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Barnaby Furnas’ “flood” paintings are quite impressive in person…check them out at the Boesky Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 18. Their sheer size and the degree to which their creation must have been out of the artist’s control is intriguing.
Tough art history quiz: who did ths painting…an elephant, an artist, or a preschooler? I play a similar game when I go to contemporary art museums: art or fire extinguisher? (via cyn-c)
Photos of a piece by artist Sharon Baker, a full-sized replica of herself made of dough and then baked. At the show she cut it up and served herself to guests. (An obvious move with a name like Baker.)
On TV tonight: Ric Burns documentary on Andy Warhol. Part 2 tomorrow night.
Profile of Michel Gondry, director of the upcoming The Science of Sleep. An exhibition at the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Manhattan accompanies the film’s opening. View some of Gondry’s short work (commercials, music videos) on YouTube.
Old news, but the copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream stolen two years ago from an Oslo museum has been recovered. M&M’s will honor their offer of 2 million M&M’s for the safe recovery of the painting. No word on whether the reward was responsible for the recovery.
Stolen mobile phone + automatic upload of the thief’s photos to Flickr = art project. (thx, stewart)
Mars, Inc. is offering a reward of 2 million dark chocolate M&M’s for the safe return of The Scream, the Edvard Munch painting stolen from a museum in Norway in 2004. Mmmm….Munch. (via girlhacker)
BMW commercial featuring the beautiful kinetic sculptures of Theo Jansen, who I covered previously on kottke.org. (via poptech)
The web site for the Marianne Boesky Gallery is a bit behind the times, so it doesn’t yet have the information for Barnaby Furnas’ upcoming show of his work from September 15 to October 14. The show will include his recent “flood” paintings; here’s a representative piece from the Saatchi Gallery:
Furnas’ huge flood paintings are created using a technique called “the pour”, detailed in a New Yorker article from earlier this year:
Furnas started at the high end of the canvas, not pouring but slathering on water-based Mars Black with sweeps of a wide brush. He switched to a dark red, laying it down quickly, and sometimes flinging it out in Pollock-like arcs. Sarah and Jared went into action with plastic spritz bottles, spraying water on the paint to make it spread and flow down the inclined plane. Boesky, equipped with a bottle of her own, followed their lead. The canvas began to look like a river of blood, dark and murky at the bottom, shading to a brighter and more lurid red in the middle. It was happening very fast, and changing from one second to the next-streaks of different red combining and separating, and running down to the lower end, where they dripped off the canvas into pails and other receptacles. After fifteen minutes, the whole midsection of the canvas was covered.
His Hamburger Hill piece at the 2004 Whitney Biennial was one of my favorites there, so I’ll definitely be checking out this new show.
One of the three statues on the top of the Washburn Lofts in Minneapolis unwittingly represents the period in the city’s history when it led the world in the production of prosthetic limbs. See also The Mill City Museum. (thx, paul)
Sketchbook of every piece of art in the Museum of Modern Art. $20.
A collection of posters and promotional art from the films of Stanley Kubrick. This Clockwork Orange poster is one of my favorites; I have a copy hanging in my apartment.
Valery Grancher does paintings and drawings of web sites, logos, navigation bars, and Google.
Eyebeam is accepting applications for the next round of fellows for the OpenLab. Artists, technologists, designers, hackers, git in there.
Vincent van Gogh painted turbulence quite accurately. Mexican scientists “have found that the Dutch artist’s works have a pattern of light and dark that closely follows the deep mathematical structure of turbulent flow”.
Adidas did a Michaelangelo-style fresco of 10 soccer players at the Central Train Station in Cologne. More photos of Adidas’ World Cup advertising.
Crazy detailed illustrations done with an Etch-A-Sketch. (via bb)
Kim Dingle’s painting, Maps of the U.S. Drawn from Memory by Las Vegas Teenagers. (via mr)
Illustrated portraits of the entire Hamline University senior class from 1925. (thx, paul)
Great Russian illustrations of movies. I like the Star Wars one and The Terminator.
This guy laser-etched his Powerbook with Rene Magritte’s The Son of Man with the Apple logo subbing in for the apple in the original painting.
Huge intricate illustration done with MS Paint, a rudimentary drawing program. Here’s how the illustrator did it; it took him 100 hours.
Update: This one, while not as large, is quite a bit more intricate and took 500 hours to do…that’s almost 3 months of 40-hour work weeks. (thx, brandon)
Tom Coates recently checked out the Royal College of Art Summer Show in London and ran across this project by Tim Simpson:
…three plants compete to reach the light that feeds and nourishes them. The first one to succeed survives. The other two are automatically cut down in their prime.
First plant to grow close to the proximity sensors wins. A simple and elegant idea.
Nice profile of artist Natalie Jeremijenko. She’s putting Hudson River fish on the board of her company so that as shareholders, they will acquire personhood, and “have a say in the preservation of their grungy habitat”.
The Tate Museum in Britain lets you make your own collection out of all their works of art. “You can create your Collection, print it as a leaflet, or send it to a friend.” Current collections include The I’ve Just Split Up Collection, The Odd Faces Collection, and The I’m Hungover Collection. See also unofficial audio guides for MoMA and the Met. (via nick)
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