15 posts tagged “art”
I'm mad about Marc Johns' wry, whimsical post-it-note drawings and other illustrations. Check out everything on his photos group (three pages).
So, in my imagination, this is really big, right? And the bottom "painty" part is really textured and the top "smoky" part has lots of layers of cloudy, sort of yellowed varnish with slight collaged elements in between layers, see? No? Well, then, you're just going to have to trust me that in my imagination it's supah cool..
I'm not sure I'm even going to upload a link to this there - it was just fun to play around (update: okay - I did). And I've found at least one other Voxxer doing Illustration Friday; here are all her posts with that tag. Neato!
I do wish Vox would let us do a bit of customization... just choose a design, then upload our own background (and bullet, if there is one) and change accent colors. This is what I'd do today:
Jocelyn Mathewes has a nice portrait series of Eastern Orthodox women holding icons of their patron saints. My favorite is this beautiful photo of Liana Lloyd, with an icon of the Byzantine Empress Theodora:
Unfortunately for Dora, though, it seems her chief biographer has been Procopius of Caesarea in his "Secret History" where he paints her as a skanky ho. However, Procopius had a big hate on for Theodora and Justinian, and in the same book asserts that "Justinian was,
in fact, a demon disguised as a man because men... claimed they saw him late at night in the palace walking around without
his head" (from here). And one of his chapters is even titled "Proving That Justinian and Theodora Were Actually Fiends in
Human Form". Well, all righty, then!
Amazingly, each 16-panel set can form 20,922,789,888,000 different possible pictures. Wheeeeeee!
Ah! I forgot to say that the geekycool thing on this last one of mine is the pattern design in the background; there are actually three different patterns that tile seamlessly with each other. I really should have done four, to have four panels each of each pattern, but I got exhausted at three.
I really like Christopher Cousins' paintings *. They remind me of the ordinary staining and scarification of everyday stucco, concrete and plaster exterior walls that seems to me so poetic - these passive surfaces silently accumulating the stigmata of time and neglect, changing imperceptibly day by day. Natural graffiti is so much more poignant than the spraycan variety, I think... though I must say, sometimes a wall tagger really gets the feel of his/her medium:
From Ternua at Flickr. Also at Flickr, two great "natural wall poems" (my term) by a user called "only because mushroom asked me to" (gee, thanks, mushroom!). The first one has a link to a nice, big version, but the second one, very sadly doesn't.
* note:In the Christopher Cousins individual gallery pages, you can click the images to see large views; unfortunately in my browser they open in non-resizable windows too small to view the whole image. In Firefox, you can just drag the image to another page to see the whole thing.
Photography by Kerry Skarbakka from two series, "Fluid" and "The Struggle to Right Oneself" (also here; what a great series title and concept!), in which he uses himself as the model. The site is a little difficult to use, but note that links from the portfolio page for both these series have two pages each. In this photo from a current installation of his works, you can see that some of these pieces are quite large. Via Joerg Colberg's very nice blog, Conscientious. Fine art photography fans can get lost in this site for days.
You knock me out! Check out the "India" pages of kids' art at Constellation of Children's Art , and say "wow". (Or to see them via thumbnails, try the silly, silly Flash interface). These were done by 11- and 12-year-olds! Really. How charming is this? I'm using #13, by Tanya as my desktop at the moment. It' a "Warli" tribal style painting like this one, and the one below; if you like these, check out dinrao's post about Warli art.
Ooh! A collection of cryptozoological stamps. The image on the stamp below is a Bunyip: "Australian aboriginal stories describe the bunyip as an evil spirit which dwells in creeks, swamps, and billabongs. The bunyip's loud bellowing cry terrifies the aborigines. They avoid water sources where they believe a bunyip might live. Some stories suggest the bunyip emerges at night principally to prey on women and children as well as animals."
Yeah, me either. Nevertheless, here's a page of vintage optical toys and related images that's fun to browse . The images below represent the classic bird and cage thaumotrope. There are a few more on this page, including, I think, I bear eating a man, and, um... a woman with a secret clown belly? Not too sure how that's supposed to work. (psst! page on how to make a thaumotrope here.)
