile: read more…
signs on walls: ‘how to work better’
“How-To Work Better” by Swiss artists Fischli & Weiss has long been one of our favorite manifestos: the reminder we need daily. We’d seen it all over the internet, and posted it as a sign long ago. We hadn’t realized that it was, in fact, an installation, painted on the wall of an office building in Zurich.
Imagine if, instead of advertising, bill-boards featured signs like this…or if building owners just took it upon themselves to paint (or stencil) their buildings a little differently…
via Swiss-Miss
Related posts: 12 rules for creating (almost anything)
diy: words on walls
ernst caramelle’s fab painted walls
rough painted brick walls
