kottke.org posts about art
Artist Rogan Brown is highlighting what the climate crisis is doing to global coral populations with two recent delicate and intricate paper sculptures of bleached coral. Brown writes:
Here I try to capture the beauty, intricacy and fragility of the coral reef in layers of simple paper. The world’s coral reefs have become symbols of the devastating effects of global warming and man-made pollution. Mass bleaching events occur each year with increasing regularity and if the situation continues then it is inevitable that we will witness the demise of these magnificent biodiverse habitats. My hope is that by reminding us of how astonishing these ecosystems are we may unite to save them.
You can check out the rest of Brown’s intricate paper sculptures in his portfolio or on Instagram. (via colossal)
For the latest episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak (after briefly introducing his forthcoming book) discusses his favorite Leonardo da Vinci painting, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
In this way, moving from the apex of the pyramid to its bottom right corner is actually a trip through time, from the past to the present to the future. And that timeline also extends along a three-dimensional axis — the lamb is in front of Jesus, who’s in front of Mary, who’s in front of Anne. But on this axis, it goes even further — behind Anne, we’re launched into the geological past. These mountains, these bones of the Earth, suggest a deep time — so deep that it conflicts with the Christian sense of the age of the world. Now that reflects a larger conflict in the Renaissance between religion and a growing appreciation for natural science, which is embodied in no person more than Leonardo da Vinci, the insatiably curious polymath.
Cecilia Paredes takes photos of herself blending into elaborate backgrounds. You can see more of her work at Colossal, Lens Culture, Schneider Gallery, and Artsy.
Designer Joe Doucet’s Wind Turbine Wall is both a kinetic sculpture and a way to harness wind power to create electricity.
Wind energy has played a key role in helping national grids around the world reduce dependence on fossil fuels to generate energy, but wind turbines for the home have encountered very slow uptake due, in part, to their intrusive physicality.
Designed to be as aesthetically pleasing as it is functional, this “kinetic wall” is made up of an array of rotary blades that spin individually, driving a mini generator that creates electricity. The electricity is utilized in the home or business, can be stored in a wall-mounted battery, or can even be fed back into the national grid to provide revenue for the owner.
Here’s the wall in action:
From a writeup of the project in Fast Company:
Doucet has built a prototype for a single spinning rod and run simulations based on that. The average annual electricity consumption for an American home uses a little over 10,000 kilowatt-hours per year. One of these walls would be enough. But where Doucet sees true potential is in larger-scale commercial buildings and even cities. “Instead of the typical retaining walls along roads and freeways, you’d have an array of these,” says Doucet, who says he’s in conversation with several manufacturers to help him bring the product to market. “With the added wind boost from trucks, our highways could take care of all our energy needs.”
(thx, michael)
Artist & engineer JBV has built a robot artist called Flingbot that works by throwing paint at a canvas according to a number of randomized parameters, e.g. fling strength, scoop shape, paint color, and throwing angles:
The next parameters are the starting and ending fling angles. Randomly chosen by the code, the trajectory and point it hits the canvas is variable creating another factor of uniqueness. This is all controlled by a servo under the base of the catapult, which also happens to be the motor that allows Flingbot to position itself under the paint reservoirs.
This means that every painting Flingbot creates is effectively unique.
All in all, accounting for all the different parameters, there are almost 3 trillion paintings that Flingbot can make. The number is likely even higher than this because there are even more variables to consider that are out of Flingbots control. These include the consistency of the paint, the angle of the canvas, the temperature in the room…the list goes on. It’s safe to say that each one of Flingbot’s painting is truly one of a kind.
(via the morning news)
Korean artist Lee Sangsoo makes these minimalist yet expressive sculptures of animals, people, and objects. And they’re perhaps larger than you expect.
I know I’ve said this probably 100 times before, but I’m continually amazed at how, with just a few strokes of a brush or twists of metal, an artist can create something that’s both abstract and familiar. That beige and brown sculpture above…my brain took about 0.03 seconds to recognize that as a siamese cat. Artists hacking the human brain’s pattern recognition ability and us being delighted by it is the gift that keeps on giving. (via colossal)
For the last ten years, artist Amy Balkin has been collecting artifacts related to the climate crisis. The collection is called A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting.
A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting is a collection of materials contributed by people living in places that may disappear because of the combined physical, political, and economic impacts of climate change, primarily sea level rise, erosion, desertification, and glacial melting.
From a piece about the archive in the New Yorker:
There is an incredible pathos to Balkin’s collection of things. In the light of imagined future eyes, tinged by loss, all manner of things become relevant that would otherwise pass unnoticed. Even two beer-bottle caps, in this context, are mesmerizing. Both are from places that are threatened with a certain kind of disappearance, or, at the very least, radical change; through their corrosion and fading, they seemed to foretell this disappearance somehow. And yet, paradoxically, looking at them, I knew that these pieces of metal would likely outlast me. A future person might see them in a museum, displayed with a label that reads “Beer-bottle caps, common in this time.” But what would that person’s world be like? What would be lost, between now and then, even as these fragments are shored up against ruin?
You can contribute to the archive — instructions for sending in an artifact are here.
Alisa Lariushkina uses air-dry clay to make swirling sculptures that look like landscape paintings. Lariushkina’s patterns and color palette evoke the style of Post-Impressionist painters — indeed she’s even recreated van Gogh’s Starry Night in clay. (via my modern met)
Always great to check back in on the work of Me Kyeoung Lee, who has been drawing delicate & detailed portraits of convenience stores from around Korea. Check out her Instagram for more work and some behind-the-scenes — I was surprised at how large some of her drawings are. (via colossal)
Check out these expressive impressionist oil paintings of scenes from Star Wars by Naci Caba. (He also does paintings of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.) Seeing futuristic sci-fi rendered in this medium is giving me a bit of cognitive dissonance.
You can buy prints and even the original oil paintings in his shop or at Etsy. (via digg)
Using foraged mushrooms, berries, leaves, moss, and other natural materials, Heather Brooks makes these lovely and lively colorful collages, which she displays on Instagram and offers prints of on Etsy and on her website. (via life is so beautiful)
It’s quite a neat trick of the artistically gifted to make figures cast in solid bronze seem like they’re moving, and that’s exactly what Isabel Miramontes has done with her ribboned sculptures of people. (via colossal)
This is Samson and Delilah, a painting attributed to the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens that hangs in the National Gallery in Britain.
Since the late 90s, there’s been some doubt cast upon the painting’s authorship, summarized in this short video:
From a recent piece in the Guardian about an AI art-analysis algorithm that declared Samson and Delilah is not a Rubens painting:
Critics have long argued that it is only a copy of a Rubens original that is known to have been painted between 1608 and 1609 for his Antwerp patron Nicolaas Rockox which then disappeared after his death in 1640.
They argue that the National Gallery picture is a different painting, one that only surfaced in 1929, declared a Rubens by Ludwig Burchard, an expert who, after his death in 1960, was found to have misattributed paintings by giving out certificates of authenticity for commercial gain.
The picture’s critics dismiss its colours as uncharacteristic of Rubens’s palette and its composition as awkward. They question why, for example, it differs from two contemporary copies made from Rubens’s original. The toes of Samson’s outstretched right foot, for example, are cropped in the National Gallery version, while they are shown in an engraving by Jacob Matham and a painting that depicts the Samson and Delilah hanging in Rockox’s home by Frans Francken the Younger.
Artist Dasha Plesen combines molds, bacteria, spores, and other objects in petri dishes to create these colorful abstract photographs. You can find more of her work on Behance and Instagram. (via neatorama)
Balloon artist DJ Morrow has been branching out recently. Morrow makes elaborate balloon animals and other things but two of his latest creations are his amazing interpretations of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son and Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio. I can’t stop looking at these. And prints are available! (thx, caroline)
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