Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.
April 1st, 2009 — Art
By combining apparently unlimited skill with a surgeon’s mental database of the body’s physical structures, surrealist artist Valerio Carrubba creates images that are, on one hand, ghastly, yet, on the other, profoundly tender and humane. Or, maybe this guy, above, just looks that way.
[via core.form-ula.com]
March 30th, 2009 — Art, Medicine, Photography, Science
Most third-year students of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College use a Computed Axial Tomography scanner for medical purposes. But for Satre Stuelke, the technology works best as a new form of camera. By running children’s toys, cell phones, and electrical appliances through this advanced scientific tool, Stuelke produces rather unearthly images, of a kind perhaps never before seen. Radiology Art, he calls it.
March 16th, 2009 — Art, Politics, Pop Culture
The ascension of Barack Obama has inspired a heightened wave of response from people worldwide, much of it artistic. That’s a good thing. The bad thing is that, well, a lot of that art is just bad.
Or at least that seems to be the contention of the web site Bad Paintings of Barack Obama. By flipping through its contents, viewers with the stomach for it can sample a range of pictorial takes on the 44th president, some skilled, some unskilled, and some just deranged. And some, like the hunky image of Obama, above, skin wet and glistening, emerging from the foaming waters like a Greek god-stud, roses lining his path as an untamed Arabian offers its worthy mount, are a bit of all three.
[via The Telegraph]
March 3rd, 2009 — Art, Photography, Race
Exline Park by R. C. Hickman (1955)
From the R. C. Hickman Photographic Archive at the
Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin
I’m giving you really short notice, as this show will only be up until Sunday, March 8. But if you’re anywhere near the Irving Arts Center (3333 N. MacArthur Blvd) in Irving TX between now and then, make it your business to stop by and see Behold the People: R.C. Hickman’s Photographs of Black Dallas, which features 56 black and white photographs from his eponymous archive at the University of Texas at Austin.
For those who, like I, had never heard of the man,
February 26th, 2009 — Anime, Art
Juliona Trans is her name, robbing banks of moneybags bigger than her torso is her game. As the copy for the 8 2/3-inch figure, above, notes, she’s
based on an illustration drawn by popular artist Masamune Shirow in his poster book Wild Wet West [right] … Every fine detail from the original illustration has been beautifully sculpted into the figure – from her proportions, her facial expression and her radiant skin to her fingertips that seem ready to fire her gun at any moment. As an additional extra, a special card of the original illustration is included.
She sells for about $80 in Japan, and can be ordered from the manufacturer, Art Storm / Lilics, via their web site, if you read Japanese.
February 23rd, 2009 — Art, Language
Like the much-rumored Inuit propensity for creating “snow” synonyms, Connecting Dotz‘s line of “In a Word” cards utilizes the nuances imbued in twenty-four foreign nouns and exclamations to convey subtleties within the human condition.
Of the host—”Uffda!” “Istikhara,” “Koi No Yokan,” “Skookum Tumtum”—perhaps my favorite is mamihlapinatapai, above (ma-MI-luh-PEE-na-TAH-pie), from the endangered South American language, Yaghan: “A meaningful look between two people, expressing mutual unstated feelings; literally means ‘ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other.'” Any six cards, $30; twelve, $49.95.
February 18th, 2009 — Art, Politics
If you thought Barack Obama had a tough-looking jawline before, sculptor Jean Dukens Boivert’s 22 x 17 in. framed portrait of the President should practically intimidate you back to your barstool. The image, according to gallerist Marcel Wah,
is made out of metal from recycled oil drums. It is coated with a primer, painted with acrylic or oil paint, then varnished for protection.
In other words, you cannot outlast this. It’s one in a limited edition of 150, and priced $475-$675, depending on what number you get in the series. Allow 2-3 weeks for delivery directly from Haiti.
February 10th, 2009 — Art, Humor, Photography
Check out this lovely portrait of Kahleefawnyuh Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, taken after waking him from a twenty-year sleep.
In fact, it’s an entry in FreakingNews.com’s “Beards Pictures,” part of their ongoing series of advanced Photoshop pictures contests.
February 5th, 2009 — Advertising, Art, Photography, Politics, Pop Culture
By now, you’ve seen a billion pictures of Barack Obama. But if you’ve got a good eye or visual memory, you’ve already noticed something unusual, something familiar, about this one, above.
The image, by photographer Mannie Garcia, was, as he notes on his blog, taken of
then Democratic Senator from Illinois, Barak Obama, when he was with actor George Clooney at the Press Club in Washington, DC in April 2006. They talked about human rights and Darfur.
But the association with Clooney, or Darfur, is not what makes this image special, or unique. Or controversial.
This is:
February 5th, 2009 — Animals, Art, Environment
By employing astounding technique, colored pencil artist Don Simon deftly visualizes a mournful and demoralized world. It’s one where man’s increasing industrialization of the biosphere has not only pushed humans and animals into ultradirect contact and competition, but where the natural landscape has begun to frustratingly morph into the mechanized metalliscape. As a New Jersey native, where some of the nation’s most gorgeous terrain borders some of its most hideous, he knows of whence he speaks.
In “Industrial Forest 1,” above, for example, from his Unnaturalism I series, deer dart between and attempt to hide amidst a thicket of silver metal pipelines. (The grove’s absolute density becomes more clear in the triptych from which this image is taken.)
By mankind literally doing to the creation what Simon does figuratively, “We are forcing other species to deal with compromised, damaged or destroyed ecosystems,” says the artist.
Yeah, well, as U. of Texas prof Robert Jensen reminds us, quoting a friend, “Nature always bats last.”
[via Paper ‘n Stitch]
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