Nick Dewar

Enter the strange world of Nick Dewar; the Southern California based artist creates ingeniusly amusing and often surrealistic illustrations in a simple style driven by graceful linework and flat solid color fills. Nick's work is higly conceptual, and most remarcable for his sharp wit and sense of humor.

His website has a brilliant feature outlining his creative process in a fair amount of detail, don't miss it!

Alex Trochut

Alex Trochut is a graphic designer from Barcelona, his type design is particularly sharp and wonderful i think. His work shows a love of detail and lovely intricacies that separate him from the rest.

See Alex's amazing portfolio here.

Fashion Photography: Paolo Roversi

Paolo Roversi is Italian-born but lives and works in Paris. He began his career by assisting the fashion photographer Laurence Sackman and has since worked consistently in fashion, both editorial and advertising. From the early 1980s Roversi has used large-format Polaroid film for most of his photographs, both colour and black-and-white. His use of the Polaroid, and his preference for the studio, has resulted in portraits that are both tender and respectful. Informed by a wide knowledge of the history of photography, they are sometimes closer to work of the nineteenth century than contemporary fashion.


Paolo Roversi's website.

André the Giant Has a Posse

Shepard Fairey created the "André the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign in 1989 in Charleston, South Carolina. Distributed largely by skaters, the Andre stickers began showing up in nearly every big city across the U.S.A. At the time Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology." Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become a world-wide movement. Simultaneously, Fairey's work has evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY Giant campaign.

"André the Giant has a Posse" sticker on a stop sign

Fairey and campaign co-creators, Michael Meinhart, Blaize Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, and Mike Mongo Nicholl created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520lb", as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subculture, and then began clandestinely (and somewhat fanatically) propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the Eastern United States.
By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Greece, London, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, and the Caribbean Islands. In effect, Fairey and associates were creating a 'posse' of a wide audience of those who were in on the joke and willing to spread the message, and those who were not but found the original image compelling.

Threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. in 1998 spurred Fairey to stop using the trademarked name André the Giant, and to create a more iconic image of the wrestler's face, now most often with the equally iconic branding OBEY. The "OBEY" slogan was not only a parody of propaganda, but also a direct homage to the "OBEY" signs found in the 1988 cult classic film, They Live, starring Roddy Piper.

Shepard Fairey in an Elizabeth Daniels portrait

OBEY sticker with Make Art Not War poster in NYC 2004

Over time, Fairey's artistic imagery has evolved into a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, parody of a range of iconic styles, mostly a juxtaposition of popular political propagandas and multi-national commercialism. It usually bears the text OBEY Giant. In addition to countless small stickers, OBEY Giant has been spread by stencil, murals, and large wheatpaste posters, covering public spaces from abandoned building faces and street sign backs, to commercial spaces such as billboards and bus stop posters.

Jan Kallwejt

Jan Kallwejt is an illustrator and graphic designer currently based in Warsaw, he runs a one-man studio focusing on illustration, apparel design and personal projects.

Jan's website.

The Art of Maths: Mathematica

Mathematica is a computer program used mainly in scientific, engineering and mathematical fields. It was originally conceived by Stephen Wolfram and developed by a team of mathematicians and programmers that he assembled and led.

It provides cross-platform support for tasks such as symbolic or numerical calculations, arbitrary precision arithmetic, data processing, and plotting. Mathematica has a programming language which supports functional and procedural programming styles.

Mathematica's sophisticated graphical capabilities can be used to generate a unique and mesmerizing new kind of imagery. Residing in the strange middle ground between the artificial and the natural. Mathematica represents a new intersection of two worlds usually separate: mathematics and the visual arts.

Works by Michael Trott:

Dodecahedron Cage

Infinite Windings

Lissajous Box

Mathematica's Graphics Gallery.

Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers

Chris Jordan's art is completely mental! The Washington based artist uses hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of tiny digital images, mostly of garbage, to produce enormous visual representations of America's social and environmental issues.

Jordan's latest series of montages is entitled "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait". This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes.

Skull With Cigarette [72x98"]

Depicts 200,000 packs of cigarettes, equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.

Cans Seurat [60x92"]

Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

I encourage you to visit the artist's website and explore the rest of this series, each piece is a visual examination of the vast and bizarre measures of an increasingly enormous and incomprehensible society.

Banksy's Biggest Piece To Date

Somehow, against all odds, Banksy just keeps going bigger and never gets caught. His newest piece which debuted this week in London. The three-storey commentary on London’s Closed Caption TV surveillance network was erected adjacent to one of the cameras in question, and still he roams free…

One nation under CCTV: CCTV (pictured top right) failed to catch Banksy

From the Daily Mail:

Banksy pulled off an audacious stunt to produce what is believed to be his biggest work yet in central London.

The secretive graffiti artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence despite being watched by a CCTV camera.

Then, during darkness and hidden behind a sheet of polythene, he painted this comment on 'Big Brother' society.

Read more.

Obey: Penguin Books Designs

Shepard was recently asked to illustrate the cover of two literary classics by George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. The re-issues are to hit the stands in early July so keep an eye out for them. For information on the release and re-issue, please visit www.us.penguingroup.com. Here is a preview of the covers.

Obey Giant.

Billboards: Peter Fuss

LOL this guys is genius!

http://www.peterfuss.com/

Erwin Olaf - Royal Blood

Erwin Olaf brings his incisive wit and vision to create a satirical portrait of our contemporary consumer society. Visually sophisticated and conceptually provocative, his images challenge global trends towards youth-obsessed sexuality, hypocrisy, violence, hyper-consumerism and social control.

His series 'Royal Blood' depicts various historic royal figures as rendered by the gruesome circumstances of their violent deaths. The victims appear mutilated and covered in gore while they stare at the viewer with sinister yet clinical indifference.

Di

Sissi

Julius Caesar

Jacky O

Erwin's website is extremely comprehensive and elegant. Check out the rest of this series and his entire body of work presented in high resolution.

Obey: Supply & Demand 5th Edition release

The 5th Edition of Obey “Supply & Demand” The Art of Shepard Fairey has just been released and is available to purchase Obey Giant's store. All S&D books come signed by Shepard and are only $55.

Supply and Demand is a massive retrospective covering 17 Years of this groundbreaking artist's prodigious output. Through the lens of esteemed writers and critics such as Carlo McCormick, Steven Heller and Roger Gastman, Fairey's work is seen for all its depth and placed in context as art, design, social experiment and "getting over". This massive book pulls no punches and all areas of the enigmatic artist's work, travels and travails are illuminated; from exhibitions, posters, flyers, silkscreens and stickers to high altitude pursuits, citations and police beatings, it's all documented in a museum quality layout and binding. The evidence is in, and it's clear that Shepard Fairey is not one to rest on his laurels, the work must go on. For both long time fans wanting the complete collection and those just curious to know what this OBEY business is all about Supply and Demand is the answer.

Antonio Canova: The Three Graces

Antonio Canova’s (1757 - 1822) statue The Three Graces is a Neo-Classical sculpture, in marble, of the mythological three charites, daughters of Zeus – identified on some engravings of the statue as, from left to right, Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia - who were said to represent beauty, charm and joy. The Graces presided over banquets and gatherings primarily to entertain and delight the guests of the Gods. As such they have always proved to be attractive figures for historical artists, notable amongst them are Botticelli and Thorvaldsen.

The piece itself is carved exactingly from a single slab of white marble. Canova's assistants roughly blocked out the marble, leaving Canova to finish the final carving and shape the stone to highlight the Graces’ soft flesh. This was a trademark of the artist, and the piece shows a strong allegiance to the Neo-Classical movement of which Canova is the prime exponent in the field of sculpture. The lines are exquisite, refined and elegant.

The Three Graces, first version, now in the Hermitage Museum

Canova’s work challenged the baroque conception of beauty as vaguely obese and shows the Graces as nubile, svelte young women. The three goddesses are shown nude, huddled close together in embrace, their heads almost touching in what many have referred to as an ‘erotically charged’ piece. The three slender female figures become one in their embrace, united by not only their linked hands, but also by the scarf which links all of them together. The unity of the Graces is one of the piece's main themes.

read full article here.

Josh Keyes

Oakland, California-based artist, Josh Keyes uses his enigmatic graphic wit to describe a world of micro landscapes and dissected ecosystems. His visually striking paintings and drawings are filled with scientific-looking slices of animals on logs, villages on core samples and landscapes blossoming with road signs. Although often absurd and disjointed, they make perfect sense. They are neat and orderly and timeless and seem to reveal an idealized autopsy of nature's mysteries.

Overflow #1

Treadmill

Slice #2

Distraction

Artist's Website.

Marilyn Minter

OMG Marilyn Minter! if you can believe it the pictures below are enamel on steel paintings! this woman is off the chain. Minter, the 60-year-0ld Louisiana born New York artist was the star of 2006’s coveted Whitney Biennial -the New York art world’s most formal stamp of approval—and at the time, some of the artwork from the show appeared on billboards around the city simultaneously. She currently has a solo show at Salon 94.

Crystal Swallow

Glazed

Rosary

Twins

Marilyn's hyper-realistic paintings have also recently been featured in an artist colab series of skateboards by Supreme, a surprising and bold choice of design from a company that is known for pushing the creative edge in the skateboarding industry. pretty amazing decks i think.

Who the Fuck Is Jackson Pollock?

Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollock? is a documentary following a woman named Teri Horton, a 73 year old former long-haul truck driver from Texas, who purchased a painting from a thrift shop for $5, later to find out that it may be a Jackson Pollock painting.

According to an interview from the film, Horton purchased the painting as a gag gift for a friend from a California thrift shop. When the dinner-table-sized painting proved too large to fit into her trailer, Horton set it out among other items at a yard sale, where a local art teacher spotted it and suggested that the work could have been painted by Pollock due to the similarity to his action painting technique. The film depicts Horton's attempts to authenticate and sell the painting as an original work by Pollock. The authenticity is difficult to prove because the painting was purchased at a thrift store, is unsigned, and without provenance.

Here's an insigtful review from the IMDB by vegasite:

There's this old joke about a small town exhibit of Norman Rockwell paintings where a snobbish big city critic is trashing the art at every turn.

- "We know why you don't like this art". says a local.
- "And why is that?" asks the critic.
- "Because we don't need you to tell us if it's any good!"

And thus, this film begs the question, "Is collecting modern art about art or collecting autographs?"

This HBO documentary details the adventures of Teri Horton (Tugboat Annie of the Trailer Park and professional dumpster diver); a small town gal finding herself in possession of what might very well be an original Jackson Pollock potentially worth millions and sets out to prove its authenticity. Herein lies the rub of modern art; "If you don't know who did it, is it any good"? We watch as the painting is wagged from pompous art critics to curious aficionados, business persons and forensic specialists each with their own take and assessment of authenticity. Little of which has anything to do with the actual art on the canvas.

Here is a fascinating look at the facade of modern art and the stuffed shirts who make cowardly proclamations regarding authenticity while avoiding the content of the painting itself.

Interesting stuff whether you like modern art or not; and while Ms. Horton's rural irascibility wears mighty thin by the end of the film, there's enough fun and insight to give anyone an art lesson.

Adam Hughes: Catwoman Covers

Catwoman #51

Catwoman #56

Catwoman #57

Catwoman #69

Catwoman #74

Catwoman #75

Adam Hughes' Website

Audrey Kawasaki

Audrey Kawasaki is a Los Angeles-based painter, known for her distinctive, erotically charged portrayals of young, adolescent girls. Her works are oil paintings painted directly onto wood panels, her style can be described as a fusion of Art Nouveau and Manga.

She Who Dares

Drip

If Only You Were Here

Audrey's website

Audrey's blog

Obey Giant: Obama

My Favourite street artist/graphic designer Shepard Fairey is fervently supporting Barack Obama's presidential campaign, He has produced a series of graphics in the form of posters, murals, banners and stickers featuring the words HOPE and PROGRESS to endorse the candidate.
Fairey posted on his site:
"I believe with great conviction that Barack Obama should be the next President. I have been paying close attention to him since the Democratic convention in 2004. I feel that he is more a statesman than a politician. He was against the war when it was an unpopular position (and Hillary was for the war at that time), Obama is for energy and environmental conservation. He is for healthcare reform. Check him out for yourself www.barackobama.com. Proceeds from this print go to produce prints for a large statewide poster campaign."

eBoy: Gods of Pixel

Famous for their illustration, web design, fonts and games, eBoy have a cult following internationally. The eBoy world is unique, populated by robots, cars, guns and girls, all built up out of thousands of pixels. eBoy's trademark eCities are Inspired by a love of buildings and architecture and the challenge of endlessly recombing different urban elements. these are painstakingly detailed and abound with monsters, seedy bars and porno cinemas.

Click on images for full resolution, eBoy's work is all about the amazing and hilarious details!

NYC

Tokyo

Inspired by popular culture -shopping, supermarkets, televisions, LEGO, computer games- eBoy's imagery is colorful, funny, subversive and startlingly original. eBoy has gained a long list of commercial clients including companies such as Coca-Cola, MTV, LaCoste, Adidas, and Honda.

Che Guevara: Gerrillero Heroico

Alberto Korda's famous photograph of Che Guevara entitled: "Guerrillero Heroico" (translates to: "Heroic Guerrilla"), was taken on March 5, 1960 at a Cuban funeral service for victims of the La Coubre explosion. The photo was not published internationally until seven years later. At the moment of capture, Korda has stated that he was drawn to Guevara's facial expression, which was one of "absolute implacability". Guevara was 31 at the time the photo was taken.

“I remember it as if it were today ... seeing him framed in the viewfinder, with that expression. I am still startled by the impact ... it shakes me so powerfully.” — Korda

As a life-long communist and supporter of the Cuban revolution, Alberto Korda claimed no payment for his picture. A modified version of the portrait through the decades was also reproduced on a range of different media, though Korda never asked for royalties. Korda reasoned that Che's image represented his revolutionary ideals, and thus the more his picture spread the greater the chance Che's ideals would spread as well.

Alberto Korda, looking at a 3 Cuban Pesos note

After Che's capture and execution in Bolivia in 1967, Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick created stylized posters of Korda's image. His motivation was to preserve Che's memory in the public consciousness and made thousands of prints giving them away to anyone for free in London, getting friends to pass them out and encouraging others to make their own versions.

Original Fitzpatrick's Graphic

"The way they killed him, there was to be no memorial, no place of pilgrimage, nothing. I was determined that the image should receive the broadest possible circulation," - Fitzpatrick

Fitzpatrick's monochrome graphic has become one of the World's most universally recognizable images and can be seen on an endless array of consumer items, including t-shirts, hats, posters and tattoos. Guevara also remains an iconic figure both in political contexts and as a wide-ranging popular icon of youthful rebellion.

Iconic Ministry of Interior Defense Building in Plaza de la Revolución, Havana

Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas

Diego Velázquez (1599 – 1660), was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary baroque period, important as a portrait artist. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family, other notable European figures, and commoners.

Las Meninas (Spanish for The Maids of Honour), is a 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez. The work's complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analysed works in Western painting.

Las Meninas - 1656

Las Meninas shows a large room in the Madrid palace of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures, most identifiable from the Spanish court, captured, according to some commentators, in a particular moment as if in a snapshot. Some figures look out of the canvas towards the viewer, while others interact among themselves. The young Infanta Margarita is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas. Velázquez looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand. A mirror hangs in the background and reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen. The royal couple appear to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on.

Las Meninas has long been recognised as one of the most important paintings in Western art history. The Baroque painter Luca Giordano said that it represents the "theology of painting", while in the 19th century Sir Thomas Lawrence called the work "the philosophy of art". More recently, it has been described as "Velázquez's supreme achievement, a highly self-conscious, calculated demonstration of what painting could achieve, and perhaps the most searching comment ever made on the possibilities of the easel painting".

Key to the people represented (see text bellow)

List of People Depicted:

1. Infanta Margarita, the five-year-old princess, who later married the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, was at this point Philip and Mariana's only surviving child
   
   
   Detail showing Philip IV's daughter, the Infanta Margarita.
   
   
2. Doña Isabel de Velasco, who is poised to curtsy to the princess.
3. Doña María Agustina Sarmiento de Sotomayor, who kneels before Margarita, offering her a drink from a red cup, or bucaro, that she holds on a golden tray.
4. Maria Barbola, a German dwarf.
5. Nicolas Pertusato, an Italian dwarf who playfully tries to rouse a sleeping mastiff with his foot.
6. Doña Marcela de Ulloa, the princess's chaperone, dressed in mourning.
7. Unidentified bodyguard.
8. Don José Nieto Velázquez, the queen's chamberlain during the 1650s, and the head of the royal tapestry works who may have been a relative of the artist.
9. Velázquez himself, looking outward past a large canvas supported by an easel. On his chest is the red cross of the Order of Santiago, which he did not receive until 1659, three years after the painting was completed.
10. King Philip IV, appears next to his queen, reflected on a mirror on the wall.
11. Queen Mariana of Austria.

Detail of the mirror hung on the back wall

A common assumption is that the reflection shows the couple in the pose they are holding for Velázquez as he paints them, while their daughter watches; and that the painting therefore shows their view of the scene.

Read full Article Here.
View the high resolution Diego Velázquez gallery at the ARC Museum.

Compfight: A Flickr Search Tool

This is amazing, Compfight allows you to quickly search Flickr and browse hundreds of results instantaneously.

These are some of the awesome features of Compfight;

• Tags vs Text: Tags are keywords. If your "tags only" results are weak use less words or use "all text" to rummage through titles and descriptions.

• Tab Me: Turn your popups on. Safari users can hold the "command" key when clicking thumbnails to invoke tabbing. Tabbing is tight.

• Blue Bars: Bars Indicate flickr™ is holding an original. Lingering your cursor over a bar will display the pixel dimensions.

• Creative Commons: Pictures found under Creative Commons are always better. Turn this feature on to tweak your search. Also useful for finding licensable photos.

• Seek Original: If you want nothing but blue bars change the Seek Original switch to "only." Turn the feature completely off when you intend to wander around flickr™.

Original post here.

David Pearson: Penguin Books Designs

www.davidpearsondesign.com

New UK Coin Designs

The new designs have been chosen via an open competition which was widely publicised in the national media in August 2005 and attracted 4,000 entries. The winning designer is 26-year-old Matthew Dent, originally from Bangor who now lives and works in London as a graphic designer.

After exploring a number of different options, Matthew Dent finally developed the heraldic theme, taking the greatest heraldic device ever used on coinage – the Royal Arms.

Also found this amusing comparison between the new coin designs and the new design of the US five dollar bill, Originally posted in The Ministry of Type.

Tomer Hanuka

Refugees

The Lost Boys

The Posibility of an Island

Artist's website

Fearless: Dave Lang

With director Joseph Zentil, this production took a different approach towards capturing rollerblading. The objective of this film was to capture rollerblading, not as another "extreme" sport; but as an art. With a specific vision in mind, the crew felt it was important to stray away from the cliche's by focusing on the artist as a whole; rather than his association with an industry.

Shot on Kodak 16mm B/W reversal film (7222) with the Arriflex BL.

Music: Pink Floyd - Fearless, Miles Davis - Blue in Green



Director: Joseph Zentil
Starring: Dave Lang
Cinematography: John Filmore
Director of Photography and Editing: Dave Lang
Key Grip Work: Ignacio Lopez and Eduardo Araujo
Special thanks to: Shields Skate Park

Chéri Herouard

Chéri Hérouard (1881 - 1961) was a French illustrator who was most famously known for his forty-five year work for French society magazine, La Vie Parisienne.

La Vie Parisienne - Le reveil de la nature

La Vie Parisienne - Nuits De Guerre

Postcard series

An enthusiast has put together a rather impressive collection of Herouard's works on flickr, the image quality is god-awful but you'll still be able to apreciate the lovely illustrations, check it out here.

William Bouguereau

French Academic Classical painter, frescoist, draftsman & teacher
born 1825 - died 1905

Portrait de l'artiste - 1869

Excerpt from the Biography of William Bouguereau, by Damien Bartoli:
"William Bouguereau is unquestionably one of history's greatest artistic geniuses. Yet in the past century, his reputation and unparalleled accomplishments have undergone a libelous, dishonest, relentless and systematic assault of immense proportions. His name was stricken from most history texts and when included it was only to blindly, degrade and disparage him and his work. Yet, as we shall see, it was he who single handedly opened the French academies to women, and it was he who was arguably the greatest painter of the human figure in all of art history. His figures come to life like no previous artist has ever before or ever since achieved. He wasn’t just the best ever at painting human anatomy, more importantly he captured the tender and subtlest nuances of personality and mood. Bouguereau caught the very souls and spirits of his subjects much like Rembrandt. Rembrandt is said to have captured the soul of age. Bouguereau captured the soul of youth.

L'admiration - 1869

Considering his consummate level of skill and craft, and the fact that the great preponderance of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bodies of work ever produced by any artist. Add to that the fact that fully half of these paintings are great masterpieces, and we have the picture of an artist who belongs like Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Carravaggio, in the top ranks of only a handful of masters in the entire history of western art.

The First Mourning - 1888

Please take some time to explore the amazing high resolution gallery at the Art Renewal Center and learn more about this truly magnificent artist.

ONE Rollerblading Magazine: Covers

ONE's website

The Beatles Album Covers

Anthology 1, 2 & 3

Please Please Me (1963)

With the Beatles (1963)

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Beatles for Sale (1964)

Help! (1965)

Rubber Soul (1965)

Revolver (1966)

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

The Beatles - "The White Album" (1968)

Yellow Submarine (1969)

Abbey Road (1969)

Let It Be (1970)

kacho-e: Ohara Koson

"White Herons and Willow"

"Fly-catcher and Spider"

Koson Ohara (1877-1945) is considered the foremost 20th century designer of bird and flower prints, or kacho-e. His designs were produced in prolific numbers for a primarily Western market and range from haunting realism to humorous depictions of animals at play.

Hanga Gallery; farily comprehensive, unfortunately only medium resolution images