Okimi

Get on your 3D glasses because the works of Kimiaki Yaegashi will irritate your eyes if you look at them for too long. The color illustrations worked much better for me with my Red/Blue glasses than the originals, and they're a little less if you don't happen to own a pair of 3D glasses (but with all movies being released in 3D now, why don't you have some? I have at least 3 pairs hanging around, and they've gotten me through some dull days).

There wasn't much I could find out about Okimi that was written in English, so I'm just going to add a lot more images. They were a lot of fun for me, and they will be for you too. I will admit that the images are a little plain and repetitive. Visit http://okimi.com/ and you'll see what I mean. Hopefully there will be newer works which contain a little more depth and are a bit more lively in the future because I feel like the 3D is just used as a gimmick which distracts from a lack of ideas. I'm glad that 3D is gaining popularity, and I hope to see some more interesting pieces from Okimi in the future.

McBess!!!

Dear McBess,

Thank you for providing me with such super cool desktop backgrounds. I especially enjoy your new color illustration that has been decorating my laptop for quite some time now:

McBess is actually a Frenchman by the name of Matthieu Bessudo whose hi-res illustrations are easily found on the internet. His work is nostalgic and so detailed that you could look at any one of his illustrations for hours at a time without finding everything he has laid out in them.

It does seem a shame though, that his illustrations are just flat 2D pieces, but then I found this:

It's the video he did for the band he's in, The Dead Pirates. The music's alright, but the animation is neat (the 3D style comes off as cheesy, but it's done well).

http://mcbess.com/

(He even has his phone number on there. You can commission an illustration if you're a wealthy patron of the arts.)

Your Meat is Mine

Yann Black is a cool French Canadian tattoo artist who seems to tattoo whatever he feels like on people, and they love it. I've always thought that there should be more tattoo artists as such instead of just a bunch of run down 30 year olds obligingly tattooing tweety birds on some fat ass. Most of the time, Yann Black's work incorporates a previous bad tattoo to create something new, that one could actually live with. Though his work might be viewed as simple, poor sketches, it is sincere, original, and super cute (in my opinion). I could definitely have one of these on me for the rest of my life.

Website is: http://yourmeatismine.com/

Some tasty cupcakes

Jan Svankmajer's Alice

When I went to a movie theatre the other day, I saw a preview of Tim Burton's remake of Alice in Wonderland (it's all wrong; Tim Burton's getting too old to make good movies anymore), I was reminded of another version of Alice in Wonderland that I had watched on the Netflix Watch Instantly section. Made in 1988 by the true master of special effect, the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, this Alice was grotesque and phantasmagoric, but overall an interesting and more accurate interpretation of the story. The only actor in the movie being Alice and the rest of the characters fleshed out through stop motion animation, this film is a very isolated experience. The animation is so lengthy, I have to wonder how long it took to film this. I don't think this is a children's movie because it's far too eerie though never outright, in your face frightening. I'm not sure if I recommend this film, I enjoyed parts of it just because I love stop motion and the story of Alice in Wonderland, but the English dub and the narration is unnecessary and irritating, and the movie runs a little long. If you have nothing to do for a long time, and you have Netflix, you should check it out; it's probably a hundred times better than the Tim Burton crap that's going to come out.

Ikea Hacks

Not really a hack, more an Ikea customization. With some painters tape and a lot of old acrylic paint, this table was born. It took about 30 minutes to paint and 30 to dry.

Fristaden Christiania

The Danish High Court will be making a ruling on Christiania in 2011 to determine it's legal status. But before that, http://www.crir.net/opencall2010.html is offering an open call to all artists and academic researchers in Denmark and abroad an opportunity to apply for a small research study to provide outsiders with insight into the Freetown way of life (unique architecture, sustainable environments) as well as the effects of recent changes (closing of the cannabis market and the subsequent violence over the drug trade). Housing is provided, but food and other living costs are not.

Unuseless Inventions

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I lost this book a while ago, and I just recalled it. There were some really great ideas in here like:

The Instant Panoramic Camera

Take a bath without getting wet!

This is not in the book, but is nonetheless hilarious.

More Art I Dug Up

I found all these pictures still stored on my ipod. I've forgotten what I named most of these pieces, but I'll put the names on them if/when I remember.

Ink on vellum.

Trying my hand at pop art. Acrylics on canvas.

Birch Trees

Acrylics on canvas

Masculinity

A lot of people told me this kite was phallic, but I really didn't intend it to be. I'll redo this one day. Watercolor and ink on vellum.

The Painted Bird

This was inspired by the Jerzy Kosinski book of the same name. It looks kind of bland though compared to its basis - all these sparrows or whatever birds they are (I don't like research or ornithology) would respond to the call of their brother but on realizing that he didn't look like one of them, they would rip the painted bird to pieces. I wish I could have gotten that action across in this painting, but it's really hard to make birds look hostile. Oil pastels on black construction paper.

The Yellow Wallpaper

This is my interpretation of the wallpaper featured in the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story of the the same name. I'm pretty sure you can make out the figure if you look closely. It used to be even more hidden but I tweaked it and made it a little more obvious. Watercolors.

Atlas as Woman

This is my most ambitious yet poorest piece.  I ripped the pose right off the cover of Atlas Shrugged. It's more appropriate that it's a woman anyway. I didn't want to rip off the art deco style, but in retrospect, it would have made this piece significantly cooler. The face is straight out of a Matisse painting. I'll give this another go one day. Acrylics on canvas.

I did this of Andrew when he got his new tattoo. He doesn't think this is a very accurate rendering. Acrylic on canvas.

Daruma Doll

I need to get rid of this painting. Everywhere I hang it, it's always falling down right when I walk past it and injuring me. It's incredibly vengeful for being brought into the world, so if you ever need an evil painting, you can have this one. Acrylics on wood.

Moon

I was working on an idea for a fashionable space suit - orange is definitely the best color for them. It could still be more fashionable though. Acrylics on canvas.

Acrylics and ink on watercolor paper.

Funny story about this guy. One of my high school English teachers actually wrote a story based on this painting and gave it to me. Really unexpected. Watercolors.

Andrew helped out with this one. He did the bottom left corner. Watercolors.

So that's my whole portfolio. It wasn't very popular with my art teacher, and I understand why. It's ambitious, but not enough risks taken or opportunities seized. Rubbish.

Rosemaling in the Telemark Style

So after three long years of having this unfinished painting around, I finally completed it yesterday. The craftsmanship is rushed, it's completely asymmetrical, but that's part of its charm. It does brighten up the house, and it reminds me of Norway (I used one of my great-grandmother's designs I found in an old sketchbook). I'm pretty sure it's in the Telemark style, but I'm probably wrong.

Drive back from Orlando at Night

This picture is pretty low quality because it was taken on the highway at around 4 a.m. on Halloween night. I drove while Andrew hung out the side of the car and shot the picture. This cross is huge in actuality, it's all you can see on the horizon once you leave Orlando and there's a huge lake in front of it reflecting the light from the cross and the lights from the town. Spooky.

Takato Yamamoto

Hermaphrodite's Body

Takato Yamamoto

I recently discovered the artist Takato Yamamoto, and I was struck by his style which resembles Klimt very closely, except dark and futuristic. For example, this painting follows the same layout as The Kiss:

The Kiss

Gustav Klimt

Figures are centered, and all you can see of their bodies is their faces. Both have great attention to detail, and simplistic backgrounds.

Takato Yamamoto has a lot of really great pieces you can find on google, but good luck trying to find something hi-res because it's not going to happen. His stuff is very magical (grotesque), very mythological (references to Tarot), and incredibly Japanese (lots of schoolgirls). The style is clean, so all his paintings feel iconic, probably because he also does illustrations and posters instead of straight paintings. Despite all the references to the past, his work seems very futuristic and post-apocalyptic, but maybe that's just the facial expression. Although the gruesome situations are evocative, the figures almost all have the same blank face in every piece, though the few that stand out have intense expressions of pain.

Fearless Freaks

Found this video from the Pompano show in 2007. It doesn't seem that long ago. Not many other videos of this show.

Anyway, on to the topic of this post, I found a documentary of The Flaming Lips up on Hulu the other day called The Fearless Freaks, and I highly recommend it. Although it was a bit lengthy, there were a lot of very funny and very entertaining parts in it. I learned a lot of new things about the band that I wouldn't have known otherwise like they got their band name from some small punk band from Oklahoma City. As far as band documentaries go, I find that they're too often overly dramatic and focus too much on rampant drug addictions and groupie sex rather than music, but this one was very entertaining and real. The making of Christmas on Mars was hysterical, the footage of the band when they were young was great too, especially the show where they brought a motorcycle on stage and just revved the engine until smoke filled the entire tiny club. Overall, the documentary seemed an accurate portrayal in the spirit of The Flaming Lips.

Link: http://www.hulu.com/watch/91177/the-flaming-lips-the-fearless-freaks

RUFFEOHEARTSLILSNOTY Etsy Shop

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=15323

I got this link for this etsy shop off a forum. I've only bought a few things from etsy and figured that the site was mostly overpriced trash, but then I found this place. The designer(s?) have some really clever ideas for some ultra futuristic clothing. Their stuff is expensive, but the stitching looks professional, and all the pieces do look like they required a lot of manual labor.

This sweater is probably their most mainstream piece. The idea is incredibly simple but looks so cool and useful that I wonder why no one came up with anything like this before. I get the same feeling with all their clothing. The shapes are simple, geometric, the colors are standard roygbiv, but the resulting clothing is incredibly creative, interesting, and novel. The fits on some of the female clothing don't look too great, but most of their stuff is made of stretch material like jersey, so it should conform to most body types. The designer has original ideas. I hope they go somewhere instead of getting ripped off by UO or AA like they themselves described.

Latte Art

I would travel to any part of the world to drink a coffee so beautiful and delicious looking.

Story of the Eye

After reading that this was Bjork's favorite book when I was 14, I set out on a search for it. I could never find it any book store because it's not really a book, it's only about 60 pages, and places like Barnes and Noble never carried it. After a while, I forgot about it, but then I found it at a Barnes and Noble strangely enough. It took me about 30 minutes to get through this book which involved a few highly grotesque occurrences involving a few motifs: eggs, eyes, and urine. A number of scenes from this book were actually used in the movie "Weekend" by Jean-Luc Goddard, in only one scene, where a woman wearing lingerie describes some menage-a-trois she was involved in a sort of flat voiced crime drama manner. This was an incredibly influential piece of literature, and Georges Bataille an incredibly influential thinker. He does a great essay on Nietzche that I read, and other fine things that I have not yet read, like, The Solar Anus. Story of the Eye only becomes really clear once you learn about Bataille and his philosophy, his obsession with eroticism and the pineal eye, images that haunt him and will stay with you after reading this book. There are about five or more editions of this book, so they're all slightly different, all good.

The Real DJ Hero

DJ タイガ

Plague Doctors

I first saw this mask, called the "Medico Della Peste" (or Plague Doctor), on the band The Knife. Recently, I learned about them on some online forum. They were used during the outbreak of the plague to supposedly prevent contagion along with a uniform of white gloves, and a black hat and cap, very grotesque. The mask was used basically as a gas mask because they thought the nose provided proper filtration; there put spices in the mask as well to stave off the stench of the corpses that were everywhere during the Plague. It could best be described as the first hazmat suit. A great Halloween idea: I'll post an instruction manual for the mask.

Customized Doc Martens

Found this cool site alltop.com that has a big slideshow of all these different Designer and non-designer customized Dr. Martens. I thought these blue boots were really cool and futuristic and didn't seem too hard to make. Just requires some leather working tools. I just can't figure out how I would replace the soles like they do. I'm sure it would be pretty cheap to get a shoe repair shop to do it for me because I mean, I doubt they get much business anyway. If I do customize my boots, I'll put up the project when I've finished. I'll probably just end up painting on them with acrylics.

A Dog's Life

I was going to study for my Anthropology class, but then I realized, why study my standard, boring, categorical text books when I could just watch outdated documentaries and read books about explorer Bon Vivants in the 50's.

Mondo Cane was a 60's Italian documentary which catalogs the mot bizarre practices of humanity spanning cultures throughout space. I saw an especially grotesque scene of some tribal woman suckling a pig. Great stuff. More authentic than the politically correct crap I read in my textbooks. It also shows the more disturbing aspects of European culture like a formal dinner where the butler goes around emptying chamberpots attached beneath the chairs. A classic.

"Brutes and Savages". This isn't easy to find, I don't think it was published by any major publishing house, but it's a good one. Features glaring spelling errors and blatant mislabeling (of entire continents), this outdated book details the adventure of one explorer and his crew venturing into the heart of darkness. It also has some nice black and white photos of Arthur Davis with his various native correspondents decked out in full tribal wear. Very old school. Campy and also naively innocent of the world, a nice flashback into a gentler and more ignorant time.

Ninja High School

Just saw Peelander Z at Common Grounds! A surprising amount of people turned out to see them. Got the Mad Tiger 7" and this poster. I don't know what happened to Peelander Blue though. Definitely one of the best shows I've been to in a while. I wonder who's going to show up for the Pensacola show. What a health!

Going to Korea

Even the city looks like Starcraft. Probably leaving for 2 years for teaching jobs. I don't think I'll be coming back to Florida after that. I've already wasted too much time sitting on my porch spitting watermelon seeds.

Homemade Biscotti

So tasty!