Category: Arts
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Leonardo’s strange faces
There’s an excellent piece in the NY Times about Leonardo Da Vinci’s obsession with drawing weird faces: Leonardo was a true Renaissance man, fascinated with everything — the mechanics of flight, architecture, engineering, botany, artillery and human anatomy — but one of his favorite private pastimes was to draw faces, either as scribbles in the…
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Banksy’s self-destructing painting 🎈
In 2016, graffiti artist Banksy installed a shredder into one of his canvasses entitled it “Girl With Balloon.” Just last week, Sotheby’s auction house in London sold the painting to the highest bidder for $1.37 million. The picture subsequently tore to shreds. “A few years ago I secretly built a shredder into a painting…in case it was…
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On the tip of your tongue
The mind always beats the tongue. It tries to make sense of reality before the linguist in your head interprets. The closer you look, the cloudier an object gets. Texture, too, is the product of an intelligent designer. You are guided by what you know. Thankfully, you never know as much as you think. Look…
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Paintings by Congolese artist Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga
“I’m inspired to see different worlds coming together; people living in chaos but partying. It’s like the beauty of a painting that at the same time represents such a harsh reality.” — Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, ‘Fragile Responsibility’
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Paintings by Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Nigerian-American painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby takes inspiration from her Nigerian roots and combines them into her own millennial experience of America. The first image above entitled ‘Home: As You See Me’ (2017) showcases objects from her grandmother’s meshed in with Crosby’s own Ikea furniture from her apartment in LA. Akunyili Crosby became a 2017 McArthur fellow last year. Writes Art.net:…
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Defining singularity in the mass
The plane I had made for Lufthansa already contained 2,000 small images of the same plane. But I wanted to get to a scale that would be comparable to what felt like the beginning of a whole different paradigm. It was the 1980s, when air transportation had truly become global: airports were becoming cities and,…
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In praise of the color gray 🌫
If you turn your mobile screen gray, you’ll use it less. The candy-colored apps will lose their addictive poking flavor. Most people disdain gray skies, pleading for blue and sunny instead. Gray appears boring and aging. A mere 1% name it as their favorite color. It neutralizes excitement and offers no hope. But author Meghan…
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Free the animals 🦁🐘🦓
The design for Animal crackers just got an update. Due to mounting pressure from animal rights group PETA, Nabisco removed the cages from its iconic cracker box. The updated version shows the animals roaming free. The redesign of the boxes, now on U.S. store shelves, retains the familiar red and yellow coloring and prominent “Barnum’s…
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The pigeon camera, a precursor to the drone
Before airplanes, skyscrapers, Google Earth, drones, and GoPros brought us aerial views, there was pigeon camera. In 1907, just a few years after the Wright brothers lifted off in Kitty Hawk, and while human flight was still being measured in metres and minutes, Dr. Julius Neubronner, a German apothecary, submitted a patent application for a new…
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Moving sculptures
Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen builds wind propelled sculptures that live on beaches. Each sculpture contains a rotating spine that allows it to rotate forward and backward. Even more interesting, these moving pieces of art can detect and avoid waves when they get too close. But don’t expect to see these mesmerizing “mobile animals”…
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“Goldsmith Work” by Celsius Pictor
I’m sure that for me collage is a tool, another vehicle to express myself and to communicate my ideas, and I think that for me collage is a means, not an end in itself. In fact lately I’ve started drawing again and like Max Ernst did, sometimes I draw parts of my pieces that are…
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Confuse the eye
There’s a fantastic piece about the history of camouflage in Topic Magazine this week. Before camouflage hit the runway, French artists (camoufleurs) in World War I used creative techniques to disguise soldiers and protect them from aerial reconnaissance and long-range enemy fire. To learn how to blend in, the French military turned to an unexpected group—the…