And so much more, from Charly and his talented Mom, click for full size! Such gorgeous artistry, I don’t know if I could bring myself to eat one. Charly says: Made today and yesterday. The bunnies in half of an eggshell are a new idea. It’s a grand idea.
© Charly, all rights reserved.
Meds have arrived, Imma go collapse and sleep for many hours. Click for full size, sorry for the bad flash photography, it’s all I have right now.
Descent of Night. © C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Click for full size.
Descent of Night, © C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Pictured is a handmade puppet, Bastet. Exquisite work by Han, and there’s much more to see at Handsome Devil Puppets.
Puppets are infinite. If you know love, they do. If you know sadness, they do. If you breathe, they do. You give them steps and they make them strange. They are sometimes silly, sometimes serious, always honest little vessels. I started making puppets when I felt I didn’t have a voice. I sculpted powerful, magical women to dance and sing and cry and give me that voice. When I feared death, they showed me it could be beautiful. When I feared life, they showed me it could be weird and wonderful. The Handsome Devils are each hand-sculpted, piece by piece, and decorated in everything from remnants from the bottom of granny’s jewelry box to bones from a field in my hometown.
“The terrors of living, the joys and the revel, alive in your misfit, misguided young devil”
Han is also featured at The Creators Project, but go have a wander over at Handsome Devil Puppets, there’s much to see!
From Charly, more of his mom’s amazing skills, click for full size! Oh, those look so good. So very good.
© Charly, all rights reserved.
But closer! Click for full size.
Descent of Night. Acrylic and ball point pen on gesso panel, 18″ x 24″. © C. Ford. All rights reserved.
After a start, and behaving boringly well for eight days, I can’t stand it anymore. Back to painting, damn the pain. If I have to stay all quiet for 4.5 more weeks, I’ll go full court bugshit. Working on the Tree Quilt is out, because there’s just too much twisting in the intercostal area, and that I really can’t do.
Acrylic and ball point pen on gesso board, untitled. © C. Ford.
Pure amazement and awe here. If you have the chance to take this in, take it!
Gothic Boxwood Miniatures.
In the video, Pete Dandridge, conservator and administrator in the Department of Objects Conservation, reveals the wizardry behind the creation of a miniature boxwood prayer bead. Through his collaboration with Lisa Ellis—conservator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Art Gallery of Ontario—the techniques of the 16th-century carvers are fully understood for the first time.
Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures, on view at The Met Cloisters from February 22 through May 21, 2017.
Featured Object:
Prayer bead with the Adoration of the Magi and the Crucifixion, early 16th century. Netherlandish. Boxwood, Open: 4 1/2 x 3 1/4 x 1 1/8 in. (11.2 × 8.1 × 2.7 cm); Closed: 2 3/8 x 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 in. (5.8 x 5.5 x 5.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.475)
That’s not all! There’s a virtual reality tour of these tiny wonders, too.
In Small Wonders: The VR Experience, now at Met Cloisters in New York City, visitors are presented with one of these boxwood carvings—created some 500 years ago by an unknown artist—that is blown up to a much larger proportion. It can be exploded and collapsed, and participants are free to walk in and around it. The incredibly small details are now large enough that viewers can see just how this artwork, which depicts Heaven and Hell, was carved and assembled into a sphere that opens like a locket.
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/small-wonders * Small Wonders: The VR experience.
Chasing the Wind from Andrew Batista on Vimeo.
Spirited Away. Chihiro eats an onigiri.
If you’ve never been to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, out in the Western suburbs of Tokyo, now would be a good time to plan your trip. The museum is planning an upcoming, year-long special exhibition that will focus on the many food-related scenes from all of Studio Ghibli films.
Meals and food play an incredibly important role in almost every Studio Ghibli film. In Laputa, Pazu splits his egg on bread in half and shares it with Sheeta. By doing so, the two become closer. In Spirited Away, Chihiro eats an onigiri and gains the courage to face her uphill struggle. In Howl’s Moving Castle, the characters become like family when they surround a dinner table over a meal of eggs and bacon.
Taberu wo kaku (which roughly translates to Drawing Eating) begins May 27, 2017 and will be on view through May 2018 so you’ll have plenty of time to see it. The exhibition will be largely separated into 2 sections – one on eating and one on cooking – and will detail the many ways Studio Ghibli animators brought their foods to life.
Via Spoon & Tamago.
Designer Mark Noad.
The triggering of Article 50 last week means that Brexit is a certainty – and that the UK will need a new passport. Luckily last week also saw the judging for our unofficial Brexit passport design competition… here is a look at the nine proposals shortlisted by our judges.
We received over 200 entries from 34 different countries. The youngest entrant was 12 years old and the oldest was 83. Most submissions were from architects and designers but there were also entries from non-designers, students, retired people and unemployed people. Below are the nine designs that most impressed our judges ahead of the announcement of the winner on 11 April: [Click on over to see all the finalists, or watch the video below.]
Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.
Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.
Artist Achilleas Souras used hundreds of discarded life jackets to assemble an igloo for Moroso’s SOS Save Our Souls installation at Milan design week.
The 16-year-old, who has already shown a similar igloo at the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, used jackets collected from the shores of Lesbos – the Greek island that has become a regular landing place for refugees entering Europe.
While his first igloo used 52 jackets, his SOS Save Our Souls structure is made from 1,000 abandoned garments. Souras cut and folded the jackets to resemble blocks of ice before assembling them together.
The resulting waterproof structure is intended as both a shelter and a welcome point for arriving migrants.
“The refugee crisis was simply a set of numbers on the news,” said the artist, who was born in London and now resides in Barcelona.
“But when I picked a jacket up, it stopped being just material. When you hold the jacket in your hand and you smell the sea, you look at things through a different prism and you realise that every jacket represents a human life.”
“The refugees, the homeless, and the less privileged cannot be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ anymore,” added Souras, who hopes his igloos could eventually be used in rescue operations.
“These are global issues that affect us all, and we must try to solve them for everyone’s sake.”
You can see much more here.
Oh man. I want every single one of them.
Featured at Ars Technica, but you need to click over to Parastone to see all of them. There are so many, and I want them all!
PARADISE – A contemporary interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.
A collaborative project between architect Kosaku Matsumoto and Japan Braid Hat Mfg. Co., ltd.
Japan Braid Hat is known for making blade hats (or Sanada hat) woven with fabric tape and natural grass straw in a swirl-like pattern. Unlike hats made by sewing, they are woven seamlessly together and completely jointless. The hat has an elegant simplicity of shape and form that made feasible to increase the hat’s scale to the limit. How big can a hat really be?
The outcome of this experiment was a hat five times larger than the standard, stretching the technical limit of the craftsman, and extending the very definition of we can see as a hat. It has been expanded so much that the brim cannot bear its own weight, draping toward the ground to cascade and wrap the whole body of who wears it. Like a coat, a veil, or a small, sculptural tent, the hat gives various fluid impressions according to the way it is worn.
By challenging the very definition and the limitation of a hat, the work attempts to discover a scale of new functions and design possibilities in what we understand as a blade hat.
Photo by Nobutada OMOTE.
You can see much more at Kosaku Matsumoto. Via Spoon & Tamago.
Francien Krieg.
The Creators Project has a feature on artist Francien Krieg, who has a series of nudes of elderly women. Aging bodies are hardly anything new in art, but there’s always a fuss. Yes, we all get to see just how much sway aging and gravity have on our bodies, and experience the sad wistfulness in the remembrance of a young, limber body, when the days stretched in front of you seemed eternal. It doesn’t take long before your bits make a rush to hit the ground, and it can be a hell of a lot of work to stave that off for as long as possible. The portrayal of the bodies of old people often elicit a revulsion from those who are young, simply because it hasn’t occurred to them yet that, yeah, if you live long enough, that will happen to you too. I remember that shock happening to me, when in my teens, I had to help my great-grandmother get dressed. That was an eye-opener. Now I’m 59, and my arse is making every effort to fall down to the floor and stay there. I’m not quite ready to let that happen, so it’s an ongoing fight.
So, old bodies. I understand the reasons for depictions, even those done for short-term shock value. What I don’t understand is why it’s always women. Can we not get out from under the constant pressure of sexist judgment in old age? Do we need to be paraded for the “ohgods eeeeuuuw” crowd? Where are all the naked old men, who are also just as subject to gravity as us women. A pair of 80 year old testicles aren’t any more fun to contemplate than 80 year old breasts; and depending on the old man in question, he might have comparable breasts to an old woman’s. I think such portraiture is fine, but I would like to see men included, and I’d prefer to see people who were proud and confident in posing, despite their age.
