Forgotten Legends In the Land Of The Hyper Surreal: Our Q&A With Alex McLeod Alex McLeod is a Canadian 3D artist who uses digital tools to create hyper surreal landscapes, which will have an air of uncanny familiarity to anyone who’s ever virtually set foot inside a video game. Shiny digital surfaces coat the bulbous, soft geometry of a Super Mario World background, and castles lie barricaded on top of their foam kingdoms. These fantastical landscapes are tweaked into life using the modern animators artillery of Cinema 4D, Photoshop, and AfterEffects. But these busy virtual worlds, populated by crystal mountains and chromatic bubble-clouds, also retain a high-gloss kitsch, the same kind that coats the pop art of Takashi Murakami or Jeff Koons, giving them a glistening psychedelia. Beginning this coming Saturday 26th May and running to 23rd June 2012 the Galerie Trois Points in Montreal, Quebec will host a solo show by McLeod called Légendes oubliées. The Creators Project: Firstly, what’s the show about. Blood Clouds Blood Clouds Sequel Sacred Forest Trip Magic Eye
Top 10 Pictures That Shocked The World It has often been said throughout time that a picture is worth a thousand words. Any picture may be worth a thousand words, but only a few rare photos tell more than a thousand words. They tell a powerful story, a story poignant enough to change the world and galvanize each of us. Over and over again… From the iconic images of Omayra Sanchez’s tragic death to the horrifying images of the Bhopal Gas disaster in 1984, the power of photography is still alive and invincible. Here is my top 10 list of photos that shocked the world: Warning: Be prepared for images of violence and death (in one case, the photograph of a dead child) if you scroll down. 10. Carol Guzy, the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, received her most recent Pulitzer in 2000 for her touching photographs of Kosovo refugees. The above picture portrays Agim Shala, a two-year-old boy, who is passed through a fence made with barbed wire to his family. 9. 8. F. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1.
Bursts Of Color Brighten An Already-Brilliant Sky Every year in the early spring, Hindus deck out their homes in lush pigments to observe Holi—the festival of colors. The holiday’s significance in the Hindu tradition is vast and varied, but Holi has also carved a secular niche, as public celebrations take place in cities all over the globe. To honor tradition, or simply to have a good time, attendees throw fistfuls of vibrant pigments at one another and leave festivals looking something like this: Image via Edison Avenue. To capture their recent Paint Pigment Photograph Series, London-based designers Rob and Nick Carter tossed pigments around, too—but not at each other, or anyone in particular. RN865 paint pigment photograph, napthol vermillion (2012). RN868 paint pigment photograph, benzimidazolone orange (2012). RN871 paint pigment photograph, nickel titanate yellow (2012). RN873 paint pigment photograph, cobalt nicket green (2012). RN875 paint pigment photograph, cobalt bermuda blue (2012). [via designboom] @bmwertheim
Judith Ann Braun's Fingers Are Magical With an art career spanning more than three decades, Judith Ann Braun has tested the limits of her artistic musculature. She began as a self-described “realistic figure painter,” and worked through the struggles common to anyone who endeavors upon an artistic pursuit, that of searching for one’s own voice in the chosen medium. Fast forward to the 21st century where the evolution of Braun’s work has brought us to the Fingerings series, a collection of charcoal dust landscapes and abstracts “painted” using not brushes but her fingertips. Braun has a specific interest in symmetry, as evidenced by the patterns she follows in a number of the Fingerings pieces as well as work in the Symmetrical Procedures collection. Share With Your Friends
Sketchbook Secrets: 50 Beautiful Sketchbook Scans The sketchbook is—to borrow a term from the new millenniums’ popular discourse—an artist’s BFF. It’s a diary for the visually inclined—a place where artists can most comfortably explore their personal thoughts, work out their visual needs, practice, maintain a visual history, and hopefully create the unpolished work that will eventually lead to amazing work for the world to see. But, sometimes, when we’re lucky, we get to see the process. Below are 50 beautiful sketchbook scans from 35 talented artists. Allen Sutton Mattias Adolfsson Laura More Amore David Fullarton Irena Zablotska Rafael Bertone Alena Lavdovskaya Beka Pkhakadze Christian Borku David Sossella f1x Grino Anna Rusakova Hanna Viktorsson Ignacio Veiga Irina Vinnik Jenkins Jenkins Jose Domingo Betancur Gomez Joshua Philippe Julia-Grigorieva Katia Petrunina Kyle Letendre L Filipe dos Santos Luishock Mamz Hu Michael Murdock Nacho-Yague Nicolas Cuestas Ooli razead Roger Haus Sabine ten Lohuis Taylor White Timothy Duong Trevor Henry Yissus Galiana Author: Shane Ward
Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls (1819) 25 Apr 2008 The Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls, painted in 1819 by Kyoto-area physician Yasukazu Minagaki (1784-1825), consist of beautifully realistic, if not gruesome, depictions of scientific human dissection. Unlike European anatomical drawings of the time, which tended to depict the corpse as a living thing devoid of pain (and often in some sort of Greek pose), these realistic illustrations show blood and other fluids leaking from subjects with ghastly facial expressions. The fact that the bodies used in scientific autopsies in Edo-period Japan generally belonged to heinous criminals executed by decapitation adds to the grisly nature of the illustrations. According to the Keio University Library (where these documents are currently stored), the two scrolls contain 83 illustrations based on Minagaki's observations of over 40 bodies. They are regarded as the best collection of early 19th-century anatomical drawings by a Japanese hand.
Geometric Tattoos | theddi Peter Aurisch is a tattoo master from Berlin. Using a great mix of geometry lines and bold and fine colors Peter is definitely standing out with his tattoo style. Do you maybe plan to make another tattoo this summer? Check these outstanding tattoos and make a decision if you want to visit Berlin! Street Artist J R Wins the TED Prize
Photographs of Mirrors on Easels that Look Like Paintings in the Desert Daniel Kukla is a photographer who had formal training in biological and anthropological sciences. His educational background plays a major part of his artistic practice, and this can be seen in his clever project titled, The Edge Effect. In the description and explanation of the project, Kukla writes, In March of 2012, I was awarded an artist’s residency by the United States National Park Service in southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park. While staying in the Park, I spent much of my time visiting the borderlands of the park and the areas where the low Sonoran desert meets the high Mojave desert. While hiking and driving, I caught glimpses of the border space created by the meeting of distinct ecosystems in juxtaposition, referred to as the Edge Effect in the ecological sciences. We love how the photos look like they’re of paintings of the desert placed within the desert. You can find the rest of the photographs in the series over on Kukla’s website. P.S.
Alyssa Monks Artist Alyssa Monks always painted women. She started with the self-portraits and then took a detour to paint family members. Her bathing beauties evolve directly from photographs while she intentionally adds a lot of invention to them in her paintings. It seems like water is the overall theme to them and Alyssa says that the water thing kind of found her, and she evolved into it. All images © Alyssa Monks A4 Papercuts Ogni scultura cartacea realizzata dall’artista Peter Callesen ha un unico punto di partenza: un candido e standardizzato foglio formato A4. Quello che accade dopo il “trattamento Callesen” lo potete vedere con i vostri occhi. Uccelli in procinto di spiccare il volo, scheletri che prendono vita… “The negative and absent 2 dimensional space left by the cut, points out the contrast to the 3 dimensional reality it creates, even though the figures still stick to their origin without the possibility of escaping“. Chapeau. [Via] Comments comments
Deceleration of Time For The Avant/Garde Diaries actress and artist Susanna Kraus introduces us to imago 1:1, the the world’s largest walk-in camera. Her father developed this camera in the 1970s as a high-speed photography researcher at Daimler-Benz. The imago creates one-off, life-size self portraits, thus forcing the user to examine their own persona. The instant camera works with a selftimer and needs ten minutes to develop a full-size portrait. The box, containing the camera is somewhat of a mirror for your soul, giving the possibility to come face to face with yourself. Browse through the Avant/Garde Diaries to get to know more inspiring thinkers, artists, entertainers and hear their stories.