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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
Alex Gross takes classic Victorian pictures and then repaints them into portraits of pop culture personalities like Aquaman, Bride of Frankenstein and Godzilla. His work will be exhibited at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in LA next month, so if you’re in town, stop by and support a great geek artist.
Matthew Davis creates gorgeous paintings by carefully dripping paint over his canvas, adding layers to form images. His technique is particularly effective for water scenes, like the one above. They remind me of the work of another artist we’ve featured recently who also doesn’t use a paintbrush.
Artist’s Website -via Colossal
Elisabetta Rogai isn’t the first painter to use wine, but she may be the first to make it work. The challenge is that the color of wine changes over time, sometimes in unplanned and unpleasant ways. But Rogai found that adding flour to the wine helped and has been using the mixture ever since. View more of her paintings at the link.
Link -via Bit Rebels | Artist’s Website | Photo: Marco Gemelli
These charming paintings by Christopher Stott are full of nostalgia and the love of vintage design.
With muted hues and a soft light, they’re easily mistaken for photographs at a glance, and Christopher shows remarkable skill for imitating real-world reflections, from chrome to painted metal to the edge of a plastic book sleeve.
You can admire the rest of these masterfully crafted paintings at the link below.
Link –via Flavorwire
Grant Woolard (previously at Neatorama) dreamed he was in the world of famous paintings. How many do you recognize? But you don’t really have to know your Monets from your Manets to enjoy this animation. -Thanks, Grant!
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Not one.
Amy Shackleton applies wet paint to a canvas and then elevates and turns it so that the paint runs in the direction that she wants. After many carefully staged pourings over one or two weeks, she’s made a complete, coherent image. Her technique seems to work particularly well for nighttime scenes. You can view more images and a time-lapse video of Shackleton at work at the link.
From photograph versions of classic paintings to artistic landscapes filled with modern blights, this WebUrbanist article features a great collection of modern takes on classic artworks. Personally, I like the Star Wars additions.
A group of artists in the Ukraine dive into the water of the Black Sea to compose paintings. With scuba gear, they can stay underwater for up to 40 minutes. During that time, they apply paint to canvases under challenging conditions. Watch the video at the link to see the artists at work.
They’re all seascapes. Can’t they get a model down there for some figure studies? Or maybe some good horse pictures. Those always look good in a home.
Link -via Geekosystem
Have you ever wondered what the world of Star Wars would look like if it emerged in our own culture? Tony Bamber has you covered with this great image of an AT-AT cruising the streets of Chicago. Personally, I’d rather ride in one of those than a bus.
Link Via Geeks Are Sexy
Anton Semenov is an artist at an advertising agency by day, but at night, his digital paintings take a turn for the dark and become much more interesting. While most people probably wouldn’t feel comfortable having his art plastered up in their bedrooms, it certainly demonstrates a lot of talent and is great to look at around Halloween.
Link Via Ratamatata
To be fair, I’m not entirely sure that a velvet painting of Admiral Ackbar belongs in an article titled “10 Crazy Pieces of Crap On eBay Right Now.” Personally, I think it’s pretty awesome. Even so, a lot of the other items certainly do belong there. Check out the rest over on Oddee.
Notice anything strange about this picture? It might take a second, but really look. If you haven’t noticed yet -look at the guy on the left’s leg. Now try to look at the painting and try to ignore that horrible mistake. It’s hard isn’t it. If you want to see more terrible art mistakes, be sure to check out this great Cracked article, but be warned, the artworks might be ruined for you forever.
I was surprised when I learned just how well Bill Murray could pull off the look of an 1800′s Russian general. But he’s not the only celebrity that looks right in the role. Replaceface features an array of modern celebrities in this classic portrait style.
Plenty of people are irritated with the banking system right now, but you know people are angry when people are willing to pay $25,000 for a painting of a Chase bank burning up:
Tapping into popular sentiment, Alex Schaefer’s painting of a Chase bank on fire just sold on eBay for $25,200. Part of what drove up the price was online buzz after police questioned him while he was painting it, asking him if he planned to do what the painting depicted.
While I wouldn’t pay that much for one of these paintings, I certainly support the sentiment Mr. Schaefer is expressing.
Link Via Consumerist
BuzzFeed often has a lot of fan art creations, but this round up is even better in that they are all paintings of video games. This Sonic painting by DeviantArt user Orioto is simply amazing, as are the rest of his works in his gallery.
BuzzFeed recently posted another great round up of fun fan art, but the one that really struck me was this Muppet Dr. Who by Amy Mebberson. It was apparently made specifically to be sold at the San Diego Comic Con. I wish I saw it when I was there, but then I probably would have missed the chance to see some of her other great works.
While I love geeky art, I think my favorite form of these works has always been mashups between two great sources. BuzzFeed has a great collection of such pieces, including this picture of Darth Valice in Wonderland by DeviantArt user Thumper-001.
While not everyone likes Parks & Recreation, practically all of those who do love the character of Ron Swanson.That’s why there’s so many awesome artworks based on him you can find 29 more of them over at BuzzFeed.
I recently came across artist James Hance’s website and I have to say, I’m impressed with what he calls his “Relentlessly Cheery Art.” Just look at this piece titled “Chester Copperpot’s Goonie Clubhouse Band” and you’ll see how fun his work really is. See more over at his website and if you like his paintings, go ahead and indulge -the prints are only $10 each.
Andy Alcala, a student at the University of Iowa, took the term “face value” quite literally when he decided to reinterpret some of the most famous paintings in the world as face paintings. They’re quite entertaining and visually stunning.
If you love Bill Murray, then you’ll certainly appreciate this great print of him by artist N.C. Winters called “The Wisdom of the Llama.” In case you were wondering, yes, it is for sale.
Link via Laughing Squid
Artist Joe Dragt’s medium of choice is the humble outdated circuit board. It’s a great way to reinject value into something that otherwise may have been thrown away. The paintings work surprisingly well as a backdrop for the organic subjects he uses.
Link Via Geekosystem
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Artist Jonathan Wateridge has a thing for wreckage. This series of paintings, depicting fallen airplanes and sinking ships, are rendered in oil paint with extreme realism. The works are all very large (2m x 3m, or about 6.5′x9.8′) to enhance the level of detail. Check out the rest of the Crash series on BestBookmarks. (I especially love the plane resting in the iceberg field.) Link
If you’ve always wanted to step inside a painting–or better yet, have on leap out at you–then you’ll enjoy the highlighted pieces in a recent 4D art show held in China. Visitors to the exhibit had lots of fun taking pictures of themselves interacting with the artwork.
The collection of paintings, on display at a contemporary art exhibition in the Jilin province, uses techniques similar to the ‘stand-up’ advertising hoardings that are sometimes painted on the edges of sports pitches.
With cunning use of shadow they trick the eye into believing that the images are leaping off the canvas, that arrows are firing towards the viewers gaze from the bows of cherubs, or that Pinocchio’s nose is protruding wildly from the frame.
The pieces are a huge hit with spectators who have already shown a talent for interacting with the works to become part of the art themselves.
See more of the cool 4D artwork in the Daily Mail gallery. Link
Image credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images
Some starvin’ artists make do with a shoestring budget, but Miami-based artist Federico Uribe makes his art on a literal shoestring budget: he uses colorful shoelaces to "paint."
Federico Uribe’s process is as painstaking as you can imagine. He carefully selects the string colors to use, weaves them together and pins each one to the canvas at various points so it doesn’t fall off. Each creation can take up to 30 days (on a 10-hours a day schedule) to finish as a result of the intricate process.
CoolThings has a few of Federico’s artwork: Link | Federico Uribe’s Websites
Previously on Neatorama: Shoe Creatures by Federico Uribe
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Since 1989, Mark A. Landis periodically donates art to various museums. He asks for nothing in exchange, then disappears. Sooner or later, the art museum finds that the Curran, or Signac, or Lepine works he donated are forgeries, painted by Landis himself.
Unlike most forgers, he does not seem to be in it for the money, but for a kind of satisfaction at seeing his works accepted as authentic. He takes nothing more in return for them than an occasional lunch or a few tchotchkes from the gift shop. He turns down tax write-off forms, and it’s unclear whether he has broken any laws. But his activities have nonetheless cost museums, which have had to pay for analysis of the works, for research to figure out if more of his fakes are hiding in their collections and for legal advice. (The Hilliard said it discovered the forgery within hours, using a microscope to find a printed template beneath the paint.)
In the weeks since an article in The Art Newspaper first revealed the scope of the forgeries, museums and their lawyers have been trying to locate Mr. Landis, who was never easy to find in the first place because he often provided bogus addresses and phone numbers. But now he seems to have disappeared altogether.
Landis often uses often names and sometimes poses as a priest. Link -via Metafilter
A Queen’s University Classics professor may have found a reference that Dan Brown missed. Ross Kilpatrick believes the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, incorporates images inspired by the Roman poet Horace and Florentine poet Petrarch. The technique of taking a passage from literature and incorporating it into a work of art is known as ‘invention’ and was used by many Renaissance artists.
“The composition of the Mona Lisa is striking. Why does Leonardo have an attractive woman sitting on a balcony, while in the background there is an entirely different world that is vast and barren?” says Dr. Kilpatrick. “What is the artist trying to say?”
Dr. Kilpatrick believes Leonardo is alluding to Horace’s Ode 1. 22 (Integer vitae) and two sonnets by Petrarch (Canzoniere CXLV, CLIX). Like the Mona Lisa, those three poems celebrate a devotion to a smiling young woman, with vows to love and follow the woman anywhere in the world, from damp mountains to arid deserts. The regions mentioned by Horace and Petrarch are similar to the background of the Mona Lisa.
Both poets were read when Leonardo painted the picture in the early 1500s. Leonardo was familiar with the works of Petrarch and Horace, and the bridge seen in the background of the Mona Lisa has been identified as the same one from Petrarch’s hometown of Arezzo.
This month’s birthday article is a little belated because I had some personal projects I had to take care of, but Salvador Dali is a May baby and his creations just make him too great to pass up, even if his birthday was back on the 11. So without further ado, I bring you a brief history of Dali and his infinite weirdness in celebration of his much belated birthday.
The Dali we all recognize was actually the third Salvador Dali in his family. His father also had the name and his parents had another son that was also named Salvador, but he died nine months before Dali was born. For this reason, Dali’s parents always believed that he was the reincarnation of his brother, a belief the artist also held throughout his life. In many of his writings, he claimed that he felt deep stress from the pressures of living as both himself and his dead brother.
Dali’s family was decidedly middle class and his mother was incredibly supportive of his work…until she died when he was only 16. The next year, he moved to the student housing at an arts school in Madrid and he immediately started to stand out through his eccentric methods of dress. The young student enjoyed wearing knee breeches with sideburns and long hair, similar to something Oscar Wilde would have worn forty years earlier.
While he made friends with a number of students at the school, he was not an ideal student and was expelled shortly before he completed his courses after he refused to be tested by anyone in the faculty, saying, “I am very sorry, but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them.”
It wasn’t long after this that his unique painting style, which seamlessly blended classic influences like Raphael with modern avant garde styles like those of Joan Miro, started to garner him quite a bit of attention in the art community. Not to be outdone by his own artwork, Dali promptly started to grow his trademark moustache, which was influenced by the seventeenth-century painter Diego Velazquez.
When Dali met his future wife, Gala, in 1929, she was already married to a prominent French poet. She soon left this artist for Dali, who was ten years her junior, but after their 1934 marriage, she continued to have many other affairs with young artists and even a rockstar in the 70s –all with Dali’s permission of course. While Dali was said to have a terrible fear of the female genitalia (part of the reason he was so accepting of her affairs was because he preferred to watch, but not partake in the activities), he was still unquestionably in love with Gala all the way up until his death. “Without Gala,” he said, “Divine Dalí would be insane.”
Dali was a prominent player in the surrealist movement, but many of the surrealists actually disliked him. This was for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest issues was the fact that surrealists did not believe that anyone should ever apologize for their art.
To some extent, Dali did agree with this sentiment and when his father demanded an apology for a painting the young artist made that bore the words “Sometimes, I spit with pleasure on my mother’s portrait.” While it seems unlikely that Dali actually even meant it about his own mother because he adored her, he still refused to tell his father he was sorry, which resulted in his being thrown out of his childhood home, written out of his father’s will and being threatened by his pop that he should never step foot in Cadaquès again.
When Dali and Gala caused a serious scandal in America, shortly after his work was introduced into the country, though, he quickly changed his tune. The incident in question involved the couple showing up to a masquerade party in New York dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper. After facing great outrage on the part of the American press, he apologized, but he only ended up facing more outrage from the surrealist group he was a member of when he returned home. Of course, they were furious about the apology, not the act.
Around this same time, the majority of surrealists began to lean to leftist politics, but Dali further incensed them by always maintaining an ambiguous position on the matters. Dali disagreed with the idea that surrealism should involve politics and at the same time that he refused to support fascism, he also refused to denounce it. Eventually he was subject to a mock trial in his surrealist group and was expelled largely for his absence of political beliefs.
His politics didn’t just bother the surrealists. Dali moved to France at the outbreak of war and only moved back after World War II ended. George Orwell denounced him for this, stating, “When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near.”
Another major problem the surrealists had with Dali was his apparent willingness to sell his soul for money. As some started referring to him in the past tense, although he was dead, others preferred the nickname “Avida Dollars,” which is more than just an anagram for his name, it also sounds the same as avide à dollar, which can be translated as “eager for dollars.”
More Surreal Than The Surreal
Dali is famous for quipping, “the only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist,” but perhaps even that was a bit of an understatement, as he developed many of his best known works by connecting with his subconscious not through drugs, but through sleep manipulation. He claims he would sit in a chair with a metal spoon in his hand, directly above a metal pan. When he started to fall into deep sleep, he would drop the spoon, the clang of the spoon hitting the pan would wake him up. Perhaps this method is what he used to create his most enduring surrealist works, the lobster telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.
The surreal nature of his works should never be taken as a sign that Dali’s work was without meaning though. In fact, Dali was a huge fan of Freud and believed in a much deeper meaning of dreams, which is widely demonstrated in his artwork. Here are a few interesting symbolisms to look for next time you enjoy some of his artworks:
Image via Kaneda99 [Flickr]
Throughout his life, Dali painted over 1,500 works. This number is on top of the many illustrations, lithographs, theater sets, costumes, drawings, photographs, sculptures, films, holographs, and other works he helped to create. He loved to experiment with new mediums and even stepped into the world of high fashion, designing a few outfits for Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior. He also created the rainbow-colored Chupa Chups logo.
Even more amazing is the fact that his portfolio only recently expanded to include his completed Disney animation, Destino. While he started it with Walt in 1946, the pair soon found themselves out of money for the project. It was instead completed in 2003 by Roy Disney and Baker Bloodworth.
That wasn’t his only film contribution though. He also worked on the famous surreal art piece Un Chien Andalou, worked on a dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and narrated about a search for magic mushrooms in Impressions of Upper Mongolia.
Image via pecaenrique [Flickr]
As a matter of fact, Dali was one of only a few artists to actually play an active role in the museum dedicated to his works. His Theater and Museum in Figueres goes beyond showcasing his paintings, it is in its own way, another work of his. It’s hardly surprising that a self-obsessed creator like Dali would make a museum for himself, after all, he was famous for once saying, “every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí.”
He started working on the building in 1960 and he continued adding to it all the way through the mid-80’s.These days, it houses the largest collection of his works, followed by the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The most interesting place for his work to be displayed though was the Rikers Island jail in New York. Dali donated a crucifixion drawing to the warden and it was hung in the dining room for years before officials decided to move it into the lobby so it could be kept safe. Humorously, after spending 16 years in a jail dining room, the painting wasn’t lost or damaged until it was moved to the lobby, where it was stolen in 2003. It is still missing to this day.
When Dali went on 60 Minutes in the 70’s, he told Mike Wallace that, “Dalí is immortal and will not die.” Unfortunately, like all self-proclaimed immortals, he was wrong. In 1980, his health started to fade and when Gala started dosing him with unprescribed medicine, it only made things worse as her drug cocktail damaged his nervous system.
In 1982, Gala passed away and this made Dali’s health fade away even faster as he lost his will to live. He started dehydrating himself and a few years later a fire broke out in his bedroom. Both acts may have been accidents or he may have been trying to commit suicide, no one knows for sure. After the fire though, he started living in his museum until the end of his life.
In 1989, Dali died of a heart failure, shortly after King Juan Carlos visited him on his deathbed and confessed his lifelong adoration of Dali’s works. Dali quickly sketched a drawing for the king and it turned out to be the last artwork ever done by the artist.
I love Dali, so I was really excited to write this article, but I must admit, he was a bit of a freak. There is so much information about him, particularly his crazy stunts, that I couldn’t even begin to describe them all here. So, instead I leave them to you. What are your favorite Dali tales?
Sources: Wikipedia #1, #2, Artcyclopedia, Smithsonian Magazine, BBC News, Salvador Dali Museum, and Neatorama
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 Geeksaresexy.
