Belgian filmmaker and illustrator Vincent Bal works within the confines of long shadows of everyday objects resting in the sunlight to create a wide range of whimsical doodles. The shadow of a film canister becomes a forbidding tower, or the filaments of a lightbulb cast a dramatic backdrop as a staircase for a daring escape. Bal makes many of his images available as prints over on Etsy.
You can see more of this wonderful cleverness at Colossal.
The look and texture of sugar cubes, with their near perfect crystalline symmetry, is marvelous to the eye, but perhaps even more so in the hands of Karni and Saul. The duo use this appearance to wondrous effect in their latest work, an animated music video for Katie Melua’s atmospheric ballad “Perfect World.” As the camera pans left, viewers see sugar cubes sat beside a cup of coffee before being taken into a wintery wonderland full of the sweet crystals.
Karni and Saul call their style, equal parts photographic and fantastical animation, “Casual Fantasy,” and you can see why. In “Perfect World” the two construct a world within our own—something like a playful brand of magical realism, perhaps unfolding inside the sugar cubes. Sure, even with such amazing animation work, the narrative is a bit saccharine. Then again, isn’t that the point?
Perfect World – Katie Melua from Karni and Saul on Vimeo.
Click here to see more of Karni and Saul’s work.
Via The Creators Project.
The 2016 Good Design Award results were announced recently with awards going to over 1000 entries in several different categories. But the coveted Grand Award of Japan’s most well-known design award, given to just 1 entry, was announced today. Last year the winner was a personal mobility chair and the year before that it was a robotic arm. This year, the grand prize went to a world map.
But the map of the world has been around for hundreds of years. So what’s so special about this map? To begin, Tokyo-based architect and artist Hajime Narukawa has a problem with our current map and he’s been working for years to try and fix it. In 1569 geographer Gerardus Mercator revealed his world map and, to this day, it’s the generally accepted image we have of this planet. But it has major flaws in that it dramatically distorts the sizes of Antarctica and Greenland.
Narukawa developed a map projection method called AuthaGraph (and founded a company of the same name in 2009) which aims to create maps that represent all land masses and seas as accurately as possible. Narukawa points out that in the past, his map probably wasn’t as relevant. A large bulk of the 20th century was dominated by an emphasis on East and West relations. But with issues like climate change, melting glaciers in Greenland and territorial sea claims, it’s time we establish a new view of the world: one that equally perceives all interests of our planet.
AuthaGraph not only faithfully represents all oceans and continents, but the map can be tessellated just like an MC Escher painting. Much in the same way that we can traverse the planet without ever coming to an end, “the AuthaGraphic world map provides an advanced precise perspective of our planet.”
Go here to find out where you can purchase posters and globes based on the AuthaGraph project. There’s an online shop that carries them too.
Spoon & Tamago has the full story.
Stunning. There’s information, and more videos at The Creators Project. I don’t want to spoil anything.
Snow Cover in Spring, 1979. Photo: Rauno Träskelin.
Nearly 70 years after she began designing textiles and making art by turning yarn and natural fibers into fabric through cultural traditions like weaving, an important figure in Finland’s late 20th century art world is getting a comprehensive retrospective. Kirsti Rantanen’s work, which is currently on display at Design Museum in Helsinki, is notable for her role in legitimizing craft processes as visual art and producing large-scale sculptures through those processes. As exhibition curator Harry Kivilinna tells The Creators Project, it’s been over 20 years since much of the work in the exhibition has been seen. “Almost all her works have not been on display since the beginning of 1990s, and the archive material, drawings and sketches have never been shown in exhibitions.”
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Kirsti Rantanen’s retrospective exhibition will be on display at Design Museum, Helsinki through March 7, 2017.
The Creators Project has the full story.
After 126 years, a lost sketchbook by Vincent van Gogh was revealed to much fanfare worldwide Tuesday — thanks to a Canadian art expert — but not everyone is convinced of its authenticity.
Canadian art historian Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov’s Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook contains many drawings from the most significant period of van Gogh’s life, when he was living in the south of France, working on some of his most famous paintings but suffering from the psychological torment that led him to cut off his ear and spend months in hospital while continuing to create.
[…]
However, as Welsh-Ovcharov launched Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook at press conference in Paris Tuesday morning, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam released a statement disputing the authenticity of the sketches.
The museum states their own experts examined some of the sketches and concluded they are imitations of van Gogh drawings, calling them “monotonous, clumsy, and spiritless.”
Domenico, via Flickr.
Serial retirer and Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, in a new special that aired yesterday on Japanese television, announced that he is working on a 13th feature-length film. In an interview, the director of Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle says he is “not satisfied” with his first CGI film, a short called Boro the Caterpillar. According to NHK’s film, The Man Who Is Not Done: Hayao Miyazaki, the filmmaker has had a change of heart and submitted a proposal to Studio Ghibli for a feature-length version of the story in August.
[…]
At the end of the special, he proposes the feature Boro, outlining a completion date of 2019, just before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The 76-year-old wonders aloud, “Maybe I’ll be alive?”
Miyazaki will be 78 when the film is finished, and faces the possibility that he might die before then with a signature stoicism. “I think it’s still better to die when you are doing something than dying when you are doing nothing,” he says in another scene. “It’s better to think about not dying when you die.”
White Man. © Marty Two Bulls.
And from Tiffany Midge, ‘Ars Poetica,’ by Donald J. Trump:
Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.
~E.E. Cummings
Trust me, I’m a poet.
I have all of the words.
I have the best words.
The most tremendous words.
Bigly. Yuge!
Those other poets are a disaster,
just a disaster.
I’m going to build a wall
around those other poet’s
words, because no one
has more respect for words as me.
I love words, I respect words so much.
I love them so much that I would date
my own words if I wasn’t already
related to them.
I’m going to make poetry great again.
And I’m just the poet to do that too.
When it comes to words—
they’re just so beautiful
I just start kissing them,
and I can do that too,
when you’re a poet they let you do that,
they let you do anything,
I’m on those words like a mystic,
I grab ‘em by the muse.
Words are great, they’re a beautiful thing.
I have the best ones though,
because I’m the best.
I’m a winner, words love me.
I’m yuge.
Candy & Sex! First up, the art of Amezaiku:
Amezaiku is one of the traditional Japanese arts crafts. The candy is softened by heating to around 90 degrees C (almost 200 degrees F), and is finely crafted with bare hands and traditional Japanese scissors. Amezaiku is created by cutting, pulling, and bending candy which is attached at the top of stick.
Amezaiku must be finished within just a few minutes after removing the candy from the pot, due to the characteristic of candy: hardened when cooled and softened when heated. Amezaiku is not crafted by chipping or shaving from a block, as in sculpture.
It is said Amezaiku originated in the 8th century. During the Edo period (17th to 19th centuries), craftsmen showed their making performance on streets to sell to the people, and Amezaiku was a form of entertainment enjoyed by common people.
The technique of Amezaiku has been passed down over generations. However, because Amezaiku is a traditional subculture, there is no literature with detailed descriptions of the processes and skills involved.
You can see and read more of Shinri Tezuka’s amazing work here. Via Great Big Story, and Colossal, here and here.
Next up, rubbers! Specifically, condoms marketed to women, fair trade and free of toxic chemicals. There’s a whole new line of sexual health products called Sustain. Via Great Big Story.
All images courtesy the artist.
When plastic material sits in our ocean for long enough it starts to degrade into nano plastics, a type of microplastic material that can traverse cell walls into fat and muscle tissue. This is a dynamic that Dutch designer Thijs Biersteker recently explored in his latest installation Plastic Reflectic, an interactive mirror that uses motion tracking technology to turn the spectator’s reflection into a silhouette made from hundreds pieces of real trash. “Turning us…slowly into plastic,” the artist explains.
Known for his psychedelic cloud installations and cancer punching bags, Biersteker constructed his new project on a horizontal pixel grid that houses 601 real pieces of plastic trash sourced from all over the world. Each piece of trash acts as a float and is pulled on and off the surface grid by 601 mini waterproof engines hidden under a pool of black biobased water.
Conservators working on Hanabusa Itchō’s ‘Death of Buddha.’ All photos courtesy of MFA Boston.
If you visit the Museum of Fine Arts Boston these days, you can witness conservation in action on an enormous Japanese hanging scroll, which is currently being remounted in the Asian paintings gallery. Hanabusa Itchō’s masterpiece The Death of the Historical Buddha was painted in 1713 and entered the MFA Boston’s collection in 1911. Though it was last on view in 1990, the scroll hadn’t been treated since 1850. “Usually these scrolls are remounted every 100 years or so, which is why the project was a priority,” Jacki Elgar, Head of Asian Conservation at the museum, tells The Creators Project.
As time goes on, scroll mounts can begin to fail or damage the painting, she explains—this is the most common reason for treatment. A painting might also become a candidate for remounting if the mount is inappropriate (for example, a 16th century painting that is mounted in a 20th century style), or if it was put inside a frame by a Western collector, in which case it can be returned to its original, hanging scroll format.
[…]
The conservation of Death of Buddha continues in the MFA Boston galleries until January 16, 2017. To learn more about the conservators—who have all completed extensive ten-year training programs in Japan—click here. The Creators Project has the full story, this would be fascinating to see. If you have the chance to go, do it!
Today, Americans will decide who will be the 45th President of the United States of America. An online exhibition considers the national and international consequences of this election. The group exhibition entitled, Pulling Down The Walls, organized by Galerie Number 8, examines some of the bigger issues—immigration, race, gender and equality—of the year. Featuring artists, Campbell Addy, Ivan Forde, Justin French, Nicolas Henry, Hector Mediavilla, Leonard Pongo, and David Uzochukwi, the pop-up show uses portrait, landscape, and reportage photography, to show what’s at stake in this presidential election. Read and see more at The Creators Project.
Justin French, Patriot, 2015, 20 x 30 inches. © Justin French.
Hector Mediavilla, Latingo Border #6, 2010, 48 x 60 inches. © Hector Mediavilla.
We voted here in town before heading to Bismarck, and the polling station was as it ever is, with some townspeople hanging out, having coffee and breakfast from the table laden with handmade goodies. Had a chat with people about the turkeys, and other stuff, then got to the business of voting. Small towns are great places to vote. Then it was into Bismarck, book store being the first stop. It’s been a while, but the radar was going off, and for good reason, too. I was thrilled to see another Brom – for those who aren’t familiar, Brom is a talented artist who started writing some years back. I highly recommend his first book, The Child Thief, which is based on Peter Pan, but it’s no Disneyfied retelling. It’s a dark tale, which deals with unsettling issues, such as child abuse. All of his books include colour plates of his artwork, usually key characters in the book. I was quite surprised to see the second book in Ken Liu’s dynasty series, this one follows The Dandelion Dynasty. That man is one fast writer! Very excited to get my hands Black Panther. Just started it, but so far, it’s very good, and I’m in love with Ayo and Aneka, they deserve their own book, and their own movie. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School arrived very quickly, and is so very poignant.
I also bought this little candle in a tin, tangerine, juniper, and clove, a scent I not only want to breathe in, but to eat and bathe in too. A brilliant blend. Also, a surprise package at the post office today – more wonderful smelling soap from Marcus, and a complete surprise – thank you so much!
Esther Mahlangu.
Stunning, beautiful, wonderful, vibrant work here! The Creators Project has a feature on Esther Mahlangu, lots to read and see, click on over!