Category: Art

Filmmaker and Mort Walker biographer (!) Jason Whiton has a blog dedicated to the crazy production design of such films and series as Diabolik, James Bond, Our Man Flint, The Prisoner, and The Avengers. Modern action films are usually too dark and dingy to really have production design worth mentioning.

Vincent Hui is a Hong Kong-born artist who currently works in L.A. I like his Bosch-like artwork. The above is titled “Plane Crash” from 2006.

UPDATE 2016:
His old site, hardsponge.com is down and/or vanished and I don’t really know what happened to him. Vincent, are you out there??

James Jean is the artist behind the comic series Fables, but his style and breadth are quite inspiring. He has a blog, too.

I don’t really know where to start getting my head around this one.

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.

And furthermore:

Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

I also heard that the coat, all cramped up in its incubator, started shrieking “WHY? WHY??? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE KILL ME!!!” Okay, that’s not true, but if it was, wouldn’t that be cool? I’d wear that.

Surely this will make us question preconceived ideas about science, life, art, fashion, laboratories, pleather (That’s enough – Ed.)

A tres cool Flickr set.

Who was the photographer, Marcus Keef? I’d like to know, but the Internet is rather quiet. What I do know is that his album cover art for the Vertigo, Neon, and Nepentha labels of the early ’70s is very distinctive. Often gatefold, widescreen works, Keef’s photos usually manipulate color, obsess about old British households, creepy interiors, dusty attics, and occasional shots of the band members sitting around looking lost and/or freaked out. I’m sure a lot of kids were weirded out by their older sibling’s/family member’s copy of the first Black Sabbath album, with that witch/old hag/meth head/Ozzy in drag on the cover, waiting outside her dilapidated old country barnhouse, waiting for you to come in for tea.

To me, it’s like the dark flipside of the late ’60s interest in nostalgia, all 1920s funfairs and post-WWI memorabilia. No, those people didn’t come back from the war, and we shuttered up the attic with a dead man’s things. Going to look for the past, these people found that it’s, well, past. And dead. And eldritch, which is a perfect word for this.

Of course, not all of Keef’s works were like this, like the awful bloody clown cover for Jimmy Campbell’s “Half Baked” or the studio shot for Raw Material’s “Time Is…”. But for the most part, these two galleries show a definite style that evoke a certain period in British rock. You can almost feel the album covers with their matte finish, their musty, unplayed smell, and tiny detritus of hand rolled tobacco/weed that’s fallen in the inner sleeve.

No album dates past 1976, and the best work is 1970-1973, so I wonder what became of him. Is he still alive?

This horse fetus thingamydooder is the cutest, most angelic thing I’ve seen in a long time. All together now: awwwwwwwwwwwww.
However, it turns out that photographer Tim Flach, who took this and other amazing horse-themed photos, has an amazing eye for more than just the awwwwwww-some.

The method I used was to ask people who have spent their lives with this subject: what is it that really touched you about the horse? What is it that you remember? And as you ask people, they’ll recount stories or things they experienced about a particular breed or how when they were a child they rode a Shetland pony, and what it meant to them. Shetlands are very intelligent and they also have the tendency to be very challenging. Most people who become quite good riders often start out with that kind of pony. If you ask them which pony has significance to them, they’ll often cite the Shetland pony over all other ponies. So then what I did was I went to Shetland and spent a week literally within the Shetland islands to find the origin of each horse, and where it came from. So that you could be a child in an arena in Moscow and see a picture of where your pony had really come from and the environment that created it.

South Carolina-based artist Hollis Brown Thornton uses a convoluted technique to transfer photos (into a moleskine!) and then work the image, removing the human and leaving something like a trail of milky smoke. Groovy.
His website and his Flickr stream.

By way of Moleskinerie.