Sven Prim is a terrific artist that specializes in photo retouching and his portfolio features some magazine work along with some morbid, graphic novel-ish stuff. There isn’t a lot of info on his website, not even an artist statement so I guess his art will have to speak for itself. Check out these selections:

Recently discovered Mark Bryan’s art and liked what I saw, particularly because I’m a fan of satire.. especially when it borders on the surreal. From his artist statement:

In my paintings I see the world as a cosmic stage for human activity. I’m in the audience like a court reporter taking notes with my sketchbook and brushes, playing the critic, here to observe and make comment. I usually begin a painting with a beautiful natural landscape, but can’t seem to leave it at that.

 

Because of my need to make comment, I feel compelled to fill it up with depictions of absurd human activities and/or violent acts of revenge by Mother Nature. These depictions are full of symbolism, exaggeration and parody, much in the manner of political cartoons. I like to show men involved in their own tiny dramas while oblivious to greater and more powerful forces around them.

See more paintings at his website.

minchi is a Japanese artist who paints using oil and watercolors. The pictures on his/her website have a bishojo feel to them. Random acts of fantasy committed in a lazy summer afternoon. Secrets in the dead of the night. Between brothers and sisters who know the moment is passing. And then there’s that commitment to the beautiful grotesque-ness of our body… and the organic randomness of our universe.

Some other pictures I liked (taken from minchi’s site):

L’Inconnue de la Seine (French for “the unknown woman of the Seine“) was an unidentified young woman whose death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artist homes after 1900. Her visage was the inspiration for numerous literary works. According to an often-repeated story, the body of the young woman was pulled out of the Seine River in Paris around the late 1880s.

The body showed no signs of violence, and suicide was suspected. A worker at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he made a plaster cast of her face. In the following years, numerous copies were produced, and these copies quickly became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society. Albert Camus and others have compared her smile to that of Mona Lisa, and there were numerous speculations on what clues the eerily happy expression in her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society.

Critic A. Alvarez writes in The Savage God: “I am told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her.” According to Hans Hesse of the University of Sussex, Alvarez reports, “the Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot was for the 1950s. He thinks that German actresses like Elisabeth Bergner modeled themselves on her. She was finally displaced as a paradigm by Greta Garbo.”

(source)

This death mask of an anonymous women inspired legions of literary writers, each of which rambled on about its beautiful expression and the mystery behind the smile. It became a fashionable talking/reference point of some sort and I guess it validated their vision of the poetic life.

This link has a detailed outline of artists, writers and philosophers who were inspired by the mask. Some of whom include Albert Camus, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anais Nin and Maurice Blanchot.

Some other pictures of the mask:

English Russia has a great collection of the picture postcards depicting the Russian empire at the start of the 20th century. Some of them would make great stamps and wall stickers.

At the beginning of the XX century another Russian photographer, Sergey Ivanovich Borisov, during his expedition across mountain areas of Altai (1907-1914) made more than 1000 photos later on used as material for coloured post cards of various European publishing offices.

Art graduate Lauren Porter knitted a Ferrari sportscar for her honours degree at Bath Spa University.The classic red bodywork consists of 250 squares of garter stitch made by Lauren and 20 family members and friends.The windows are V-shaped stocking stitch, while the details are crochet and the badge is embroidered. It’s all supported by a steel frame which Lauren, 22, of Greatham, Hants, welded herself. (source)

A 20th-century artist, Louis Wain, who was fascinated by cats, painted these pictures over a period of time in which he developed schizophrenia. The pictures mark progressive stages in the illness and exemplify what it does to the victim’s perception. (Source)

Ever wanted what it would be like to live in a city without advertising? São Paulo is where you should head. São Paulo is city that has passed laws preventing outdoor advertising of any sort. This means no posters, flyers, bus ads, billboards or even stickers.

“In September last year, the city’s populist right-wing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, passed the so-called Clean City laws. Fed up with the “visual pollution” caused by the city’s 8,000 billboard sites, many of them erected illegally, Kassab proposed a law banning all outdoor advertising.

The skyscraper-sized hoardings that lined the city’s streets would be wiped away at a stroke. And it was not just billboards that attracted his wrath: all forms of outdoor advertising were to be prohibited, including ads on taxis, on buses—even shopfronts were to be restricted, their signs limited to 1.5 metres for every 10 metres of frontage. “It is hard in a city of 11 million people to find enough equipment and personnel to determine what is and isn’t legal,” reasoned Kassab, “so we have decided to go all the way.”

This bold move was first initiated in September 2006 and has been well documented by photographer Tony de Marco. Here’s a Business Week article about Sao Paulo’s ad-free campaign and I’ve dug up some pictures of Sao Paulo as well.

An urban environment stripped of advertising feels a little odd but it just take a little getting used to. I actually like the spartan feel of it.

“The walls between art and engineering exists only in our minds.“

Theo Jansen is a Dutch kinetic sculptor who creates light weight, movable objects that are powered by the wind. He main creations seem to be these beautifully tragic animal skeletons which walk on their own along the beaches of Netherlands. What material does he use to fuel these creations? Cheap plastic tubes, nylon strings, adhesive tape, cable ties and a heck of a lot of mechanical experimentation to get the right walking stylistics.

In an interview with Wired, Jansen comments:

“Animals are machines as well,” said Jansen. “I was making animals with just the tubes because they were cheap but later on they turned out to be very helpful in making artificial life because they are very flexible and multifunctional as well. I see it now as a sort of protein — in nature, everything is almost made of protein and you have various uses of protein; you can make nails, hair, skin and bones. There’s a lot of variety in what you can do with just one material and this is what I try to do as well.”