Category: Art

Scott Teplin draws/watercolors intricate Escher-like rooms devoid of people, but containing intriguing domestic goods and hidden vaults, all visibile through his Ukiyoe-meets-video game isometric view. I think, also, his style reminds me a bit of the artist on the HBJ editions of Stanislaw Lem books.
Here’s a page at the Adam Baumgold Gallery, which is showing his works, including the latest, Alphaville. Here’s his blog.
By way of Boing Boing.

Fascinating and grisly.

The Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls, painted in 1819 by Kyoto-area physician Yasukazu Minagaki (1784-1825), consist of beautifully realistic, if not gruesome, depictions of scientific human dissection.
Unlike European anatomical drawings of the time, which tended to depict the corpse as a living thing devoid of pain (and often in some sort of Greek pose), these realistic illustrations show blood and other fluids leaking from subjects with ghastly facial expressions.
The fact that the bodies used in scientific autopsies in Edo-period Japan generally belonged to heinous criminals executed by decapitation adds to the grisly nature of the illustrations.

From the PinkTentacle Blog

I don’t know the artist, but these are cool. More here.

Film Portrait (Incision) I
2005

John Stezaker collects postcards, movie portraits, stills and lobby cards with an archivist’s zeal. But the way in which they are re-functioned as art is not at all congruent with such an approach. One of the things that makes Stezaker’s practice so intriguing is the extent to which the works more or less follow Conceptual art orthodoxy up to when he makes his ‘cut’, bringing the two images together, after which all other decisions are intuited. The ‘idea’ of the works is straightforward and consistent, and Stezaker has constructed them in much the same way for more than 20 years: two different images are brought together, each destroyed in some important way in order to birth a new one. Yet the logic, or meaning, of the new images remains mysterious.

Written by Dan Kidner from Frieze.com

Some more Stezaker galleries at MoMa, and the Saatchi Gallery.

And here’s some art grant writing:

Through his signature use of photographic collage John Stezaker identifies mankind’s desire to portray an enhanced self and explores our acceptance or our suspicion of others’ personas and the denial of our own.

Arrrrgh. Like fingernails on chalkboard. Here’s some more of that from the Tate:

John Stezaker is fascinated by the power of images and questions the authority of pictures found in books, magazines, postcards and encyclopaedias by directly intervening into their ordinary status.

Owwwwww! Sweet pain of art-grant writing! Why do you hurt me so?

Found over at the always groovy World of Kane blog.

Belgian advertising illustrator Guy Peellaert was one of the first cartoonists to embrace Pop Art and incorporate Andy Warhol’s appropriation of mass market iconography into his work. His first comic, Les aventures de Jodelle, (Jodelle’s likeness modelled after yé-yé chanteuse Sylvie Vartan) appeared in 1966, swiftly followed by ‘Pravda la Survireuse’ (her likeness based on Françoise Hardy) for the magazine ‘Hara-Kiri’ in 1967.

Hard to believe this is the same artist that went on to design the cover for Bowie’s ‘Diamond Dogs’.
I realized I’ve been looking at Peellaert’s work for some time: it’s the cover of this Mansfield CD.

Now this is going to be cool.

In the next few entries, I’ll describe some of the things I’ve been doing instead of posting and journaling but let me begin by telling you about my newest book. It’s called “An Illustrated Life: Drawing inspiration from the private sketchbooks of artists, illustrators and designers” and it’s been so exciting to work on it. I contacted every person whose work I’ve admired over the years and asked them if they would be willing in sharing pages form their illustrated journals and allowing me to interview them about their process, their tools, how they use their books, and what impact it has on their lives. To my delight everyone I asked said they would be happy to be part of the project. I accumulated an embarrassment of riches: dozens of pages from more than fifty amazing people and now the book is overstuffed to bursting.

Check out the sample pages, including ones from Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, and plenty others I’ve never heard of. I love to have a nose about in people’s sketchbooks (when they let me!), so I’m looking forward to this.

Shintaro Kago is a very odd manga-ka, and his 16-page Abstraction is a bit like porno meets Chris Ware meets Art Spiegelman. NSFW but excellent.

A very odd Chinese painter. Although the artbabble go on about propaganda posters and such, isn’t the manga influence obvious?