Scott Moore incorporates two perspectives in his delightfully not-to-scale retro style oil paintings.
As much as I admire the technique and surreality, I must admit that my first thought was “I’d love to be a tiny woman running around with that massive food!”
I imagine sinking into giant pillowy donuts…swimming in cocoa…doing my neuroscience work on a pile of toast…
See more in the galleries.
Curtis Killorn creates a very special kind of artistic landscape. The home page begins with a quote that dates back to 1914: “Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to the body and soul.”
“The intent of this enterprise is to create beauty where there is already beauty, highlighting the strengths of a tree already dead or a stone seemingly unimportant is in essence how we are to regard each other. In our busy lives we sometimes forget to notice the splendor of the world around us.”
I truly love the idea of punctuating a landscape with brightness like this. How many people who would never stop to notice a tree might think twice after passing one of these?
Here are a few choice selections from Belgian artist Felicien Rops (1833-1898).
Rops does have a fair amount of art that is not exactly safe for work, so beware of google image searches if you’re in public. I tend to prefer his dark, sinister, foreboding pieces.
Cheval Noir is the website or Japanese artist Aya Kato.
Her work is so lushly detailed, with brilliant tapestries of color…
I swear, some of these images appear to actually give off light. Beautiful.
See more in her galleries.
I think many of us have at some point seen an image sampled from a vintage Alfred Mainzer Cat postcard (Mainzer was the publisher; the images were painted by Swiss artist Eugen Hurtung).
Recognize the style? Oddly anthropomorphic felines placed in distinctly human situations…
Often, chaos arises.
Ah…they’re incorrigible (I am currently watching a cat in her sixth consecutive hour of napping and increasingly doubting feline willingness to pick up a drill and engage in construction work).
I may send this as my next “get well” greeting:
Some are appropriate for party invitations:
Just wanted to pay tribute to this seminal slice of kitsch history. I captured my images from Card Cow but there is a more official collector site here. Does anyone have originals?
Though he sites MC Escher and Buckminster Fuller as influences, Dick Termes has developed an intriguing art form of his own: the Termesphere.
“Imagine that you are standing inside a transparent ball suspended fifty feet above the Grand Canyon floor. You are higher than some canyon walls and lower than others. You have paints and a brush, and you begin to paint what you see on the inside surface of the ball. You paint the north face, then the east, south, and west. Finally, you paint everything visible above and below you. You move your globe to safe ground and step out to observe your paintings.Walking around the sphere, you see that you have captured the entire three dimensional landscape. In fact, you’ve discovered the structure of your visual experience.”
Termes transforms architecture, landscapes and fantastical worlds in his imagination to spherical representations. They hang in space and roate on a central axis, powered by motors.
I am duly impressed with his combination of creativity, mathematics, theory and execution.
If you really want your mind blown, read his illustrated description of the 6 Point Perspective.
Apparently pop culture bloggers have invented and embraced the word “AMAZEBALLS” for use in juicy celebrity gossip. I feel that word is more fitting in reference to Termespheres.
See more here.
Blanka Dvorak’s work will appeal to those of you who don’t mind your art a little on the tense and macabre side.
Dvorak does a wonderful job creating a grotesque sense of uneasiness, disgust, fear, sadness…
These works tap into the darker side of something primal.
See more in the galleries.
Nothing like a good dose of fetal skeleton artwork. There is much to be found on Kat Powell’s site.
She comes up with some interesting little scenarios. I find them rather adorable.
My dear friend Skye recently directed me to GUBLERNATION, quite (correctly) certain that I would enjoy the various comedic gems to be discovered there.
One look and, in a rare astrological outburst, I immediately said “I’d be shocked if the author of this blog is not a fellow Pisces” (we often possess a distinctly…”Dr Seussian” quality).
However, I didn’t know that Matthew Gray Gubler is actually a well known genius on the popular program Criminal Minds.
Pardon my pop culture ignorance. I’m always many years behind on even the best TV shows.
Twin Peaks rocks, by the way.
The best part of light colored canvas shoes: sketch-ability (I hear this pair makes you run really fast, too)…
Here I spent hours making a pair of astronomy Mary janes, complete with actual Hubble footage…and I’m schooled by these badass monsters.
If we ever walk up to each other and engage in a shoe battle, I think my spiral galaxies would get devoured by the striped snake.
Drawings…
This little chap’s story is quite unique. But don’t read it to your kids at bedtime. There are syringes.
GUBLERNATION
You can also check out Gublerland (I recommend the self-mockumentary in the video section)
SheWalksSoftly 