Twenty-seven animators worked on the new Wes Anderson flick Isle of Dogs. This video demonstrates some of the techniques and challenges they faced in production.
According to one of the creators, “one of the hardest things to do in animation is a walk.” So they strapped cameras to the backs of dogs to understand a canine’s movements and other points of view.
VSCO releases Isle of Dogs Presets
Photo editing app VSCO released some filters to help promote the movie. I took some photos of my dog and applied the presets. DOG 2 gives the images a yellow tint while DOG 3 adds a pink hue to images.
Art by Vasily Kandinsky (animation by Simone Seagle)
Since starting a year ago, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has made 400,000 of its images free to download and remix.
The project immediately empowered the likes of software developer and designer Simone Seagle. She downloaded a 1920s print from abstract Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky called Violett. Said Seagle:
Generally you can’t be in a mad mood looking at his work, and it’s a blast to cut up and play with in Photoshop. I picked the print called Violett, because it has fun colors and good shapes to work with.
Everything is a remix
It was Pablo Picasso who once said “great artists steal.” He took inspiration from his scenius and mixed it into his own original work. So it is no surprise that third most visited in the world wants to be part of the creative dialogue. The museum’s chief digital officer Loic Tallon told Quartz:
“If we could preserve the art world in a nice old pickle jar, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I genuinely believe that for the museum to maintain its relevance, we have to participate in that conversations.”
The internet is the world’s largest copy-paste machine. Giving the public unfettered access to rework old masterpieces will bring visibility to obscure pieces while also fueling new interpretations. With time, reworks will birth their own stems for future creators to build on top of.
When mixed media artist Jimmy Swift traveled to India in March 2015, he saw a jagged rock on the beach. He immediately knew what to do with it.
“When I first saw this rock it looked like a perfect place for a great white. It’s truly amazing how mother nature can carve out such a perfect shape.”
But creating a three-dimensional lifelike shark wasn’t easy. He braved an ocean of buffeting waves to get the first draft done. “This was the hardest thing I’ve ever painted. I was literally beat up by the waves and rising tide and forced to stop before it was finished.”
He returned two years later to repaint it for Instagram-obsessed beachgoers.
Read more about the work on My Modern Met and follow Jimmy on Instagram.
Banksy is back in New York, the first time since his month-long residency back in 2013.
The iconic street artist kicked off his visit with a mural dedicated to the imprisonment of Turkish artist and journalist Zehra Dogan, who’s watercolor painting protests the continued destruction of Kurdish territory by the Turkish military.
The black hash marks represent each of the days since Dogan has been in jail. Turkish authorities incarcerated her last March.
“I really feel for her. I’ve painted things much more worthy of a custodial sentence,” Banksy told the New York Times.
Fresh off The Walled Off Hotel project in Bethlehem where he also teamed up with producer Danny Boyl to put together a film called ‘The Alternativity’, it appears that Banksy is making the Big Apple his canvass again.
“New York calls to graffiti writers like a dirty old lighthouse. We all want to prove ourselves here. I chose it for the high foot traffic and the amount of hiding places. Maybe I should be somewhere more relevant, like Beijing or Moscow, but the pizza isn’t as good.”
No artist contained an extra wrinkle in their brain as big as Leonardo Da Vinci. He was a creative genius who combined the disciplines of both art and science to make something new.
Leonardo’s formula: see, contemplate, emulate, remix, and recast.
His undivided mind drove his imagination which led him toward discovery and innovation. He was also a tinkerer, even a procrastinator. Below are some sketches from his notebooks where he noodled on concepts and ideas.
“Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Drawing of bird in flight
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
Widely known for Obama’s 2008 “Hope” poster, contemporary street artist and activist Shepard Fairey created two posters to aid students with their #NationalSchoolWalkout yesterday. According to EMPOWER, the National Women’s March group that sponsored the march, the campaign drew over 3,000 walkouts all over the country including London.
The students are protesting stricter gun control after last month’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida which left 17 dead.
#ENOUGH
The posters “Schools Not Warzones” and “An Assault On Our Future” are both free downloads via Fairey’s creative agency, Studio Number One.
Art is where our mind’s eye merges with reality to create a theater inside our head, resulting in the form of a diary. This was especially true for Pablo Picasso.
Picasso was perhaps best known for his practice of public journaling via painting. “My work is my diary. I have painted my autobiography,” he said.
Picasso grasped his inner thoughts and projected them on canvass. His art gave us a peek inside his head, such as his relationship with partner Marie-Thérèse Walter in his formative years.
Art is an instrument for coping, part mental therapy part expression. Bottling his thoughts without letting them go would’ve driven Picasso insane. Whether it is painting, writing, or playing sports, we exercise our bodies to verify that we’re still alive.
As Picasso and so many other artists illustrate, self-expression has a real and irresistible pulse.
“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.”
Francis Bacon painted ghostly, violent images. Some say he emptied his darkest thoughts on canvass, mostly as a manifestation of his relationship with his sadistic lover, Peter Lacey.
Bacon cultivated a sense of darkness that gave his paintings an “edgy atmosphere…gambling everything on the next brush stroke.” Says Bacon in the video:
“We do with our life what we can and then we die. If someone is aware of that, perhaps it comes out in their work.”
francis bacon
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon
Bacon was an untrained artist, an outlier in the painting world. He worked closely with his PR agent David Sylvester to ensure that he continued to stand out, securing an exhibition at the Tate Museum and book of interview transcripts collated by Sylvester himself.
Francis Bacon was a mystery man who tugged at the most morose moments in his life, leaving the characters in his paintings look as if they are literally gasping for air.
What is new instantly becomes old, a permanent attrition.
At least that’s perspective of artist Maaren Baas, who took a blowtorch to Gerrit Rietveld’s iconic Red and Blue Chair and turned it into something completely new.
“I do not want to destroy, says Baas, “… burning is not something negative. Standstill is. If things remain as is, there is no progress. It’s about changing of what we already know. It’s very human to keep things as they are. While it is very natural to continuously adapt. In nature nothing ever stops changing. It is an ongoing process.”
If a museum is where pieces of art go to congregate in dust, then remixing a version of them at least gives them the potential of new form.
What is great should remain preserved. But it is the pattern of nature’s interest to evolve from past states on top of so-called originality, at least to keep the remix going.
If Facebook’s recent newsfeed changes are any sign, social media is in decay. It’s gone from connecting people to Buzzfeed’s linkbait to a nest of echo chambers where the likeminded and bots spread fake news.
The art done here by artist Andrei Lacatusu provides a metaphor for the chaotic and ruinous state of social media, which appears to be failing like today’s brick-and-mortar stores. While we can expect the social networks to stay in business, they need to spend 2018 rebuilding the public’s trust.
