Documenting the human body

There are cases that nudity is no longer provocative or shocking, but a manifestation of the human condition. In Spencer Tunick’s photographs, a nude body stops being just a nude body and becomes part of the landscape.

More than 15 years, Spencer Tunick has been gathering hundreds or thousands of volunteers and photographing in public places, such as the Zocalo Square in Mexico City, the Dead Sea in Israel, in museums, or in the streets all around the world,  challenging our notions of nudity and purity.

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Art made of salt

Creativity has no limit, no borders, no specific medium. Each artist chooses his medium to express himself, to convey meaning or even to ease the pain. For Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto‘s his medium of choice is salt (more precisely tons of salt) and his story is a little bit different. He builds giant sculptures entirely out of salt and creates incredibly salt maze floor installations to commemorate his sister, who died at the age of 24 from brain cancer.

He perhaps found the healing power of salt, since, as alice says in My Modern Met “salt has a special place in the death rituals of Japan, and is often handed out to people at the end of funerals, so they can sprinkle it on themselves to ward off evil”.

As a way to deal with grief or not, we can’t stop staring and admiring his pieces of art.

The following sculptural salt staircase called Utsusemi reflects on the devastating effects of earthquakes in his own country.

At least, we won’t turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife just by looking at these amazing pieces. See more after the jump

An envelope, my canvas

An envelope, a canvas to ‘house’ your inspiration?

For Mark Powell envelopes have become the perfect medium to paint his portraits with nothing more than a standard ballpoint pen.

Pretty amazing. Don’t you think?

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Connecting the light

It’s like connecting the dots to create figures of animals, people, geometrical schemes. That what Cassandra C. Jones does in her very impressive images of lighting ripping and branching through the skies.

She uses all sort of pictures, available to the public, and arranges them atop each other or side by side, allowing the lightning in one photo to connect with the light in another. These collages reveal concrete figures outlined of squirrels. rabbits in motion, perfect circles, “portraying an urban animal jumping through time, space and different rural, suburban and municipal locals”.

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Classic rock albums revisited

Here they are, I can see them!!! The Ramones are standing on the opposite pavement!! Well, kind of.. Photographer Matthieu Raffard places rock and punk groups  in real life settings – taken from classic albums. A very interesting campaign of the French rock radio station OUÏ FM.

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Breaking the norm

Exploring new frontiers and creating new orders? Photographer Frauke Thielkin  uses human bodies to reshape our notion of space and explore the world in a totally different way.

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The fragments of a face

A basic rule: first destroy, then create. That’s what Lucas Simões at least did in his series of portraits “Desretratos” by reconstructing already deconstructed faces. He cut out photographs of people  in different shapes and re-arrange them back together in different places.

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The first ever designed album cover

We love music, we love design and we just love the work of Alex Steinweiss, art director and graphic designer who died at the age of 94. He invented in 1938 the idea of a custom artwork to record album covers and designed the first covers with original design, replacing the existing non branded 78 rpm record inside protective, pasteboard covers which included only the name of the album and artist simply stamped on the cover and spine.

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Your eyes, a whole world

We often hear that people are landscapes and unmapped areas. But what if you could actually discover human figures in a map? Visual artist Ingrid Dabringer spins ordinary maps to find the figures formed by the interdependent lines and discover the underlying encounters of human beings across the world.

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Darwin, the rock star

Rene Descartes, a pop idol and Charles Darwin, the rock star. That’s how graphic designer Simon Bent decided to re-popularise some of the greatest scientists in history. In his series of illustrations Science vs. Delirium, he renders these iconic figures in the kinds of psychedelic patterns and colors, just like in 1960s acid-rock posters.

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Who’s who in a film crew?

What does a producer really do in a movie? A film editor or a foley artist? Don’t tell me that you never thought about it and ask yourself or your friends. Neven Udovicic managed to find out the main responsibilities of a movie crew and present them in these beautiful posters, with just a few simple words of explanation.

The light between us

Light defines form and shape and creates space.

Italian visual artist Carlo Bernardini uses optic fibers to create spatial drawings and light up the darkness.

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Ceci n’est pas une post

A tribute to Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte.

A mesmerizing motion graphics video (with an original piano score) illustrating and giving life to some of his iconic paintings, created by the creative sound company Box of Toys and video and design agency flipEVIL. Simply magnificent.

via Brainpickings

See also:

• The quest of an artist
• Art above time
• Painting with notes

Create your own record cover

Create your own record cover, but from existing ones. That what visual artist and composer Christian Marclay thought to do by mixing and matching different record covers. The result: beautiful musical and visual encounters of different genres and artists.

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Poetry is on the streets

Poetry can be found everywhere. On small pieces of paper and tiny notebooks, or even in big large billboards and back-lit bus stops. Robert Montgomery shares some of his thought in the most prominent spots of the city.

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The form of a word

Can you imagine the forms and colors that words can take? Digital design agency Corum + Guerrette created String DNA, an interactive data visualization image generator, which converts alphabet letters into shapes and colors.

By typing your name or a short description in the text box, you can a visual interpretation of how a letter or a word looks like, like our blog’s name just below.

See also:

• Create stunning word cloud infographs
• Can you hear color?
• Making (non) sense

Hello summer!

Google celebrates today the summer solstice with a new colorful Google Doodle, created by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.

See also:

• What do the oos in google mean?
• The joke is on Helvetica
• Do you know about Google A Day?

Made of crayons

Art made not by crayons, but of crayons. Artist Christian Faur uses more than one hundred thousand hand cast crayons of varying colors and shades to create amazing photorealistic landscapes and figurative images.

Christian Faur creates a ‘new art form that uniquely balances the qualities of both photography and sculpture’ by placing these individual “pixels” of wax into specific locations inside of wooden frames. Simply wonderful!

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The quest of an artist

The quest of an artist for inspiration, creation, truth and beauty. This is the story of each true artist. And this is the story of Jackson Pollock, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, in this beautifully animated French short film entitled Dripped by director Léo Verrier. The video lasts almost 8 minutes, but worth every second. Enjoy!

via BrainPickings

See also:

• Kubrick’s animated odyssey
• The Man in the Black Coat
• Time is of the essence

Squared cities

The city fragmented and reunited in just one picture. This is what photographer Daniel Hanai managed to capture in his photographic series-collages Squared Cities, by assembling different views of the most famous city corners in the world.

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