Los Angeles-based painter Melissa Moss makes artwork that seems fit for a children's fairy tale. From her graceful, curtseying trees to her odd little nubbin creatures resting beneath the splayed gills of gigantic mushrooms, these paintings beg for a fanciful storyline. And her use of color.
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Justin Gignac, a graduate of New York's School of Visual Arts, picks up trash off of the streets of New York City. But, you won't find him in a sanitation department uniform. He actually fills bags with subway passes, Broadway tickets, coffee cups, phone book pages, and other NYC junk and carefully arranges them in plastic cubes, which are then signed, numbered, and dated in slick Helvetica typeface and sells them for 50 smackers — "making them perfect for anyone who wants their own piece of the NYC landscape," he says.
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In January, it was announced that Olafur Eliasson, an internationally acclaimed Danish-Icelandic artist, will bring a series of freestanding waterfalls to Manhattan's East River from late June through mid-October this year. The scaffolding for the 90- to 120-foot waterfalls is now being built, and the City expects tourism revenues to increase by $55 million while the project is underway. The large-scale public art has been designed to protect water quality and aquatic life by using intake pools suspended in the river to filter the water, and ConEd, the local gas and electric company, will provide electricity generated from renewable resources.
I was blown away by Eliasson's recent exhibition at the SFMOMA here in San Francisco, which featured a kaleidoscopic tunnel built on the museum's steel truss bridge and a multisensory 360 degree color room — although it kind of cracked me up thinking of Aleksandr Petrovsky's "large scale light installations." I also know that "the Weather Project," Eliasson's installation of a massive sun in London's Tate Modern, was a wild success.
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David Wiseman works in a variety of mediums including wood, porcelain, crystal, and bronze, and is inspired by the subtleties in nature, like the texture of bark or the pattern of moss growing on a rock. His designs, which can be found on a tabletop, wrapped around a fireplace, or dangling from the ceiling, highlight these organic details, and bring a romantic, Sleeping Beauty-esque woodland quality indoors. His bronze branches, which sprout porcelain blossoms, are kindred spirits of midcentury bronze wall sculptures, but have a timeless sophistication that supersedes them.
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I'm all about making something out of nothing, and artist KS Rives takes that philosophy one step further by making something beautiful out of nothing anyone wants: trash.
Whether through the use of old maps of Paris, discarded rubber bands and public transit tickets, or even cigarette butts, KS Rives takes something that no one wants and transforms it into a highly desirable work of art.
To see some of her art, including her hand-painted wallpaper, just .
In her artist statement, she says,
For years my work has been about using refuse to reflect on the decisions that people make, and deciphering what that means about them as people. Studying waste from different parts of the world allows me to discover not only things about other cultures, but about my own by comparing and contrasting the two. Using the technique of collage, I am able to connect intimately with my work and study the individual pieces in detail.
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According to Daily Mail, Babyshambles rocker, incarceree, and Kate Moss's former flame, Pete Doherty debuted an exhibition of his bloody paintings at the Chappe Gallery in the Montmartre district Paris last week, despite the fact that he's currently serving time behind bars.
The gruesome exhibit features 30 paintings by l'artiste, including "one blood and pencil image of the supermodel, entitled 'Miss Moss reclines', shows her topless lying on a sofa," one self-portrait scribbled with "with the baffling initials S.K., V.I.C., a Star of David and a swastika," and in another, the known drug offender "signed his name in blood from one of his
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An overt sign that the growing crochet trend has been taken to new heights, literally, is artist Carol Hummel's Tree Cozy. As part of a two-year exhibition of eight works by sculptors in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, Hummel crocheted a cozy with brightly colored nylon and synthetic material for a tree in front of Cleveland Heights City Hall, which wouldn't impede "the growth of the tree or [harm] wildlife." In her artist statement, Hummel refers to the tree cozy as "an emphatically handmade blanket representing femininity and comfort" which covers "a natural object representing masculinity and strength," a piece that personifies the tree "keeping it cozy and colorful throughout the year, enhancing the beauty of nature," and evokes "memories of bygone times and places when life was good," as well as "softens the strong tree form while also emphasizing it." She says, "The cozy covering the tree fluctuates between comforting blanket and suffocating cover-up; it conceals as much as it protects; it hides as much as it reveals." Tree Cozy was on display from 2005 through 2008, and landed Hummel an award as the winner of the Heights Public Art Competition. There's more to learn and see about this project, so .
Hummel has also "cozied" a companion tree in India to the one in Ohio, bound another tree in India with rope, was commissioned to crochet a tree in Orlando, Florida, macraméd a mountain in Utah, and has also been known to dress trees in underwear.
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Today is International Women's Day. Annually on this day, thousands of events are held throughout the world to inspire women and celebrate their achievements. Definitely look in your local paper to see if there are any events in your community celebrating this day, and for now, take a look at some of my favorite posts celebrating creative women here on CasaSugar.
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Jim Denevan makes unforgettable art with hardly anything more than his bare hands — well, his hands and a stick. Jim's work is made on beaches, where you can find him at low tide working for up to seven hours with just a stick he's found on the beach. His resulting freehand images are stunning and temporal, for as soon as the tide rolls back in, the images disappear.
Rebecca Rebouché is a multimedia artist living in New Orleans. Her deceptively simple style combines embroidery, painting, and collage into lovely, meditative imagery. Of working in New Orleans, she says, "My life in New Orleans is a duality all in itself.
