Joe Forkan’s paintings of characters and scenes from The Big Lebowski are also based on classic works of art. The one above, for example, is based on Caravaggio’s 1601 painting, Supper at Emmaus. Writes Forkan:
[Supper at Emmaus] illustrates a dramatic moment from the story of Jesus’ resurrection. I was interested in Caravaggio’s take on the story because of his depiction of the moment of discovery, when the disciple’s “eyes were opened”, and for his symbolic use of the still life to reinforce the central idea of his painting.
(snip)
In my painting, I was looking to create a kind of visual and narrative tension between the figures, the dramatic space, and the still life, one that is suggestive of a larger narrative, and that hopefully moves beyond the specifics of the Jesus story, the Lebowski story, or the Caravaggio story, but retains a shifting, if uneasy relationship between all three, in addition to where I am trying to go with the content and the formal elements.
I have a friend, an artist who goes by the name Dirty Wett, who is one of the people I most admire, though I’ve never told him so. For as long as I’ve known him (geez, well over a decade now) he has been uncompromising in his ideals and his desire to pursue his art.
Recently, he embarked on a new project, wherein he is making small pieces of art, and then stashing them for people to find later. He’s calling it “Tweet-Seeker Art.” Here’s his writeup of the project, where he says:
My intentions are to stash these gifts in a place where the seeker might find more than just a piece of art. Maybe it’s a bit presumptuous, but whether it’s the view, the vibe, the atmosphere, the architecture or some strategic act of attaining the piece itself, I’d like to facilitate an experience that simply encourages one to seek.
So, although it was bitterly cold with a biting wind, I took a short detour, walked up to the abandoned sign outside a vacant church, and found a piece of real actual art, protected by a ziplock, tucked gently away. That’s me finding it, above.
Of course, like much art, a photograph doesn’t do the piece any justice at all. “Jovian Julie” is delicate and textured in a way that pixels can’t convey. I feel proud to have found her, almost like I was rescuing her from the cold.
But I also feel like I found it too fast. Like there should have been more anticipation, more challenge, more chase.
Plans are afoot for a Winnipeg art stash, I hear, but in the meantime, I’m trying to come up with a way that I can keep things going. Can I think of something that I could stash as well? Could I give up “Jovian Julie” for a second round of stashing?
I have always liked the “take something, leave something” vibe that I got from geocaching, so perhaps I will learn from that.
I’ll let you know what I figure out, and some hints as to where I leave it. But you don’t have to wait for me — why not go out yourself?
About half a block from my house, there is a fairly good-sized park. Unusually for this prairie town, this park features a number of hills and a pleasing variety of trees and walking paths. I live close to the south-east end of the park, abutting the north end is nursing home (once the local jail), a community centre with skating rink, and ye olde community water tower, which is perched way up on a big hill, to boot, serving as the neighbourhood’s toboggan central, as well as a local landmark.
Between the community centre and the park, I forgot to add, is a community swimming pool. There’s also some lawn bowling greens along the west side. (Ah, heck, I Google Mapped it for ya’ll.)
Well, I’ve long dreamt of putting on a three-day music festival. Sigh. I know.
But this park would be great for it! (No camping.)
So every time I stroll through, a part of me is also in “festival director” mode, thinking about which natural amphitheatre would be best for stage set-up, where the backstage area might go, how to set up gates and concessions, etc., etc.
But once I saw the video embedded above, the next time I walked through the park, I had a revelation — my three-day music festival needed some kind of public art component!
And why not set up a digital projector on top of the pool house, to display video or animation on the face of the water tower?!
Of course, now I’m thinking I can scale back my ambitions a little. For example, maybe I should just drop the idea of a three-day music festival, and focus on the water-tower projection as an art project.
In fact, I think I will. Hmmm. Achievable ambitions. This is unusual for me.
Projection … was the most economical medium and ideal for keeping the historic tower in it’s natural state. This tower, which we’ve named Rusty, faces the new Target Field Stadium, which just opened and is the new home of the Minnesota Twins. Several other projection ideas are in the works, but this simple face has been the clear favorite so far as it brings to life the physical structure itself allowing it to complete the overall look of the character. Currently, we’re working to have Rusty react in realtime to the games in the stadium, so that If the team wins, he can cheer and if they lose, he cries.
I love that companies still assign employees to interesting projects like this.
This looks like it would be a lot of fun as a group activity. And I’ll bet it would be relatively easy to do at a smaller scale, if you were an art teacher, say.
Among other projects, artist Kim Rugg will take a page from the newspaper, cut out every individual letter, and re-arrange it, so that it is alphabetical.
The result is a presentation that is all messenger, no message, as she puts it.
I find it oddly soothing, to have the graphic design of a newspaper without the screaming alarm of content blaring at me, and yet oddly unsettling, to have familiar letters arranged in a familiar pattern and presented in a way that I am conditioned to believe is important, but doesn’t convey any information.
Jonathan Puckey draws portraits, like the one of Obama, above, that are made out of interconnected polygons of different colours. They way they stick together and are shaded, it looks to me like origami.
Three carefully synchronized clocks, with hour, minute, second hands all the same length, can be precisely arranged to form a perfect cube. It’ll repeat itself once every 12 hours.
Here’s a 24-hour span — look at how many near-misses there are:
Roland Roos is a conceptual artist. One time, he placed a heavy art installation on a flooded plaza, and waited until the spring flood waters receded before it was revealed (someone took it).
Another time, he filled a boat with water on the frozen river, let it freeze, and then tried to sail away on his ice cube boat when the river melted. Unfortunately, so did the boat.
For the past two years, he’s been travelling around Europe, and when he came across public art that was broken, he fixed it.
First of all, good for him. Second of all, this is endemic in the world. It’s all too rare for governments of any level to try and make the dreary world a little brighter with “indulgences” like art. When they do, it seems like there’s no followthrough.
So good on Roos.
To finance the project he’s selling before-and-after photos of the repair job. Because he repaired it right after taking the picture, these are one-of-a-kind photos, or unicums, he writes. They’re 320 Swiss francs apiece, which, oddly, is almost precisely $320 (Canadian).
That, above, is a drop of sake, squeezed out onto a microscope slide, allowed to dry, and then photographed under a high-power microscope.
It’s the work of a company called BevShots, which offers prints of highly magnified drinks as abstract art for your walls. Some of them are really cool.
What’s mostly visible in the pictures are crystallized sugars and other carbohydrates. Because vodka, say, has a whole lot fewer of those than, um, a pina colada, it can take a long time to get a good photo of vodk — perhaps up to three months and 200 attempts.
Which goes a long way towards explaining the $550 price tag on the largest and most expensive prints.
Fear not, though! You can get metallic prints for as low as $20. And, when I went through the checkout process for one poster, pricing options seemed both really fair and really transparent.
You can browse a full gallery on the BevShots site. The only thing stopping me from buying right now is that I can’t decide if I want to buy one based on the colour, or based on the drink that it is.
This is practically old news, but what the hell. Artist Leandro Erlich created a really cool faux pool for the Museum of Art of Kanazawa in Japan:
It’s been a permanent installation at the museum since 2004. Elrich created the effect by using two layers of clear glass with water in between them, followed by a layer of water on top.
I imagine that it would be incredibly surreal to be standing in a pool, under water, looking up at people. I think I would be slightly claustrophobic, and just a little paranoid that the water would come crashing down on me.
Elrich has a lot of interesting art installations at his website, like the Lost Garden.
Based on a throwaway comment by Grant earlier today, I was reminded about a post I’ve been meaning to make about Robert McGinnis. Even if you are unfamiliar with this American artist’s name, you are more than likely familiar with his work.
If you have ever seen one of those old painted movie posters for a James Bond movie, with Bond holding his gun in that famous pose of his, you’ve likely seen McGinnis’ work. He originated that pose. Not only did he work on the posters for Thunderball and You Only Live Twice with a partner, he was solo artist for Bond on the posters for Diamonds Are Forever, Live And Let Die, and The Man With The Golden Gun.
On the other hand, if you are more of a bibliophile, you are more probably familiar with his work on paperback covers. He did what was possibly hundreds of them. While some were the typical romance novel covers, he seemed to have the most fun on those that involved a tough guy, a gun and a woman (who tends to be partial naked, preparing to get naked or completely naked). These are the covers for pulp detective novels that are so much fun.
Here’s a link to a Flickr gallery of his work, but be warned that some of the images are NSFW. There’s another one here that has more of his movie posters and is proabably a better choice if you’re at work.
French band Hold Your Horses! has come out with a cool video for their song “70 Million” where they re-create famous paintings, all the while singing along and playing their instruments.
It looks like they had a ton of fun making the video, and are pretty shameless about some of the poses. It doesn’t hurt that the song is pretty darn catchy, too!
