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Artist Kelly Coats created a phenakistiscope that follows the life of Michael Jackson. Spin the wheel and see him change. It looks like this:
Link -via Dangerous Minds
James Hance is a Jacksonville-based artist who paints fabulous Star Wars-themed paintings. Check him out!
I’m inspired by television and movies from my childhood. It’s funny how you watch some of those things today and wonder why you were so obsessed with them at the time. I remember the Fonz being SO much cooler than he actually was. My paintings are basically just placards screaming ‘Childhood! It was amazing! I want it forever, please!’ I paint mainly in my pajamas, watching the Muppet Show and eating cereal. I’d like to think it shows.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Ostrich eggshells with patterns engraved on them were found in Africa dating back 60,000 years. The eggshells were used to carry water.
The four different patterns and markings are repeated and believed to convey ownership or purpose and to differentiate the eggs from each other.
The researchers led by Pierre-Jean Texier, of the University of Bordeaux, said that before this discovery, the first signs of art, writing or ‘culture’ was thought to have been first shown in the late Stone Age between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago.
It included cave paintings dating back to 30,000 years BC, thought to be some of the earliest examples of decorative art or written communication.
But this latest discovery, which is much older, showed “collective identities and individual expressions” that were the beginning of modern civilised behaviour, they said.
In other words, writing. Or at least a form or communication that led to writing. The researchers examined 270 fragments of ostrich eggs found in South Africa. Link -via Scribal Terror
The question of whether video games can be considered an art form is raging across the internet. Game designer Kellee Santiago asserted in a TED talk that they can be. Film critic Roger Ebert responded that video games are not and can never be art. Gamers and art critics immediately joined in the fray. Neatorama author John Farrier comes down on the side of video games as art and explains in detail.
I define art — and specifically good art — as the effective outward expression of an inward conception of an ideal condition. If a person thinks of a story, and can express that story fully in text, that person is an artist and has produced art. If a person thinks of a sound and can fully express that sound in music, that person is an artist and has produced art. If a person thinks of a movement and can fully express that movement in dance, that person is an artist and has produced art. If a person thinks of an image and can fully express that image in paint, that person is an artist and has produced art.
If a person can envision a video and gather a team together that can accurately express that inner vision, that person is an artist and has produced art.
What do you think? Link
Or perhaps displayed in some other prominent location in your home. This 24 centimeter (9.5 inch) figurine has been masterfully crafted out of the finest crystal by Atlantis – one of the premier glassmaking companies of Portugal.
The piece is entitled “Nossa Senhora” (“Our Lady”). It is a stylistic representation of the Virgin Mary – most evident from the small cross incised near the base of the figure. Even if your family is not religious, one would have to think that a piece of art like this would be a wonderful conversation starter at parties.
Link, via Oregon Expat.
Timothy Miller does wonderful stained glass windows in designs you’d never expect, including super hero logos and Transformers. Here you see his version of Bumblebee. See more in his gallery at Deviant Art. Link -via The Zeray Gazette
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Watch as Oliver the otter creates a masterpiece to be auctioned off for the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa. -via Unique Daily
Josh Millard turned a little idea into a flier which turned into a meme. Deservedly so, don’t you think? Other people are now putting them up in far-flung places. Link -via Metafilter
Update: Josh has started a blog to document these useless fliers.
Doyle Geddes, a teacher at Sky View High School in Smithfield, Utah, led 150 students through the construction of the world’s largest recreation of Van Gogh’s masterpiece Starry Night. The finished product was 72 feet by 90 feet on the gym floor, and an inch deep in breakfast cereal! A Malt-O-Meal factory donated two tons of Tootie Fruities, Cocoa Dyno-Bites and Frosted Mini Spooners for the project.
“To the best of our knowledge it is the largest re-creation of a Van Gogh work of art in any medium,” he said. The re-creation – made with blue, purple, red, green, yellow and brown cereals – was displayed in a gym at Sky View.
As he looked at the completed project Saturday, Geddes said, “I think it’s better than we even expected or dreamed that it could be.” He thinks Van Gogh would be happy with the re-creation, too.
The work was displayed to the public for four hours on Saturday, then the cereal was collected and given to a farmer to feed his pigs. The Herald Journal details the process of making the recreation. Link to story. Link to time-lapse video.
(image credit: Alan Murray/Herald Journal)
Jason Ruff, who goes by the name Doctor Mobius built this huge spider from LEGO bricks! The creation he calls “Big Hairy Spider” was built for the Battlebugs Creepy Crawlers challenge.
See more LEGO creepy-crawlies in the Flickr group Lego Battle Bugs.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
John Jacobsmeyer has been one of those artists that just slips through the radar cracks (if I may use a mixed metaphor) and his recent wood-themed series is worth a look for its brilliant treatment of industrial wood. Notice how JJ puts this timber into different roles, sometimes the backdrop, sometimes the focus, always the theme.
His photo series, A Piney New World is a nice jump from this:
…which was his previous best, IMHO. And still, behold that wood paneling. (The top painting is called Painter’s Lounge. The bottom one is Bele and Lochi Tie the Knot.) Get it? Knot?
Laz Marquez
There’s a certain familiarity to modernizing and re-envisioning posters for Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful films, and Laz Marquez has these sizzling contributions. After he did The Birds, he took suggestions from his followers on what else to do.
I sincerely hope you all enjoyed seeing this project come to life as much as I loved creating them. It’s great to see the set together and working as a whole. Thanks again for all the support & keep your eyes peeled for the next set (Starting very, very soon)!
I hear the next set will be Stephen King themed. Link
The unnamed artist, a friend of a reddit member, buys thrift shop art and adds silly details. I have just the place in my home for a painting like this! You’ll find links to other paintings in the comments at reddit. Link
Artist Shauna Richardson produces trophy animals by crochet! She has been commissioned to produce three giant crocheted lions to be displayed at the 2012 Olympic games in London. Link to interview. Link to artist’s site. -via Everlasting Blort
Some of the prisoners liberated from Auschwitz in 1945 recreated the scenes of their lives there in art. An online exhibit places those artworks side-by-side with photographs of Auchwitz taken many years later.
In 1979, The Auschwitz Museum Archive reproduced selected pieces of art and sent them to writer/photographer Alan Jacobs.
After years of related work and many more trips, Jacobs, and his son Jesse, returned to the camps in 1996 to find and photograph the identical scenes depicted in the art. Krysia Jacobs then devised a way to present them as you see here. They are the result of work over a 24 year period.
An explanatory text, which may be disturbing, accompanies each image. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Mieczyslaw Koscielniak/Auschwitz Museum Archive)
If you’ve been reading Neatorama long enough you will recall a previous Gummi Bear chandelier, which had an elegant, fin de siecle feel, but I think this one is more exuberant and comtemporary. Made by Jellio of 5,000 hand-strung gummi bears (they’re acrylic and not edible, alas, but thus won’t melt on your head while you’re reading), the Candelier takes two months to construct, and only ten will be offered for sale. Added plus: it’s lit by a 50 watt CFL, so you won’t have to change the bulb that often.
Link: Swiss Miss via Fast Company
Designer Steven Heller gives an overview and critique of Olympic pictograms used over the past 74 years for the New York Times. When you only see these every few years, you don’t realize how different they are for each Olympiad. -via the Presurfer
We have seen Microsoft Excel used as a drawing tool before, but not like this. YouTube user and artist shukei01 put this time-lapse video together that shows almost 13 hours of work. ”Autoshape can be used to do lineart, colors, shadows, lighting effects and layers, like some drawing software.”
Anyone know who does the music?
Sayaka Kajita Ganz makes sculptures from recycled materials, and here she’s made a dramatic pair of horses from black and white plastic objects. The installation is called Emergence; you can guess which horse is Night and which is Wind.
My working process is reminiscent of my experiences growing up in several different countries, of being disconnected from the place I was born. Then, I began searching for a new community where I truly belong. I find discarded objects from peoples’ houses and give them a second life, a new home. For my sculptures I use plastic utensils, toys and metal pieces among other things. I only select objects that have been used and discarded. The human history behind these objects gives them life in my eyes. My goal is for each object to transcend its origins by being integrated into an animal form that seems alive. This process of reclamation and regeneration is liberating to me as an artist.
Much more fantasticness at her site.
-via Design You Trust | Photo credit:Sayaka Kajita Ganz
Kevin Van Aelst create artworks inspired by biology from a wide variety of mediums. I particularly like this set of chromosomes made from Gummi worms. Link -via The Sciencepunk Blog
James Stowe has a neat collection of Star Wars cards for Valentine’s Day, which is this Sunday. There are six cards, one for each episode.
Link (Previously on Neatorama: A Very Wrong Star Wars Valentine)
Don’t throw away that used subway ticket! You could be holding a potential starfighter in your hands.
Artist Hubert de Lartigue was playing with his Paris Métro ticket between stops, folding it this way and that, wondering how he could give it a cool shape. He did this for six months, and discovered that with a scalpel and a folding tool, but no glue, he could transform two subway tickets into an X-wing fighter.
Lartigue says:
“I’m very proud of how it turned out and I feel like I am the author of a little masterpiece. I got to the point where I asked myself whether the Parisian metro tickets hadn’t actually been designed to enable me to one day use it as a canvas for this ‘work.’ Their proportions and even the patterns and drawings on them take part in the whole of the work. I’m not kidding, I find that there is a great underlying mystery here…”
He gives step-by-step directions for making an X-wing starfighter here.
More about Paris subway tickets and the history of the Paris Métro here.
Photo by Hubert de Lartigue
In the storage facilities of the Walker Art Center the process is facilitated by labeling the art as such: “Do Not Open! Box Is Art.”
One presumes that the trash is not labeled.
Photographer Nikki Graziano takes pictures and then creates graphs of mathematical functions which map nicely to elements of the image. It’s a very neat and beautiful way of combining math, nature, and art together into a single image.
Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by thalin.
The blog Women, Snakes and Stalkers features South Asian book covers from the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library. This commercial art is very much worth preserving and sharing! Link -via A Journey Round My Skull
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What happens when the bison at the Museum of Natural History get dusty? Photographer Richard Barnes has traveled the U.S. photographing museum dioramas undergoing repair and maintenance, and his photos have been made into a book, Animal Logic, that was published last fall.
Do his photos, which emphasize the distinction between nature and artifice, increase or diminish your appreciation for museum dioramas, many of which were constructed in the 1920s and ’30s? In a recent issue of The Smart Set, Jesse Smith notes this detached perspective towards dioramas isn’t new– The American Museum of Natural History In New York has a section of its website devoted to their “renowned” and “beloved” dioramas, and the Museum’s chairman describes them as “amazing technical feats of illusion.” But once you admit they’re illusions, Smith argues, the dioramas are no longer viable as scientific learning tools. And perhaps we lose something as a result.
Smith admits that he prefers the approach of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences. “It’s not willing to throw in the towel, as the American Museum of Natural History has done. On its site, the Academy budges very little: ‘Although their magic has diminished somewhat with the advent of television and the internet, dioramas still provide an opportunity to experience these magnificent animals up close.’ I don’t know if the Academy really believes this, or it just wants me to. It honestly doesn’t matter. I prefer to be the one stepping back to judge these on their own terms, and the Academy lets me do that.”
(image credit: Richard Barnes)
An unfinished work is a creative work that has not been finished. Its creator might have chosen never to finish it, or might have been prevented by circumstances outside of their control (including death).The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final novel by Charles Dickens. The novel was left unfinished at the time of Dickens’ death and thus how it might have ended remains unknown. The novel is named after Edwin Drood but it mostly tells the story of his uncle, a choirmaster named John Jasper, who is in love with his pupil, Rosa Bud. Miss Bud is Drood’s fiancée, and has also caught the eye of the high-spirited and hot-tempered Neville Landless, who comes from Ceylon with his twin sister, Helena. Neville Landless and Drood take a dislike to one another the moment they meet. Drood later disappears in mysterious circumstances and Dickens’ death before he completed the story means that what happened to him remains a mystery for real.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
Anastassia Elias is an artist who uses the rolls leftover from toilet paper as a showcase for miniature tableaus. At left, children building a snowman, complete with wintry tree limbs hanging as a frame to Elias’ crafted scene.
By making the inserted figures out of the same color paper as the tube, and illuminating the piece from behind, he gives a sort of life to them. Other works depict a woman taking clothes down from a line, a classroom, a market scene, and Anastassia’s grandmother dozing in a chair.
He said: ‘The imagery of my work comes from looking people around me going about their everyday life. Sometimes I use recycled materials and find new things to do with them – this time it was the turn of toilet rolls. The rolls remind me of the famous miniature boats enclosed in bottles.”
Link. (via Unique Daily) Photo: Solent News & Photo Agency.
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It’s not a weather anomaly, but an art project. Stevie Famulari used a weed sprayer to paint the snow on her Fargo lawn pink!
Famulari is an environmental artist and a landscape architecture professor at North Dakota State University.
She changes the color of her snow with each new layer that falls. She plans to paint the next snowfall a purplish blue and the one after that will be black.
She chose her colors to become darker as the season progresses. When the snow melts, she expects the older layers to be revealed.
Famulari says she will not paint the snow yellow. Oh yes, she also paints her lawn in the summer. Link -via Unique Daily
(image credit: David Samson/The Forum)
Silversmith and offbeat artist Polly van der Glas creates jewelry made from human teeth, hair, and sterling silver. Aside from rings, she also makes necklaces, earrings, purses and more.
All works are handmade in Melbourne, with sterling silver, human hair and human teeth. Human teeth are locally donated and sterilised, and human hair is either locally donated or sourced from India and China.
Teeth are particularly difficult to come by, so any donations are gratefully accepted.
Link (Photo via OddityCentral.)
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