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Let your geekiness show in the valentines you send! Express your love for your sweetie plus your love for your favorite video game, online community, scientific discipline, movie, or TV show. There are lots to select from, but you won’t find them in your local greeting card store -no, these out-of-the ordinary valentines are found on the internet. Shown here are some valentines based on the TV series Breaking Bad, by Beth at Butt Horn. See the rest of the collection at mental_floss. Link
What started as an art form practiced by prisoners and tramps has become a really cool way for crafty folks to show off their modeling skills by building awesome structures, and sculptural works of art, out of a million or so little pieces of wood and lots of glue.
Hit the link to peruse a gallery featuring eight matchstick art masterpieces, full of fine detail and fantastic constructs, just don’t light up anywhere near these highly flammable works of art or you can kiss them goodbye!
Can
french fries be objects of art? That's debatable, but they sure can be
objects of lawsuits!
Here's what happened when a gallery lost a pair of french fries that "were the basis of an artwork":
The artwork comprised a cross made of two golden chips, alongside two normal fries, deep-fried and not gold-leafed.
The catalogue for the original 1990 exhibition “Pommes d’Or,” described the work of artist Stefan Bohnenberger as “the metamorphosis of a profane everyday object into a sacred artwork.”
But the gallery’s reverence for the chips declined in the intervening decades, because when Bohnenberger asked for the two normal fries back last year, the Munich gallery Mosel and Tschechow could no longer find them. An incensed Bohnenberger promptly demanded damages, which the gallery refused to pay.
According to a report in news magazine Der Spiegel the court ruled that the gallery must now hand Bohnenberger €2,000 plus five percent interest from May 2010. On top of that, the gallery is being forced to pay 90 percent of the court fees.
The judge found that the gallery had neglected its duty to keep the chips safe.
What were they thinking? This could've been solved for $0.99 with a quick trip to the local McDonald's: Link - via Arbroath
You might not know the name Wayne White, but you’re bound to have seen the works he has created over the last thirty years or so of his artistic career.
From stop motion animation, puppets and set design for PeeWee’s Playhouse, to music videos (Peter Gabriel’s Big Time and Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight) to his fine art series, which features 3-D text painted into classic lithographs.
Wayne White is an amazing artist, his talent is such that he’s left no artistic medium untouched, and there seems to be no limit to what Wayne can accomplish, so why has it taken so long for someone to make a documentary about him? Probably because all the money has been tied up in making supernatural teen love stories and Romcoms. Oh well, better late than never I suppose…
Sure it seems like a conceptual idea that would never work in real life, but this bathtub is actually completely functional, not to mention totally awesome -or at least, it would be if the creator actually finished the project. BoingBoing is trying to track down leads to find out if it was ever completed or not. If you have any information, share your knowledge in their comments section.
Link Via BoingBoing
You don’t often think of a garbage can as an art medium, but some artists do. And how nice is it to disguise an ugly-but-necessary object as something delightful? My favorite of the collection at WebUrbanist is this graffiti-embellish can by Job Willemsen and Tom v.d. Hurk in the Netherlands. Link
(Image source: Wooster Collective)
What’s the connection between electricity and the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson? It’s a play entitled Call Me Waldo in which an electrician is consumed by the spirit or at least the ideas of Emerson. The promoters of a new off-Broadway production commissioned Noah Scalin, the artist behind the Skull-a-Day project, to make this image.
Link -via Boing Boing | Scalin’s Website
After seeing this great Star Wars version of Marcel Duchamp’s mechanically abstracted Nude Descending a Staircase, Irene Gallo wanted to see what other geek interpretations of classic artworks have been put out there. The resulting round up is quite enjoyable.
Link Via Geeks Are Sexy
We’ve featured a number of great art shows that took place at Gallery 1988 before, but that’s because they have so much awesomely geeky stuff go through there. Their most recent show, Multiplayer x2, focuses exclusively on classic games of the past including Castlevania, Mario and Pac Man. If you happen to be in LA before March 3, be sure check it out.
Link Via Laughing Squid
Digital artist Petros Vrellis created an interactive version of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night. The brushstrokes movie and activate music. Vrellis tells more about the project at Creative Applications. Link -via The Daily What
See also: Starry Night is Everywhere!
This might just be a better movie than both the Phantom Menace or The Adventures of Tin Tin. Would you go see it?
Grant Snider at Incidental Comics found the secret to making life a lot more artful, interesting, and …strange. Link -Thanks, Rich!
Caleb Kraft decorated his 1977 VW Microbus with a mural of an “octophant,” an elephant head with a trunk and tentacles! That’s not all -he installed handmade stained glass in the van as well. So if you see a Microbus with stained glass and an elephant inside, you know who it is. Or continue reading for a video of the project.
This illustrated chart by H. Caldwell Tanner shows how much time is needed to properly enjoy each genre of video game, from casual games to epic length RPGs, and in my opinion it pretty much sums up what all hardcore gamers know-each genre has a different level of commitment, and appeals to a particular type of gamer.
This chart is a great way for newbie gamers to figure out what kind of games they’re looking for, instead of borrowing your copy of Mass Effect 3 for six months just to discover that they don’t really like RPGs.
Link –via Geeks Are Sexy
I’m amazed that this is possible. Jim Dingilian adds a layer of soot inside bottles and then etches at the surface until he makes sharp looking landscapes. If you’re in New York City, you can visit an exhibit of his work that opened yesterday.
Link and Exhibit Website -via Craft | Photo: MacKenzie Fine Art
Ted Lott builds houses, but not like any house that you've ever seen. In this piece titled "Sit Stay," he took an old armchair frame and turned it into a foundation for a miniature house.
Designboom has more photos: Link | Ted's official website (Don't miss his artwork Mobile Home)
This really should have been posted last night, while the running theme was coffee, but better late than never. Artist Gwyneth Leech paints paper coffee cups. Over 700 of the finished cups are on display in an exhibit titled “Hypergraphia: Gwyneth Leech, the Cup Drawings, Studio in the Prow” at the Sprint Flatiron Prow Artspace in New York City. Leech herself is on exhibit, too, as she sits in the window with her cups and paints more cups five days a week from 10AM to 2PM through February 18th. Link -via Laughing Squid
There’s a lot to look at in these beautiful paintings by Audrey Flack, and I can’t help but wonder if she used the house of a hoarder as the inspiration/reference for her paintings.
It’s like a little adventure for your eyes, a tour of mystical terrain that takes you to some strange places and provokes a myriad of thoughts.
There are many stories being told by these works, the brilliant colors of life, beautiful shading and skilled rendering of multiple surface types playing off one another and further selling the realism.
Even though these pieces were painted in the 1970s, they look fresh to this day, and I’m sure digging that mystical vibe. Check out more of Audrey’s masterpieces at the link below, it’s a great way to feed your head.
Link –via Beautiful Decay
These Victorian style portraits of Star Wars characters by Terry Fan lead one to believe that C3PO is powered by steam, and that droids actually enjoy wearing three piece suits. Everyone knows that these things are untrue, of course, but it’s a romantic version of the Space Opera that hasn’t been fully explored yet, so let’s just go with it.
In this series you get Darth Vader looking quite dapper, Yoda with a top hat that somehow makes his head look even smaller (and his ears even bigger), C3apo as a gentleman about town and Boba Fett fresh from overseas service in the military. These portraits look like they were taken a long long time ago, in a place that’s not so far away after all…
Link –via Rampaged Reality
And on the Seventh Day, God rest after a nice cup of coffee. We've featured Karen Eland's coffee art on Neatorama a while ago, but it's always neat to revisit and see her newest creations: Link | More neat coffee pics and art over at Dark Roasted Blend - Thanks Avi!
Saimir Strati composes mosaics out of unusual substances, including toothpicks and nails. His message in this 270-square foot mosaic made of coffee beans is simple: “One world, one family, one coffee.” The five human figures represent five continents (sorry, Australia and Antarctica) uniting together in a caffeinated peace.
-via The Presurfer
Artist Marcelo Gallegos has several lovely Valentine cards that stray from the normal hearts and flowers but still convey romance. This card depicting the elder god in love is my favorite. See the others at his Etsy store. Link -via Buzzfeed
Confucius has never looked so creepy! Sculpted by Zhang Huan in waaaay more than life sized scale (32 feet tall!), this is one version of the Chinese philosopher that you’ll want to steer clear of when it’s feeding time.
It’s so startlingly realistic that I have to wonder if Zhang hired a giant figure model for reference while sculpting. I kinda want to climb on top of giant Confucius’ head and pretend I’m Remy from the Pixar movie Ratatouille.
Link –via Geekosystem
Photo: Combo-pictures/Flickr
Hadouken not withstanding, I agree with urban artist COMBO that Muhammad Ali would totally best Street Fighter's Ryu. But I'm not so sure about E. Honda. It's not so easy to defeat a fat man in undies. Via Twisted Sifter
One morning, after she had two pear-sized tumors removed from her brain, Debbie Wagner decided to paint the sunrise. This became a daily ritual for her — a celebration of the life that she still had. For seven years, that’s what she’s done almost every day. Wagner explains why:
“When I look at a sunrise, it represents a new beginning. I’m just so happy to be here another day and see my kids do different things and go to dinner with my husband. I suppose that’s the addiction of it — it puts me in a state of mind focused on gratitude.”
Seven years have many sunrises, so Wagner has produced more paintings than she can display. She sells them to people who want to mark a special day:
Increasingly, Wagner’s artwork is taking on personal significance for others as well. People moved by her story have started requesting sunrise paintings for their own milestones: the day of a wedding or a baby’s birth; the day a loved one came home safely from Iraq or Afghanistan; the day a person finally overpowered a stubborn addiction.
Link -via Oddity Central (where there’s a video) | Photo: Debbie Wagner
Hill Valley of the future is such a wonderful place to live, or at least it is when created by Lego artist Alex Jones. He has even more cool movie sets on his Flickr page for the viewing enjoyment of any Lego enthusiast.
Link Via Geekologie
Lots of people love playing with tape, but Rebecca Ward has elevated sticking-tape-on things into an artform.
Take a look at her geometric installation, featured over at My Modern Met:
The tape artist redefines the space she's working in with her evenly spaced parallel and interweaving stretches of bright lines that form three-dimensional shapes. Taking her architectural pieces around the world, Ward has shown her installations from a gallery in Texas to a Kate Spade flagship store in Tokyo.
Link | Rebecca Ward's official website
Steven Spazuk draws with fire by holding a candle up to pieces of canvas, then adjusting the soot with brushes, knives, and his fingers to create images. I really like his impressionistic works, like the one above. But from a technical perspective, his massive composite portraits consisting of hundreds of smaller pieces demonstrate the magnitude of his skills. Watch a video at the link showing how Spazuk does it.
Sir, it’s quite possible this staircase is not entirely stable. Nonetheless, C3PO will descend it as Mr. Duchamp requires. John Mattos composed this painting. You can see a roundup of other famous works of art with a science fiction twist at the link.
Link -via The Uniblog | Mattos’s Website
You’ve seen many minimalist art posters based on movies, but how about minimalist posters for internet memes? Artist Stefan Van Zoggel created 29 of them so far, illustrating both classic and recent memes. Link -via Blame It On The Voices
