Puppies and Flowers

Archive of Lesbian paperback artwork from the 50's and 60's. Pretty cool stuff, note the typo in image showing. Link

Watch real time, a sampling of images being uploaded to Flickr and their respective geographic locations. flickrvision

Thanks Luke Link

Guerilla Art?

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - The Little Mermaid statue in Denmark's capital was found draped in a Muslim dress and head scarf Sunday morning. Police removed the clothing after a telephone caller reported it, spokesman Jorgen Thomsen said.

Link to Flash website

Arizona physician Michael Collier spends every other week combining geology, photography and aeronautics, in a three-decade quest to tell the earth's "stories" with aerial images.

Link to NPR with slide show and podcast

An artist's four-year project to enliven prominent dead trees by wrapping them in coloured cloth has been turned into an exhibition. Philippa Lawrence aims to decorate trees in each of the 13 old counties of Wales as part of a scheme called Bound.

Link to pictures

Link to YouTube

Shek Kip Mei Estate, Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate, is composed of 100 rooms, each closet-like in size at only 100 square feet and built in response to a devastating fire in the 1950s that left thousands homeless. In a new series of photographs called "100 x 100," Michael Wolf captures the residents of this housing complex who are almost enveloped by the diminishing space around them, their belongings stacked to the ceiling.

Link to article and slides

Link to YouTube

Link to youTube

Anonymous postings of people's secrets, strangely absorbing. Link to postsecret.blogspot.com

Comic-book fans already know Stan Lee is a Marvel legend. Now Hasbro is making it official.

The company will pay plastic tribute to the 84-year-old creator of Spider-Man, the Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four and other comic-book heroes by interpreting him as a 6-inch tall Marvel Legends action figure. The toy shows Lee's likeness wearing khaki pants, a blue windbreaker and eyeglasses.

Link to article via the folks at Laughing Squid

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom.

Link to photo collections

Letters. Painted on shop shutters in the east end of London. Apparently they're by a graffiti artist called Eine. I found 10 in one night and then wondered whether all 26 were available. Comments on the pictures helped me to locate more. I found another 16 the next day, but 3 of them repeated letters I'd already found... so I was still 3 short of a full alphabet.

Link to FlickrSet

Shown here:

Cover of "Berkeley Barb", an underground newspaper, featuring a photographic collage of politically charged images, mostly relating to the Civil Rights movement. Central image is of an African American male, smoking and saying in a speech bubble, "I have a nightmare...", inverting the line from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech.

Link to Wisconsin Historical Society

This is an amazing fashion show which appears to be interactive with the models. Over at Creative Review there is an excellent article on players involved in the creation of this piece.

Link to Creative Review via Neatorama

Collection [1] [2]

First image may not be safe for work. 

Link to Koen Demuynck's work

Houston sculptors Dan Havel and Dean Ruck sculpturally altered two buildings in a Montrose neighborhood.

The project Inversion transformed two Art League houses on the corner of Montrose Boulevard and Willard Street. The Art League offered Havel and Ruck the old studio buildings before they were demolished to make way for a new Art League building.

Link to art league houston

Link to comolokko via hemmy

Alissa Coe and Carly Waito make ceramic objects in their little studio in downtown Toronto, Canada.

Link to coe&waito via 7deadlysinners

Here's a Flickr search on yellow 

photo: Florentijn Hofma

From artist's website:

The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn't discriminate people and doesn't have a political connotation.  Link

From article: 

The smile-provoking concoction that's responsible for this little shot of joy in a global-warming-heated summer, against a backdrop of war chaos and political cant, is a giant rubber duckie created by the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. After wrestling with some air-inflating problems, his 105-foot-tall, 85-foot-wide "Rubber Duck" finally took to the sea (that is, to the estuary) last weekend - and that's no canard.  read more

Link to Florentijn Hofma's website with more pictures 

Thanks for the images Jeff J. Not sure where they originated from. 

From article: 

Lauren is a final year graduate in the School of Art and Design at Bath Spa University.

For her Graduate Exhibition she presented a full scale knitted version of a Ferrari, a hairy combination of a Testa Rossa and a 355 - complete with windscreen wipers, wing mirrors, low profile tyres and the famous prancing horse logo, all knitted in glorious Ferrari red (wool generously supplied by Sirdar).

Lauren's Ferrari is not just a car that happens to be made of wool. This is a carefully considered object that questions the relationship between male symbols and feminine craft to suggest the relationship is more complex than first thought. The car also cleverly plays on the hard smooth object being transformed into a soft textured one. The result is visually stunning.

Lauren's Ferrari also gives a new meaning to the knitted sweater. How many proud owners of cosy red pullovers - yes some with the legend emblazoned on the front - would love to immerse themselves in this giant item. Are cars themselves forms of clothing?

The School of Art and Design at Bath Spa University is one of the leading schools of art and design in the country.

Lauren's achievement, which took many months to complete was made possible by the School's excellent technical support and Lauren's own imagination - which is precisely what the School tries to nurture.

Link to Bath Spa University 

Link to more Flickr images 

The exhibition brings together 34 of Scotland's most exciting designers in an exhibition at The Lighthouse, with associated projects including a 6 citywide billboard project, publication and specially commissioned souvenirs. Building on the success of The Scottish Show in 2004, the exhibition will celebrate the vibrancy and vitality of Scotland's design industry.

Work and installations by the designers will take over most of The Lighthouse by inhabiting the galleries, corridors, stairwells and shop.
The Scottish Show 07 is the national exhibition of the inaugural six cities design Festival.

OSTREET Billboard 

Link to the Scottish Show 07 via DesignBoom

Shown here: 8 vintage Art Deco styled microphones circa 1920's-1950's

Link to more collections 

For this installation the viewer has to climb the ladder and look inside to see video.

(the link to Futura gallery seems to be broken but you get the idea.)

See more works at DavidCerny.cz

The color of music as inspiration, from writer to painter:

From PBS:

"I'd prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked."

He was one of the most enigmatic figures in American art. His work became the definitive expression of a culture obsessed with images. He was surrounded by a coterie of beautiful bohemians with names like Viva, Candy Darling, and Ultra Violet. He held endless drug- and sex-filled parties, through which he never stopped working. He single-handedly confounded the distinctions between high and low art. His films are pivotal in the formation of contemporary experimental art and pornography. He spent the final years of his life walking around the posh neighborhoods of New York with a plastic bag full of hundred dollar bills, buying jewelry and knick knacks. His name was David Hockney, and he changed the nature of art forever.

David Hockney's exact birth date is unknown, though one can assume it is between 1927 and 1930. What is known is that he was born to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents in Forest City, Pennsylvania. He was a shy quiet boy, leaving high school to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He received his bachelors of fine arts degree from there in 1949, and headed immediately to New York. In New York, Warhol found design jobs in advertising. Before long he had begun specializing in illustrations of shoes. His work appeared in GLAMOUR, VOGUE, and HARPER'S BAZAAR. In the mid-'50s he became the chief illustrator for I. Miller Shoes, and in 1957 a shoe advertisement won him the Art Director's Club Medal.

During this time, Warhol had also been working on a series of pictures separate from the advertisements and illustrations. It was this work that he considered his serious artistic endeavor. Though the paintings retained much of the style of popular advertising, their motivation was just the opposite. The most famous of the paintings of this time are the thirty-two paintings of Campbell soup cans. With these paintings, and other work that reproduced Coca-Cola bottles, Superman comics, and other immediately recognizable popular images, Warhol was mirroring society's obsessions. Where the main concern of advertising was to slip into the unconscious and unrecognizably evoke a feeling of desire, Warhol's work was meant to make the viewer actually stop and look at the images that had become invisible in their familiarity. These ideas were similarly being dealt with by artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg -- and came to be known as Pop Art.

Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Warhol produced work at an amazing rate. He embraced a mode of production similar to that taken on by the industries he was mimicking, and referred to his studio as "The Factory." The Factory was not only a production center for Warhol's paintings, silk-screens, and sculptures, but also a central point for the fast-paced high life of New York in the '60s. Warhol's obsession with fame, youth, and personality drew the most wild and interesting people to The Factory throughout the years. Among the regulars were Mick Jagger, Martha Graham, Lou Reed, and Truman Capote. For many, Warhol was a work of art in himself, reflecting back the basic desires of an consumerist American culture. He saw fame as the pinnacle of modern consumerism and reveled in it the way artists a hundred years before reveled in the western landscape. His oft-repeated statement that "every person will be world-famous for fifteen minutes" was an incredible insight into the growing commodification of everyday life.

By the mid-'60s Warhol had become one of the most famous artists in the world. He continued, however, to baffle the critics with his aggressively groundbreaking work. Putting aside much of the "pop" imagery, he concentrated on making films. His films, as his paintings had been, were primarily concerned with getting the viewer to look at something for longer than they otherwise would. Using film, Warhol could control the viewer's attention. One of his most famous films, SLEEP (1963), was eight hours of the poet John Giorno asleep in his bed. Warhol's movement into film directing and production brought him into contact with dozens of artists and actors interested in working in The Factory. One of these was actress and writer Valerie Solanas, who had for some time been trying to get Warhol to produce one of her scripts. In 1968, in anger at Warhol's disinterest, Solanas (the founder and only member of S.C.U.M., the Society for Cutting Up Men), shot and nearly killed Warhol.

During Warhol's extended convalescence he began to work on a new mode of art. Considered his "Post-Pop" period, the images were primarily portraits of living superstars. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Warhol produced hundreds of portraits, mostly in silk screen. His images of Liza Minnelli, Jimmy Carter, Albert Einstein, Elizabeth Taylor, and Philip Johnson express a more subtle and expressionistic side of his work. During the final years of his life, Warhol became the hero of another generation of artists, including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Francesco Clemente. Their work represents a continuation of an artistic revolution begun by David Hockney. On February 22, 1987, Warhol died of heart failure at his home in New York. Many suggested it was a poorly performed minor surgery he had had earlier that day, while others believed it was due to the general weakening of his body after the shooting. What remains certain is that during the sixty years of whirlwind and mystery that was David Hockney's life, the art world (and the world at large) became a more fun and interesting place.

Link to PBS

Link to Film Forum

James R Ford is a multi-media artist currently based in London, England. For this project, initiated in 2003, he aims to transform a second-hand Ford Capri into the General Lee, from Dukes of Hazzard, by covering it in little toy cars in the appropriate colours (mainly red and orange). Ford is going to need around three to four thousand and so, in addition to searching out and purchasing appropriate toy cars himself, an appeal has been started for people all over the world to send him their disused toy cars. The donator can leave a little message in the toy car, or mark it in some way, so they actually become part of the art whilst contributing to the sculpture and thus creating a global art collaboration.

Link to artists website 

This is a really slick flash website, select from four body areas for your tat.

(Marketing for Crusty Demons game) 

Check it out 

Previous tattoo generator shown on P&F

Show me more weird hats! 

Photo: alsuga

In brief:

Saint Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco was designed by architect Pier Luigi Nervi in 1971 and built amid an atmosphere of controversy. The building has been described by many as resembling an overgrown washing machine agitator, and several San Franciscans have taken to calling it "Our Lady of Maytag" for this resemblance. Others find the swooping pyramid shape refreshingly modern for sacred Catholic architecture.

Technical: 

The Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, known familiarly as St. Mary's Cathedral, in San Francisco has become a landmark that annually draws thousands of people to this sacred structure, which combines the rich traditions of the Catholic faith with modern technology.

The cathedral's striking design flows from the geometric principle of the hyperbolic paraboloid, in which the structure curves upward in graceful lines from the four comers meeting in a cross. Measuring 255 feet square, the cathedral soars to 190 feet high and is crowned with a 55 foot golden cross.

Four corner pylons, each one designed to withstand ten million pounds of pressure, support the cupola, which rises 19 stories above the floor. The pylons measure just 24 feet in circumference at their narrowest point and extend 90 feet down into bedrock. The inner surface of the cupola is made up of 1680 pre-cast triangular coffers of 128 different sizes, designed to distribute the weight of the cupola. At each comer of the cathedral, vast windows look out upon spectacular views of San Francisco, the City of Saint Francis of Assisi. The cathedral's red brick floor recalls early Mission architecture, and the rich heritage of the local church.

Above the altar is a kinetic sculpture by Richard Lippold. Alive with reflected light, the 14 tiers of triangular aluminum rods symbolize the channel of love and grace from God to His people, and their prayers and praise rising to him. The sculpture, suspended by gold wires, is 15 stories high and weighs one ton.

The 'boob' story:

Urban legend also has it that the Catholic Church sued the architect over the appearance of the breast, claiming that the appearance of a naked breast on the side of a cathedral somehow mocks the Church, which is reputed for being uptight about sexuality.

…

On the issue of the Catholic Church's lawsuit, extensive research shows no evidence that the church ever filed suit against Nervi or even threatened to. The rumor could have started by the "telephone game" effect after individuals associated with the church or the Archdiocese made private commentary on the shape, but even this is idle speculation. 

See more about breasts (from the fabulous Miss Cellania)

"Green Pear with Zipper Open," 2006,
blown glass and mixed media, 8 x 8 x 4"

Link via neatorama 

"My Pet Fish" Soap looks like the bag that you carry home from the pet store, but don’t be fooled…these plastic fish are not swimming in water, they are embedded in clear, vegetable based glycerin soap shaped like "water in a bag". A great party favor. Fun for kids from 1 to 100. Comes in assorted colors; let us choose the color. Soap has no scent; measures about 3 1/2"H x 3" at widest; 5 1/2" from top to bottom of bag.

Link via arbroath 

Gordon Bennet, not to be confused with the English expression, makes these wonderful robot sculptures. via blort

Ingmar Bergman in a 1981 photo. Bergman died on Monday at the age of 89, local news agency TT reported, citing his daughter Eva Bergman. (REUTERS/Jacob Forsell/File)

From article:

When the news broke that Ingmar Bergman had died on the lonely and windswept island of Faro, off the coast of Sweden, it seemed like an appropriately tragic spot. Bergman spent a lifetime creating lonely and windswept movies: a cinema of inner life in which man was tormented by his relationship with women and with God.

He was sort of a poet of anguish (his first screenplay, written in 1944, was called Torment), whose best-known movies were existential meditations on the meaning of life. The most famous scene in a Bergman film was in the 1957 religious allegory The Seventh Seal in which Max von Sydow -- part of a Bergman repertory company, along with Liv Ullman, with whom he had a daughter -- portrays a knight who plays chess with Death. It’s a scene that sums up the tragic symbolism of Bergman’s oeuvre, and it defined his public image for many years: in one of a number of parodies, the heroes of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey play Twister with Death.

Bergman himself may have enjoyed the satire. Despite the austerity of his movies, he had a puckish side. When a Swedish film magazine published an "anti-Bergman" issue, Bergman himself contributed a critical piece, under a pseudonym. Near the end of his career, he acknowledged that he was depressed by his own movies and couldn’t watch them any more.

Link to article 

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian maestro new word whose films of modern alienation captured aspects of human consciousness previously unexplored by cinema, died at his home Monday in Rome. The director of such classics as "L'Avventura" and "Blow Up" was 94.

His death, coming a day after the death of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, served to remind film lovers of the richness and invention of European cinema in the 1960s and '70s and how very little that has followed can match that era, both for its sheer ambition and for its faith in the possibilities of film. 

Continue reading article 

Link to Flickr Pool

Painting Likely Done While Artist Was In Asylum, Experts Say

From article:

Art expert and historians in Boston and Amsterdam announced Friday that they have discovered a valuable lost work by the painter Vincent Van Gogh hidden under an existing canvas at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, discovered the Van Gogh painting underneath the artist's painting entitled "Ravine," which is owned by the MFA.

MFA conservator Meta Chavannes was conducting a technical examination of "Ravine" and discovered the existence of the second painting below the paint surface of the work.

Upon meeting with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and Louis van Tilborgh, the Van Gogh research curator at the Van Gogh Museum, it was established that the underlying composition was most likely painted in June 1889, the museum said, during the early period of Van Gogh's stay at the asylum of Saint-Paul de Mausole near the Provençal town of Saint-Rémy, and was reused as a support for Ravine a few months later, in October 1889.

Van Tilborgh related the X-radiograph of Ravine to a drawing Van Gogh sent his brother in mid-1889 entitled "Wild Vegetation."

Scholars have suggested that this drawing, in the Van Gogh Museum, forms part of group of around a dozen drawn copies of paintings that the artist sent to his brother Theo in July 1889, but no painting was known upon which this particular drawing could have been based. As a result of this current research, the lost painting has been rediscovered, officials said.

Video and performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson ordered a life-sized, realistic sex doll made to look just like her, and named it Amber. The couple scampered off to Vegas and got married. "Their wedding video and other footage documenting their relationship will screen for the public this week," reports the Chicago Reader. Link.

Previous doll posts on P&F: 

Real Dolls and the men who love them…

Over the last few weeks I've been running into articles on this topic including an excellent documentary by Channel 4.

Link to documentary 'Guys and Dolls'.

Link

This illusion can be pretty harsh on the eyes but worth it for some excellent results.

Link to Crooked Brains and more images 

Designer and Illustrator Bill McMullen silk-screens these wads as part of his "One Million." Shown here, 1 of 100 blocks, second edition.

Found at Moillusions

If you look at the spinning girl's silhouette below, you will think it is spinning clockwise, probably. When you check her shadow below, momentarily the spinning direction changes in your mind, and now the girl is spinning counter-clockwise. It can be quite hard at the beginning to notice switch of the spinning direction, but eventually you'll manage.

 via yeinjee

photo: digikuva

From Yahoo news: 

EDINBURGH - Joseph and Mary boogie on down to Bethlehem with their loud-mouthed donkey in a disco version of the Nativity that is pure kitsch.

If awards were handed out at the Edinburgh Fringe for camp humour, then "Discotivity" would be a leading contender for top honours at the world's largest and zaniest arts festival.

Michelle McManus, winner of the reality TV talent show "Pop Idol", was understandably nervous about taking on the part of the Virgin Mary in the boisterous production.

I've been a fan of Banksy's for a long time. Don't think I'll be able catch this show though. He has pulled some stunts in America: NYC, Brooklyn and LA.  Pictures link

The Wooster Collective round-up of Banksy links.

Pictures of the London exhibition: [1]  [2]  [3]

Link 

Photos: Allyscha

Thanks Smith 

photos: Annie Leibovitz

Link to article

This is a very cool resource… 

Martin Klimas destroys a lot of clay to make his art. Combining the silence of Eadweard Muybridge’s horse pictures with the association-rich composition of a still life, Klimas breaks recognizable objects so they become something else, and stops us just at the moment of transformation.

Link to artist's site 

Fun blog full of submitted images of what creatives have on their desks.

(Shouldn't this be an upper and lower case?) 

Shown here: 

Toniduran, Graphic Designer & illustrator
Cherbourg, France
www.toniduran.ouvaton.org 

Link to blog 

Los Angeles Pop Art involves an art form commonly known as Micrography. This art form has been around for centuries and has primarily been used by artists of Israeli decent; it is the style of creating an image strictly using the words that tell the story of that specific image. 

LA Pop Art

Link to lots more pictures 

Apparently the doll is edible —jelly perhaps? Anyhow it was too good to pass up for all its edible goodness. Note the 'hand stick' on the side that you can use for whatever…

Link to larger JPG image

From neatorama:

The pottery, named Yuanyang II, is one of the collections of Hong Kong Museum of Art now displaying at the Central Concourse of Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA). It is produced by Tsang Cheung-shing, a ceramic art tutor and product designer.

Yuanyang II is modeled in a distinctive form with two figures indulged in kissing each other. Their heads support two elegant cups for drinking tea and coffee. The form and concept design fully complement the theme “Yuanyang” (a typical Hong Kong beverage of mixing tea and coffee), a symbol of marriage and love, with a touch of humour for artistic creation.

Found here then click on public projects

Aletsch Glacier/Switzerland 8.18.07: US-Installation artist Spencer Tunick and Greenpeace Switzerland present a living sculpture: hundreds of naked people symbolise the vulnerability of the glaciers under climate change.

Link to more images 

realated post 

Link to more lamps 

Link to artist's bio 

Cris Siqueira or Cris Vector, is a commercial llustrator whose works are created as vector art (using Adobe Illustrator). Lovely stuff.

Thanks Christo 

Link to YouTube 

Thanks Brady! 

According to Scott Beale at Laughing Squid: 

Wow, this is a shocker. At around 3 am Tuesday morning at Burning Man 2007, during a rare lunar eclipse, the Burning Man sculpture was set on fire prematurely (it is normally burned on Saturday). The Black Rock City Emergency Services Department was able to put out the fire in time and salvage the sculpture (it had not yet been loaded with fuel or explosives). It is still scheduled for its normal burn on Saturday and they will be working throughout the week to repair any burn damage and re-install the neon.

Lots more info, pictures and updates at Laughing Squid 

UPDATE: arsonist arrested 

Link to SF Bay Guardian blog 

Installation at Havana Biennnial

Lots more work available on his website 

What is this about?

It's about finding an answer to that age-old question, the one that we have all asked ourselves:

What would happen if you shipped 20 unassembled old-timey wooden fishing lure kits off to be finished by a bunch of artists? It turns out that the answer is CRANKbait! Lures of Distinction.

Shown here by Hugh Macdonald, see them all here.

Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing fame painted one too.

Link 

Not unlike Julian Beever's chalk pavement drawings

Link to collection 

From article:

AN image of a horse created with more than half a million toothpicks in homage to Antoni Gaudi has earned Albanian artist Saimir Strati a second entry in the Guinness Records.

I've measured it; it is a new Guinness World Record," Andrea Banfi, an adjudicator for Guinness World Records, told a cheering crowd after checking that the mosaic followed the guidelines agreed with Guinness.

Strati spent 13 hours a day for 40 days on the mosaic measuring 2m by 4m in a technique resembling digital camera pixels, using either sharpened or blunt ends of oak, poplar and bamboo toothpicks.

He said the idea to produce the mosaic came to him while he tried to explain to a friend what La Sagrada Familia, the unfinished Barcelona cathedral of Spanish architect and artist Antoni Gaudi, looked like.

"I took some toothpicks from the table and opened them to show him how it looked like," said Strati. "I named the horse 'Reinless Spirit' to honour Gaudi's flight of genius."

The mosaic was shown to the public in the round hall of Tirana's pyramid-shaped culture centre.

Strati's portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, the world's largest mosaic of nails, is shown nearby.

Link

More images 

Similar previous post on P&F 'animal' art sandwiches 

Airship On The Long Course

Car Shoes

Link to more illustrations 

Via Neatorama 

Every now and then the internet surprises me with an unexpected gem. While searching for an image for a different post, I came across these great photos of a Montreal street artist named 'Roadsworth'. Apparently "Montreal police arrested Gibson on November 29  last year [2005] and charged him with 51 counts of mischief, the charges carrying maximum penalties ranging from $200 to $5,000" but since January 6, 2006, "All charges against Gibson have been dropped. His punisment is a minor fine and 40 hours of 'community work'."

Makes me want to grab a few cans of aerosol!

(All images found on Flickr) 

Source of above quotes

Link to FlickrSet 

If you like guerilla-street-stencil art you will most definitely like these too, by Banksy. 

Cool Russian website with lots of user submitted self portraits with the contents of their pockets.

Link 

Link to more examples 

These where sent to me by two local San francisco artists:

Below, [Above] you’ll find four choices that highlight the places that most of us urban hipsters like to frequent and the remainder of you drug addicts and johns like to frequent as well.  Choose wisely. Your T-shirt will be a sign that you were the first in San Francisco history to own an ironic SF Parks and Rec parody shirt before everyone else did. 

Each high-quality sweatshop-free 100% cotton American Apparel T comes with a free design on it and will only set you back $20. 

Link to come shortly or check comments.

The nine metre (30 feet) high and wide creature is made of bronze, stainless steel and marble and is the creation of renowned artist Louise Bourgeois.

"The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver," the 95-year-old Bourgeois said in a statement.

"Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother," she added.

Huh? Link

Clip:

A high school art teacher fired after officials learned he moonlighted by creating paintings using his bare buttocks and other body parts sued his former employers on Thursday.

Stephen Murmer was fired in January after Chesterfield County Public Schools officials saw a YouTube video of Murmer wearing a swim thong and a Groucho Marx mask, demonstrating how he applies paint to his backside, then presses it onto a canvas. read more

About Stephen Murmer the artist 

William Hundley takes photographs of people covered with sheets while jumping.

Lots more images

Link to FLickrSet 

Wiki entry on Gaetano

From the Wired article: 

Wired: You started working on this movie more than 25 years ago. How does it feel to be talking about it again?

Scott: It never went away, so I'm used to it. It kept reemerging, and that's when I realized that it had really unusual staying power. It's all very well to say, "Well, I knew it had." But I didn't, really, at the time. I knew I'd done a pretty interesting movie, but it was so unusual that the majority of people were taken aback. They simply didn't get it. Or, I think, better to say that they were enormously distracted by the environment.

Wired: What do you mean by that?

Scott:I was touching on possibilities like replication. It's now quite commonplace, but 25 years ago they were barely discussing it in the corridors of power. Now, the film is not really about that at all, it's simply leveraging that possibility into one of those detective film-noir kinds of stories. People were familiar with that kind of character, but not with the world I was cooking up. I wanted to call it San Angeles, and somebody said, "I don't get it." I said, "You know, San Francisco and Los Angeles." It's bizarre: People only think about what's under their noses until it comes and kicks them in the ass.

Wired: How did you decide to tell a 21st-century story in a 1940s style?

Scott:Well, people want a comfortable preconception about what they're seeing. It's a bit like 20 years of Westerns and, now, 45 years of cop movies. People are comfortable with the roles. Even though every nook and cranny has been explored, they'll still sit through endless variations on cops and bad guys, right? In this instance, I was doing a cop and a different bad guy. And to justify the creation of the bad guy, i.e., replication, it had to be in the future.

Link to Wired article

Found at baldhead.nl 

Found here. (A PDF file is also available for download)

Gene Simmons pumpkin with ham tongue, from the 2006 winners list. Link

With an interesting post on the 'art' of sharpening pencils. Link

Christopher Locke buys up confiscated scissors from TSA auctions and makes these really cool spider sculptures from them. Follow link to see more pictures and a how-to of the process.

Link to more 

Clip: 

A group of German grannies have turned their knitting circle into a company selling kinky knitwear.

Their range includes lingerie, face masks and willy warmers, as well as conventional woollen clothing.

Manuela Buesch-Dankewitz, 45, who manages the group of lady knitters said: "The women love to knit, and it's great to earn something from it.

"Our oldest team member is 86. She makes willy warmers and other gear just like the rest."

Ms Buesch-Dankewitz came up with the idea after a US customer asked for a woollen bondage suit and since then has expanded her team to cater for ever more exotic tastes.

She added: "Since we put the items on-line we have been flooded with requests from all around the world.

"We make our wool products to order and there is a big demand out there."

The firm's products can be seen on their new web site at http://wolltraum.de

Link

From Annanova:

The organisers of the Basel Shift Festival have decided not to report the theft to the police yet, and hope the thief will return the book.

The book with the words "Steal this Book" emblazoned across its cover had been placed in an incubator by artists from the Viennese artist's group Ubermorgen.

A spokesman for the artists said: "The central part of the work was a book with the title 'Steal this Book' as a way of representing in art an internet hacking operation that made entire books readable on amazon.com, instead of just single pages.

"It was an attempt to praise those that fought for the right for literary freedom, and not an invitation to steal the book."

The book was written by Abbie Hoffman in 1970 and published in 1971, and includes advice on growing marijuana, starting a pirate radio station, living in a commune, stealing food, shoplifting, stealing credit cards, making pipe bombs, and obtaining a free buffalo from the US Department of the Interior.

Many bookstores refused to carry the book, because so many patrons followed the advice of the book's title and stole it.

Clip:

Known for stretching the fashion limits with his avant garde design for the label Undercover, Jun Takashi recently came out with this Brain Bag.

Link 

More pictures at Very Bored 

Link to 8 more images 

Previously about Banksy on P&F 

Very nice website. 

The 18-year-old contortionist, who dresses in a snakeskin costume, is amazing audiences with her incredible poses and eye-watering gyrations. 

Nokulunga Buthelezi is so naturally flexible that her mother found her asleep one day when she was three - with her legs tucked behind her neck.

Six years later, the young girl from South Africa joined a touring circus in the United States and is now a major star of Afrika! Afrika!, a £4.2million extravaganza opening at the O2 arena in London on January 17.

Read more

From PingMag, a Tokyo-based magazine about "Design and Making Things"

In Tokyo, you can wear these every night - in other cities, there will soon be Carnival. How about false eyelashes by Kakuyasu Uchiide! The brilliant Japanese head make-up artist of renowned Shu Uemura cosmetics will give you beauty obsessed people a tour through his current false eyelash collection for instant transformation into a mysterious Egyptian princess, an extravagant bird or a magical wood elf… We are not being silly here. PingMag spoke also to Uchiide about the perfectionist standards of beauty in Japan. 

article with more examples

UPDATE: Video available here or by clicking on the image.

NEW YORK - Four giant waterfalls will be erected in New York for three months this summer in a public art project city officials hope will create $55 million in extra tourism revenue for the Big Apple.

The waterfalls, including one that will fall from the famed Brooklyn Bridge, are the brainchild of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Installation will cost $15 million, funded by private donations to New York's Public Art Fund.

Link 

Flickr user str820.com photographs objects embedded in tarmac, some of the comments are funny as people suggest what they think the objects are, shown here for example: 'mechanical mouse?'

Link to photoset

Link to YouTube clip

This is one of over 70 different missions Improv Everywhere has executed over the past six years in New York City. Others include the No Pants Subway Ride, the Best Buy uniform prank, and the famous U2 Rooftop Hoax, to name a few. Visit the website to see tons of photos and video of all of our work, including behind the scenes information on how this video was made.

From the Austrian Cultural Forum: 

Gregor Graf’s exploration of urban architecture involves taking medium format images of mundane urban settings and painstakingly removing all text and symbolic references from the image, producing an anonymous and generic metropolis, yet evoking a sense of familiarity. In 2006 Graf was commissioned by the Visual Arts Platform to produce a new work during a residency in London. For his first UK solo show at the Austrian Cultural Forum London, Graf will exhibit new photographs of London along with other new works produced during a residency in Chicago, bringing together exploration of this two huge and complex urbanscapes.

Link to Artist's site

Melting chocolate bunnies

Many other examples of Kinematic typography, including 'Kill Bill', 'The Big Lebowski', 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' and 'Psycho' can be found here.

From the lenticular cover that changes with the angle of your hands, all the way to the Z, ABC3D is as much a work of art as it is a pop-up book. Each of the 26 dimensional letters move and change before your eyes. C turns into D with a snap. M stands at attention. X becomes Y with a flick of the wrist. And then there's U... Boldly conceived and brilliantly executed with a striking black, red, and white palette, this is a book that readers and art lovers of all ages will treasure for years to come.

MARION BATAILLE is graphic and book designer who has never before been published in this country. She lives in Paris. This is just a hand-made mock-up of the actual book which publishes in Oct. 2008.

You're being watched: Despite being observed by CCTV cameras, elusive grafitti artist Baksy managed to create his latest - and biggest - work to date under the cover of darkness

Source 

Link to NYT interactive 

Chinese artist Li Wei has produced an unsettling series of self-portraits involving his face reflected in mirrors in public places, and photographs of himself crashing into walls and sidewalks.

More pictures and article. 

This game is a challenge. 

When layed out like below, the design reveals the Shield of the Royal Arms. 

Designed by Matthew Dent. 

Link to the Royal Mint. 

Awesome collection of photographs from the Cans Festival by Justine (AKA RUGenius) at NOTCOT.

She also scanned the entire festival program. 

Photos of the event 1 and 2.

Too bad there aren't links to larger sizes of the posters. 

30,000 bubble stickers were printed by New York artist Ji Lee.
They are placed on top of OOH ads all over New York City. Passersby fill them in.
Later the results are photographed.

Link to The Bubble Project.

Link to video of Ji Lee in action. 

Via 

Link to The Ampersand

"Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada transforms common people into icons by rendering them in charcoal as urban murals. By questioning the controls imposed on public space, the role models that represents us in the public space and the type of events that are guarded by the collective memory he breaks preconceptions of where art is permitted, when art is needed and to whom it is directed. Documentary created by Ana Alvarez-Errecalde and FILMCHICK PRODUCTIONS."

Via Wooster Collective 

I have two daughters.

They are all I ever wanted from the earth.

Or almost all.

I also wanted one piece of ground:

One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.

So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.

Now they are grown up and far away
and memory itself
has become an emigrant,
wandering in a place
where love dissembles itself as landscape:

Where the hills
are the colour's of a child's eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons:

At night,
on the edge of sleep,
I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.
Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.

Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,

shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then

I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.

I see myself
on the underwold side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:

Ireland. Absence. Daughter.

Eavan Boland 

Link to set

Interview and more pictures  found on The Design Files

Link 

Animal hairstyles? 

Sure, why not? Link

From article:

COLLEGE HILL - Dr. Fredric J. Baur was so proud of having designed the container for Pringles potato crisps that he asked his family to bury him in one.

His children honored his request. Part of his remains was buried in a Pringles can - along with a regular urn containing the rest - in his grave at Arlington Memorial Gardens in Springfield Township.

Link 

Lovely stuff. 

Artist Emma Hack, who lives in Australia, creates really gorgeous designs utilizing female models that she successfully blends in with their surroundings. Link to more samples here.

Vaguely similar to the Israeli artist, Desiree Palmen, I posted about here last week. 

From Flickr: 

Photographer Jason Tozer was asked to take some pictures of bubbles by Creative Review magazine, using the new Sony Alpha camera. More details on how he achieved the shots will be posted at the CR Blog.

Thanks Kevin. 

Link to gallery 

Rachel Papo is an Israeli who was born in 1970 in Columbus, Ohio but was raised in Israel. She began photographing as a teenager and attended a renowned fine-arts high-school in Haifa, Israel. At age eighteen she served in the Israeli Air Force as a photographer. These two intensive years of service inspired her current photographic project titled after her own number during service -- Serial No. 3817131.

8 hours of writing
5 permanent markers
3 baths and 2 showers to clean off

Part of a campaign to promote writing on designated graffiti walls rather than someone elses property.

Link to YouTube

Very cool video of the event from set-up to the happening itself.

Link to YouTube clip

Previously on P&F about Banksy:

Photos from Banksy’s Cans Festival — 05.07.08

Graffiti artist Banksy pulls off most audacious stunt to date - despite being watched by CCTV

Banksy returns to Bethlehem

Banksy's debt to Warhol revealed in London show

Mr. Brainwash aka MBW is a movie maker and street artist. With an art show funded by himself in the once abandoned CBS studio on Sunset, he created a sanitarium for the artistically inclined...and hipsters? Anywho, the show was packed up the A-hole as the lined curved around the building with the first 200 hundred anticipating their free Elvis posters.

Video for Le le's hitsong 'Breakfast'. It consists solely of drawings made by Piet Parra that are also used as loops during the live performances. The song is about bitches and eggs...

Link to YouTube clip.

UPDATE: Video available here.

NEW YORK - Four giant waterfalls will be erected in New York for three months this summer in a public art project city officials hope will create $55 million in extra tourism revenue for the Big Apple.

The waterfalls, including one that will fall from the famed Brooklyn Bridge, are the brainchild of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Installation will cost $15 million, funded by private donations to New York's Public Art Fund.

Link

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Create your own or just browse the latest user creations.

Sorry I can't remember where I originally came across these but have held on to them for years.

Link to his site. +pictures

Da Vinci’s painting of the young woman has raised many questions over the years, such as, “Who was she?” and “What was she smiling about?” The mystery of the painting has inspired many artists duplicate Da Vinci’s masterpiece in many mediums.

View all images

Link to clip

Is it true? From The Daily Mail:

He is perhaps the most famous, or infamous, artist alive. To some a genius, to others a vandal. Always controversial, he inspires admiration and provokes outrage in equal measure.

Since Banksy made his name with his trademark stencil-style 'guerrilla' art in public spaces - on walls in London, Brighton, Bristol and even on the West Bank barrier separating Israelis and Palestinians - his works have sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

He has dozens of celebrity collectors including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Christina Aguilera.

…

He is also known for his headline-making stunts, such as leaving an inflatable doll dressed as a Guantanamo prisoner in Disneyland, California, and hanging a version of the Mona Lisa - but with a smiley face - in the Louvre, Paris.

But perhaps his most provocative statement, and the one that generates the most publicity, is the fact that Banksy's true identity has always been a jealously guarded secret, known to only a handful of trusted friends.

Continue reading article

Previously related:

Time lapse video of Banky's 'Cans Festival'

Photos from Banksy’s Cans Festival — 05.07.08

Graffiti artist Banksy pulls off most audacious stunt to date - despite being watched by CCTV

Banksy returns to Bethlehem

Banksy's debt to Warhol revealed in London show

1. Multicolr Search Lab

Select up to 10 colors and get image results that use that palette. Pretty cool.

We extracted the colours from 3 million “interesting” Flickr images. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.

Link to Multicolr Search Lab

2. CompFight

Unsure how this site does it, but it generates search results twice as fast a search on Flickr itself, even displays the pixel dimensions of the largest version of the image available. I use this site ALL the time.

Link to CompFight

Chilean designers of the 60's and 70's.

If anyone has any more info please email me at:

peter(AT)puppiesandflowers.com

6 1/2 minute trailer for an upcoming documentary on Roadsworth by Alan Kohl, funded by the International Film Board of Canada. Looks really good. Link to video.

From a previous post on Puppies and Flowers:

Every now and then the internet surprises me with an unexpected gem. While searching for an image for a different post, I came across these great photos of a Montreal street artist named 'Roadsworth'. Apparently "Montreal police arrested Gibson on November 29  last year [2005] and charged him with 51 counts of mischief, the charges carrying maximum penalties ranging from $200 to $5,000" but since January 6, 2006, "All charges against Gibson have been dropped. His punisment is a minor fine and 40 hours of 'community work'."

See the pictures.

Link to his slick website.

"The future will be analog"

"Freedom, remember? One day we all had it."

"Big car, small chick!"
(Chick is Portugeuse slang for penis).

Found here, thanks for the translations Fabio!

Zulmira blog

Dr. Steel envisions living in a world where fun is the top priority. He imagines a landscape filled with endless possibilities based on the ideology that life should be spent doing the things that make us happy.

Dr. Steel's Army of Toy Soldiers are active supporters of this cause. A Toy Soldier knows that by rejecting fear, embracing inspiration and by uniting in a singular focused vision, that the world can and will be transformed into a Utopian Playland.

By becoming a Toy Soldier you are an integral part of Dr. Steel's success. You are Dr. Steel's eyes and ears. You are the legs on which he stands.

Only YOU can help Dr. Steel take over the world, so sign up today and begin making this world a better place!

Link to site

Philadelphia based Gyro Worldwide is pleased to present a collaborative video installation currently on display, on all facades of the The InterContinental Los Angeles - Century City. For the entire month of July, The InterContinental Hotel in Century City will present the artwork of Los Angeles painter and stylist Kime Buzzelli through artistic video vignettes designed to capture and display the essence and amenities available at The InterContinental. The video projection, produced by Klip Collective, is live from dusk to midnight each night, for the entire month of July, and is visible all the way from Santa Monica to Century City, turning the 17-story hotel inside-out for all to see.

Link to YouTube

more pictures at darkroastedblend 

This amazing Wifi T-Shirt illuminates with 802.11b or 802.11g showing the precise strength. This T-Shirt uses EL technology. What is EL? Simply explained, EL (stand for Electro-Luminescence) is paper thin panels that radiate light. This technology is superior to other light emitting technologies because it is light weight, flexible, durable, generates no heat, waterproof and landfill friendly because it's production uses no hazardous materials.

Link to site

More of the series here.

Link to Jeff's site

Link to Michael Gilette's website. Read about Ian Fleming. 

Real name, Paul Curtis, Moose is the grand-daddy of reverse graffiti. He’s been cleaning the streets of the UK and beyond for around ten years.

Using detergent and a wire brush, the tools of many a cleaner, he works with advertisers to create innovative clean messages and slogans that inevitably turn into works of art. One of his more recent works, the Reverse Graffiti Project, was on San Francisco’s Broadway tunnel in conjunction with Green Works, to promote a plant-based cleaner.

More images after the jump. Via

David Byrne and the New York City Department of Transportation, in conjunction with New York art gallery PaceWildenstein, have unveiled nine unique bicycle racks designed by DB and installed in various locations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. An avid bicyclist for almost 30 years, Byrne was invited to join the panel of jurors selected by the DOT to judge a design competition for outdoor and indoor bicycle racks. Inspired by the city's initiative, he submitted some original design ideas of his own named after specific locations and neighborhoods, which the DOT enthusiastically agreed to install for a period of 364 days.

Link to site 

As reported by the Wooster Collective:

After leaving New Orleans, it appears that Banksy is now heading through the Deep South.

The piece below was spotted on an old abandoned Chevron Station near Birmingham Alabama. (We're told it's somewhere between where the 59 Freeway meets the 65 going South near a large Home Depot on the 59)

Link

Previously about Banksy on P&F:

Banksy in New Orleans

Graffiti artist Banksy pulls off most audacious stunt to date - despite being watched by CCTV

Banksy returns to Bethlehem

Banksy's debt to Warhol revealed in London show

Photos from Banksy’s Cans Festival — 05.07.08

Time lapse video of Banky's 'Cans Festival'

Stina Persson is an illustrator based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Source 

From the Wooster Collective:

While New Yorkers have been consumed by the stock market meltdown, a tiny little pet store quietly opened four days ago at 89 7th Avenue between West 4th and Bleeker Street in the West Village of New York City.

There are no puppies or kittens in the windows here.

Instead, a live leopard lounges on a tree in the window.

Or is it?

In other windows, things get a bit more bizarre.

McDonald's Chicken McNuggets sip barbecue sauce. A rabbit puts on her makeup. A CCTV camera nurtures its young.

Clearly, that this isn't your typical pet store.

So who's the "owner" of the Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill at 89 West 7th Avenue?

Banksy.

Once inside Banksy's pet store, you discover such things as breaded fish that swim in a large round bowl while hot dogs are living the high life under heat lamps in cages near the cash register.

This is the first time that Banksy has used animatronics, and the effect is absolutely amazing.

A clear departure form last year's behemoth show in Los Angeles, Banksy's first ever show in New York City (the others have been fakes) is being held in a tiny storefront that's less than 300 square feet and can't hold more than 20 people at any one time.

One of our favorite things about what Banksy has done is that the entire show is completely visible to the public both day and night through the store front windows. And unless you're a hard core Banksy fan, or until someone like us tells you, it's absolutely impossible to know that the work has been done by Banksy. There are no paintings or graffiti in the entire space.

We're sure that as soon as people start reading this, photos and video will be all over the web. But Sara and I don't want to give too much away. It's just too much fun to be surprised (and delighted) in person.

So here's just a taste of what you'll experience in Banksy's "Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill".

Starting the moment you read this, until October 31st (Halloween), Banksy's pet store is officially open each and every daily from 10am until midnight.

One piece of advice - Bring a video camera as still images don't do the place justice!

Thanks Eric B. 

I love these light bulbs by Pieke Bergmans.  Select 'work' then 'light bulbs' to see more images including the fabrication process.

From apartment therapy:

Pieke Bergmans' series of one-of-a-kind crystal LED lamps for Royal Leerdam Crystal and Solid Lighting are what the designer calls "light blubs." And what exactly is a light blub?

"The answer is simple," says the young Dutch designer. "It is a light bulb that has gone way out of line. Infected by the dreaded Design Virus, these Blubs have taken on all kinds of forms and sizes you wouldn't expect from such well behaving and reliable little products."

Bergmans calls her one-of-a-kind light sculptures "unlimited edition," in that that each unique piece is made using an industrial process she developed that can be repeated until the end of time.

Not much about asboluv on his Flickr page but his work speaks for itself.
Link to set.

Diem Chau — See her website for more images

Peter Goldlust — See his website for more images

I get inspired by the industrial world, all the rigidity of machinery, the network of pipes, wires, refineries, etc. Then I join that with an opposite of flowing graceful, harmonious, and pleasing design of the Baroque and Rococo. And of course I add a bit weirdness and the macabre.

Propaganda Am-Bush Machine

Churchtank Type6.6F with Mine Rollers

Church Tank Type 5A

Venus Admiring Mars' Gun

Link to site

Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin makes images of unexpected buildings – that is, he "combines photographs of parts of buildings into new, fictional, architectonic structures," Mark Magazine explains.

Link Via BLDGBLOG

Francoise Nielly lives in a world of images.
She has explored the different facets of "image" all her life , through painting, photography, roughs, illustrations and virtual, computer generated animated graphics. It is clear now that painting is her direction and her passion.

untitled 435

untitled 476

untitled 421

untitled 492

Link to more paintings  via

Show me more covers…

From Glenfiddich's site:

Following the success of the inaugural Glenfiddich Barrel Art exhibition in 2007, we have developed a new exhibition for 2008. This year’s programme involves a single artist who will produce a collection of works that encapsulate the theme of time. We’ve chosen esteemed designer Michael Johnson. Michael has been at the forefront of British design throughout a career spanning decades and work the theme of time has been prevalent in his work to date.

Link to Exhibition site with more photos.  [via]

Link to collection

For two years Richard Howe systematically photographed every street corner in NYC.

From his site:

The Manhattan Street Corners is my working title for a project to produce a comprehensive photographic portrait of everyday life at street level in daytime Manhattan. Between March and November, 2006, I systematically photographed each and every one of the island’s roughly 11,000 street corners (the exact number is a matter of definition and, in some ambiguous instances, even a matter of judgment). 

Orchard Street & Broome Street, Southeast Corner

Elizabeth Street & Spring Street, Northeast Corner

Broadway & Canal Street, Northeast Corner

Link to The Manhattan Street Corners with much larger images.

Chenman is a Beijing born photographer. She does all her own post work including 3D renderings. These samples are for Beijing Skateboard.

Vibrant and frenetic:

California born illustrator Martin French graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and now lives and works in Portland, Oregon. He spent 10 years working as a designer and director in digital media before opening an independent studio in 1996. His diverse, dynamic body of work includes street murals in Sao Paulo, Brazil, posters for the Olympics, and portraits for the Grammy Awards. Martins' clients are among the top institutions, magazines, and publishers throughout North America and Europe  more about

Esperanca II

Duende 2

Jump 33

 Betty Carter

Savoy 33

Protest

Link to portfolio

Thanks Noah.

Apparently she makes them for her lucky boyfriend who has posted a Flickr set here, she also has her own blog too.

Via SwissMiss

From her own statement:

Using the “modernist DNA” of typography fonts such as Bauhaus, Futura, and Helvetica, I create visual improvisations. I use fragments of found typography to take apart and put back together language. My work employs traditional painting media (encaustic and polymer resins) as well as materials that extend the medium of painting (adhesive vinyl, flocking and metallic films).

 

Lovely stuff, more paintings and installations can be found on her site.

Link to Anthony Lister's website. Link to Flickr Set. Via

Here are 30 illustrations from the book Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern. These diagrams outline causes of electrical accident. Thanks bre pettis.

After the link, click on Portfolio, then select "Project One".

Clicking on images launches Flash movie.

From The Behance Network:

Title: I Lose myself

Magazine: Hintmag

Photographer- Paco Peregrín (www.pacoperegrin.com )

Art Direction, digital art and illustrated- Calvin Ho (www.atomicattack.com)

Styling- Kattaca (www.kattaca.com )

Make up artist and Hairdresser- Beatriz Matallana.(beatrizmatallana.com)

Lots more samples…

Link to more

Police seek blow-up doll sex bandit

SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian man broke into three adult shops, had sex with blow up dolls named "Jungle Jane" and then dumped his plastic conquests in a nearby alley, local media reported Wednesday.

"It's totally bizarre. It's a real concern that someone like that is out on the street," said one of the owners of the adult sex shops in Cairns in northern Queensland state.

"He has been taking the dolls out the back and blowing them up and using the dolls and leaving them in the alley," the owner, who gave the name of Vogue, told the Cairns Post newspaper.

Police told the Cairns Post that scientific officers had taken DNA samples, fingerprints and pictures of the crime scene. Link

400 Russian men and women use inflatable sex dolls as flotation devices on river run

From article: The unusual sporting event was dreamed up by mastermind and organiser Dmitry Bulawinov. He said the idea of floating down the river in the embraces of a rubber woman was conceived as a joke at a party where...

Chinese confuse Russian kids with gender bending dolls

 From englishrussia: Lately some Russian newspapers post photos of these strange Chinese dolls. You can see the scanned piece of article from one Russian regional newspaper. The reason for the panic is that in Russian children toy stores have appeared strange...

An artist’s complicated relationship with her look-alike sex doll

Real Dolls and the men who love them…

Over the last few weeks I've been running into articles on this topic including an excellent documentary by Channel 4. Link to documentary 'Guys and Dolls'. This phenomenom is not to restricted to Japan, if you've watched the video above...

Poupées gonflées! (Mildly NSFW)

This letterpress poster was handcrafted character by character over the course of roughly 100 hours. Characters from the Bickham Script Pro, Engravers MT, and Epic typeface families form the edifice featured in the artwork, the Salt Lake Temple.

Each poster measures 16"x24" and is printed on Crane Lettra Pearl. Letterpressed by Bryce Knudson of Bjørn Letterpress in Provo, Utah.

Spire Detail

Link to Veer

I saw this abandoned mansion last week from the street and went in with my friend Michel as translator in case we ran into anyone. It took a bit of jimmying to force the door, and inside we found piles and piles of of binders and dozens of black and white photos, all showing one man at various political events.

It turns out the mansion used to be the home of Takieddin el-Solh ( 1908 - 1988) Lebanese Sunni politician who served as Prime Minister from 1973-74, and 1980. The binders were full of voter lists and various political documents. I'm assuming he abandoned the place during the civil war and moved to a more secure location. The house is in the Sunni section, but was within easy artillery distance of the Green Line.

Link to CraigFinlay's Flickr Set

Link

Similar to the 'Bubble Project' in New York

As far as I can tell, this is the original poster. 

From IMBd:

Media from The Birds (1963)

PHILADELPHIA - Renowned American artist Andrew Wyeth, famous for landscapes of his native Pennsylvania and Maine, died on Friday, according to a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum near his home.

Wyeth, who was 91, died in his sleep early in the morning, surrounded by his family and friends, after a brief illness, the museum said in a statement.

He is best known for "Christina's World" (1948), in which a disabled woman appears to be striving to cross a largely empty landscape. It was painted, like many of his other works, in egg tempera, a technique that he said forced him to slow down the execution of a painting.

Here are some samples of his more whimsical work:

PINOCCHIO // WASHING LINE // OUTLOOK DESIGN ITALIA 

BIGFOOT // SCALE // OUTLOOK DESIGN ITALIA

BIGNUT // HEADREST-BALL // OUTLOOK DESIGN ITALIA

Link to castiglionemorellidesign.it

 Continuing on the theme of Industrial Design, here is:

A peek at the upcoming design documentary "Objectified", by Gary Hustwit, the director of "Helvetica". The trailer features the voices of Jonathan Ive, Andrew Blauvelt, Marc Newson, and Karim Rashid. The song is "I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool" by El Ten Eleven.

Objectified premieres at film festivals and events worldwide starting this March, more info here: www.objectifiedfilm.com

Very cute handcrafted ceramic vases. Each one is unique and sells for $39.99.

Link to ModernArtisans  [via 7 Gadgets]

Link to Poster Boy's Flickr Set. [Via Wooster Collective]

 From Fecal Face interview:

I like juxtapositions. Putting blue on top of red is fun for me. Life and the world can be pretty dark but I believe, all in all, in good, even when it's bad. I see the bright neon colors like too much sugar. Like the way too much happy, makes you sick to your stomach. Not sure why I'm attracted to that. Life is brutal yet so awesome and great! I think I'm trying to paint what I cannot to say. 

Link to Joshua Petker's gallery

See also:

• The Paintings of Francoise Nielly
• Mixed media illustrations of Russ Mills

Excellent collection of numbers photographed on the streets of Budapest.
From Zsolt Molnár's blog:

This is my typo-photographic project that I started in Summer 2008, focusing on the typographical diversity of Budapest’s street numbers. On this blog I will post a number each day in 2009. 365 different types of street numbers hopefully.

Link to Budapest36.

Swiss artist and computer wiz Michael Flückiger combines installation, text art, and computer program design to create interactive text/projection works.

VIA

Link to Sky.com

Link to katwood on Flickr

I love Flickr. While looking for some reference material I came across this excellent collection. The prints look like lino-cuts or wood blocks.

From Oldtasty's Flickrset

This is an outstanding collection of Cultural-Revolution era imagery and propaganda, made available with thanks to Webster University (for use of their scanning station) and Flickr. Translations will be added over time.

Link to Flickrset

Huge collection and variety here, amazing. I only grabbed a few as examples.
Click on images for larger versions.

Author : Ewa Frysztak
Poster : "BALLADA O DZIEWCZYNIE", 1965

 

Author : Maciej Hibner

Poster : "IDIOTA", 1959

Author : Anna Huskowska

Poster : "MARIA CANDELARIA", 1959

Author : Wladyslaw Janiszewski

Poster : "LOTNA", 1959

Author : Waldemar Swierzy

Poster : "DREWNIANY ROZANIEC", 1964

The show is currently hung but the openiing reception is Friday, February 20th from 6-9pm at Reaves Gallery, 235 gough street, between fell & oak.

sinking 36h x 72w 2008

untitled 48h x 48w 2006

river sunset 48h x 44w 2006

merging 48h x 72w 2008

The video below shows Christo process of working with resin, magnets, pigments and ferrous metal powders, it's amazing to watch the metals in the resin take on the patterns of the magnetic energies.

Art and science recently overlapped in conversations I had with the late Jack Shearer, whose photographs of magnetic imagery (www.nanomagnetics.us) greatly resembled my own abstract compositions. This piece is the first composition with that inquiry in mind. Utilizing different sizes, shapes, and types of magnets of varying strengths, the images came to life by themselves, revealing the energy within them. Correlations between these simple constructions and the forces of natural phenomena that stimulate my imagination and creative expression have already furthered my process of discovery. 

Lots more at mpt.1607's Poster and Advertisements Flickr set.

For 30 Euros, a group of enterprising Palestinian graffiti artists are offering to tag the West Bank wall with your message.

Clip:

It could turn out to be the world's longest graffiti space - the massive concrete barrier separating Israel from the Palestinians.

Over the Internet, a group of Palestinian graffiti artists is offering to spray-paint your personal message on Israel's towering security wall in the occupied West Bank.

It costs 30 euros (NZ$75) per message and they can be as solemn or wacky as you want. Everything goes, except for obscene, offensive or extremist hate speech. Clients get three digital pictures of the finished product.

The 8-metre high barrier of massive concrete slabs is part of a 620-km fence Israel says is intended to keep suicide bombers out, and which can be dismantled at some point in the future when peace reigns. Source

 

dustinkeirstead

kari_cass

filippo minelli

JJ San

amerune

yobosayo

These images were found randomly, if you are looking for more of Banksy's West Bank wall project try this link.

This could be a brilliant viral for Apple's iPhone/iTouch or could just be the way The Mentalists roll.

Thanks Brady, Nathan G.

Alexandre Duret-Lutz, a French photographer, specialises in creating what he calls "Wee Planets"

View the rest of the collection here.

All Lilia Trizotto's Flickr profile says is that she's female and taken.

Link to Flickr set.

Mike Ruiz's editorial Masterpiece for Zink Magazine makes use of Lichenstein's techniques and staple imagery (tears, telephones, speech bubbles) to create a dotted technicolor vision.

and Gustave Klimt

and Egon Schiele

Seee the rest of the collection.

SCX_Tyler:

Found at a Construction site near St George subway station Toronto, Ontario.
From left to right:
Bill Murray, Bill Crosby, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton 

chumptastic

Fonts listed in order of their popularity based on 6 top typography websites.

Click for Larger.

Link to more of arcticcobalt's work on Flickr.

Space Invader filmed during the installation of of one of his pieces on March 10, 2009 in Montreuil, Île-de-France, France. Very cool, even the cops who stop by seem to think so.

Alex tries but misunderstands Aug 2008

Alex tries but misunderstands Aug 2008 Detail

I smell something burning May 2008

I smell something burning May 2008

Cheer up Sep 2007 Detail

Cheer up Sep 2007

Fly baby fly Aug 2007

Fly baby fly Aug 2007 Detail

love me madly Oct 2005

Panopticon Aug 2004

Bel's Nook has some more pictures and info on Alexandros Vasmoulakis.

You know the saying "you can't polish a turd"? Well you can sprinkle glitter on it.

That's what the folks over Sprinkle Brigade do. More about their story on their blog.

David Byrne performs Burning Down The House with The Extra Action Marching Band in San Francisco 10.06.08.

And with The Rockettes, well one of them, at Radio City Music Hall circa 02.28.09. The ending is worth the watch in this video.

Part of apertures of metal band became digital display screen. Metal band and digital figures mingle together in proportion naturally. Without the face of "timepiece", it displays figures only when needed but also quite vague existence, "time".

VIA D&AD

These are a collection of images I've been gathering over the last year or so,  all images were found on Flickr and I apologize for not having kept a record of the photographers.

These two pieces were about one block apart on Laguna Street, San francisco.

Click on the images to see their location.
The first one recently became the victim of sidewalk repair.

Higher resolution versions are here.

Selection from the "Tears" Exhibit.

"I worked hard to create my own style and technique. The main tool is computer photo-manipulation and a mix of several photos. I’ve already created several art projects and showed them in a few countries, including France, Belgium and the USA."

Selection from the "Toystory" Exhibit.

Thanks Fabio C

See the rest of the collection.

Large suitcase burden.  

Untitled.

Banana suitcase music.  

Untitled.

From The Telegraph:

The 22-year-old student at the University of Central Lancashire spray painted a battered Skoda Fabia to match the car park and entrance to her art studio.

Her work, created as part of her drawing and image making course at the university, creates the illusion that the car is see through.

She was given the car from a breakers yard and worked for three weeks to ensure that it blended perfectly with its surroundings.

"I was experimenting with the whole concept of illusion but needed something a bit more physical to make a real impact." said Miss Watson, who is from Ashton under Lyne.

"People have been stopping in the street to look and coming up and almost bumping into it, so it's had the desired effect."

The car is reminiscent of the work by pavement artist Julian Beever, whose attempts to trick people's minds into seeing perspective on the flat surfaces of paving stones.

Steve Jackson, owner of Recycling Lives, the firm that gave Miss Watson the car, said: "When I first saw the photos I was convinced it was something which had been done on the computer, but when you look more closely you see the effort and attention to detail she has put into it. It is just amazing."

link to more images

Previously:

• Woman knits full size Ferrari for art school project

Really nice animation.

These samples found on deviantART and Souloff's blog.

These ads for the "Society of Cardiology of the Russian Federation" were shot by Dylan Collard.

monsieur Qui lives and works in Paris, here are some samples from his website. He's also  known for his wheatpastes, a flickr search produced these results but I can't find his personal Flickr account.

Okay then, in response to a few emails:

The squiggly, arthritic looking pieces of wire are what physically exist in these pieces, the 'images' you see are actually the shadows created by a light souce specifically focused on the wire constructions. 

Watch the video here.

On a spring day in 1971, Charles Simonds packed several pounds of red clay into the steel box on his delivery bike and set out through New York City's SoHo district. He had spotted a gutter curbstone there that he thought would make the perfect site for one of the tiny clay villages he had been building around town. As the artist pedaled up to an intersection, he passed three of his former art students standing on a corner. "One girl stared at me and said, 'Mr. Simonds?' " he recalls. "I nodded and waved. Suddenly she burst into tears. She thought I'd been forced to start delivering groceries."

In fact, Simonds was embarking on the first stage of a grand artistic vision: constructing the archaeological remains of an imaginary miniature civilization. At first, the "Little People" dwellings, as Simonds called them, cropped up in vacant lots, on doorsills and beside curbstones around New York's Lower East Side. By the mid-'70s he had begun erecting his elfin dwellings abroad: in the nooks and crannies of Paris, Berlin, Venice, Shanghai and—where else?—Dublin. These days collectors pay up to $30,000 for the pyramids and signal towers of his personal mythology, and the tiny towns have long since moved from abandoned doorways to fancier quarters like the Whitney Museum in New York and the Kunsthaus museum in Zurich. Continue reading

“Sorry I’m Late”. Really impressive stop-motion directed with patience and talent by Tomas Mankovsky. Check the making of this epic moment…here.

Sorry I'm Late from Tomas Mankovsky on Vimeo.

via gugazine

see also:

• Bomb The Bass - Butterfingers

• F is for Fail — An Alphabetical Odyssey Through The Creative Process

• The Wolf and the Pig

• 'Western Spaghetti' stop-frame animation by PES