I’ve recently come across a super awesome, interactive website. Someone called Zefrank either was the genius behind it or linked to it, but it’s hard to say which.
I could go on and on about the artistic merits of the website, but I think I’ll let you experience it for yourself and tell me what you think. To me, it felt just as frustrating navigating the website as it does navigating the crazy dating world.
Click here, you know you want to.
Only because it’s so relevant to those of us in our Art School years. Again, courtesy of We The Robots.
Recently discovered carved into a rocky hillside in rural Italy- The Eighth Wonder of the World!
The Temples of Damanhur were not the workings of some ancient civilization but rather the work of a former insurance broker from northern Italy. Oberto Airaudi began having visions of amazing temples decades ago, in the 1960’s at age 10. His goal was to translate his childhood visions into reality, he along with the help of countless volunteers worked for decades on the temples - thought to be the largest temple structure the word has ever seen.
The group - self-named the Damanhurians - hid their construction from the Italian government until 1991, when Police Officers threatened to dynamite the hillside if they weren’t shown the ‘temples’ they had heard about. When several of the builders brought the police into the main temple, jaws dropped as the police officers were met with immaculate murals, stained glass, mosaic and statues. The Damanhurians were granted retrospective permission for their construction, which has now become one of Italy’s national treasures.
Click here for more information on the temples.
Stolen straight from the creator’s mouth over at www.wetherobots.com,
WE THE ROBOTS is a comic strip by animator and former syndicated cartoonist, Chris Harding. It is about the robots.
WARNING: WE THE ROBOTS often reflects the author’s sense of humor. If you are offended by words and jokes, you might want to read something else. Maybe you can find some recipes or something on-line.
The comics are charming in their simplicity, and their quirky punchlines. Many of the comics revolve around certain workplace scenarios, as well as the always funny topic of romantic relationships (done robot-style).
Visit www.wetherobots.com frequently and enjoy!
I was first introduced to Peter Horvath’s work in a digital art class I am taking this semester at Emily Carr, seeing his work and hearing a bit about him sparked some serious curiosity, and inspired me to find out more about Horvath’s work and his practice.
Peter Horvath is a film and video artist who personally brings his work to a place where most filmmakers are trying to prevent their work from appearing. The Internet. He creates short vignettes which are able to capture the audience with their unabashed simplicity and tenderness. The colour schemes appearing in his films are carefully chosen, the illuminated sepia-golds and contrasting steel greys of his latest work, Boulevard, provoke reflection of the altercations between memory and current reality.
Colour-Coding and Book Collecting.
I just shared these photos ( from this flickr set ) with a friend, and sparked a lively discussion about my obsessive need to colour-code things. Maybe it’s just my visual orientated nature, but I find myself arranging everything from pencil crayons to smarties in the order of trusty Roy G. Biv.
The trend of colour-coding books has been around for awhile now, seen in the trendiest design firms, and in more mundane magazines like House & Home. The organization system used to file books can tell alot about a person, and certainly, colour-coding is not the right choice for everyone. Luke Bulman from the design studio Thumb chose to organize his books by colour for the some of the following reasons,
” For one, books he’s purchased or received as gifts are books he knows and often loves, and the color of these books is a major part of the experience of interacting with them.
Another of Luke’s reasons is this: organizing his books by color allows him to discover new and unexpected relationships between books he knows well already. When two unrelated books are forced to occupy the same shelf simply because of their spine color, the shelver is asked to think about whether they have ideas to share between them. Perhaps, the designers of these chromatically-related books saw something in the books’ content that even their authors did not. Maybe their ideals share a common hue? “
The photo’s I’ve shared above are from an art installation by Chris Cobb titled ‘There is nothing wrong in this whole wide world.’ wherin he, along with 20 helpers re-organized the aprox. 20,000 books in San Francisco’s Adobe Bookshop according to the colour wheel. The massive organizational overhaul took place over one night and remained for a week, after which all the books would be returned to their original locations.
Cobb mentions in an interview with Suzanne Kleid that he created this project out of a desire to “make something that I didn’t think would exist anywhere, and that nobody would ever make, that I couldn’t go anywhere in the world and see it. ” He also discusses the immediacy of the project; “It’ll be like in a dream. One day it’ll be like how it is, and the next day when the store opens it’ll be completely transformed.”
Although the idea of arranging my books by colour is something very appealing to me, it’s not something that I think my personal library could handle. Many of my books are oversize, and in order to get the maximum use out of my shelving, I’ve had to recognize shape as well as content.
But keep a wary eye on the horizon, I’ve just photographed my personal (and rapidly growing) library to share with you the way I like to organize my life.
Head on over to www.whipstitchbackstitch.wordpress.com for a sneak peak at my contribution to the Emily Carr student art sale, a selection of one-of-a-kind plush creatures!
They were (and are) so much fun to make. Stay tuned to whipstitch.backstitch. for more creature updates!
Paint by Numbers became an American phenomenon in the 1950’s with the promise to hobbyists that ‘Everyone Can be a Rembrandt’. Many people found the pre-designed canvases to be relaxing and more rewarding than painting from scratch, claiming to become ‘hooked’ on the whole paint by numbers process.
One grateful hobbyist likened the process to an addiction. “I know I’m not much of an artist and never will be,” he or she wrote to American Artist. “I’ve tried in vain repeatedly to draw or paint something recognizable. . . . Why oh why didn’t you or someone else tell me before this how much fun it is to use these wonderful ‘paint by number’ sets? . . . am on my fifth set and just can’t leave them alone.”
For critics, the paint-by-number phenomenon provided ample evidence of the mindless conformity gripping national life and culture. “I don’t know what America is coming to,” one writer complained to American Artist, “when thousands of people, many of them adults, are willing to be regimented into brushing paint on a jig-saw miscellany of dictated shapes and all by rote. Can’t you rescue some of these souls-or should I say ‘morons’?”
‘Every Man a Rembrandt’ Full article.
I grew up in a home that didn’t believe in colouring books. I remember once receiving a dinosaur colouring book as a kid and my father using it to teach me how to mix pencil crayon colours to create more depth. I had an abnormal upbringing. And although I would often beg my mother to buy me those little colouring pads with the clear marker that turned things colours (remember those?), I’m grateful that I wasn’t told to “colour inside the lines” as a child.
A favorite colouring book of mine is the Anti-Coloring Book by Susan Striker. It’s a book that gives the artist prompts instead of outlines. Here is a page from one of her books;
(P.S. If anyone actually wants to finish the above anti-colouring book page, it would make my day if you posted it and told me about it! Such fun!)
And also, just for fun, some people who are doing something NEW with the Paint by Numbers project. Paintball by Numbers! (c/o The Amateurs). Enjoy!
