artsiefartsiez

Marcus Levine’s Hammered Nail Art

2012-01-10T10:47:00.000-08:00

Using up to 50,000 rigid steel nails to recreate something as fragile and curvy as the human body isn’t the easiest of tasks, but artist Marcus Levine manages to to it without as much as a sketch.

The British artist’s road to his brilliant career has been anything but predictable. Born in Yorkshire, Levine attended the Jacob Kramer Art College, but instead of pursuing his dream of making nail art, he opted for career as a TV graphic designer, and later joined the family business. It wasn’t until 2004 that he finally decided he wanted to make art for a living, and moved to Budapest. He began hammering nails into composite wood boards and completed his first real nail artwork in 2005. He continued to perfect his technique, creating increasingly dynamic interpretations of his subjects and pushing the boundaries with each new art piece.

Marcus Levine takes between three days and two months to complete one of his hammered masterpieces and uses anywhere between 15,000 and upwards of 50,000 nails. By placing them at various heights and distances, he can create various distinct tones and manipulate the intensity of the contours. He masters several techniques, like undulating the height of a nail or rotating its head round, but Marcus admits that light has a big part to play in his art, as “from morning sun to evening sun the shadows across the sculptures change and affect the contrast, and by altering artificial lighting, the sculptures can appear as light as a pencil sketch or as dark as a charcoal life drawing.”
Most of Levine’s artworks focus on the human body, a strange choice considering he picked a rigid medium like steel nails to create representations of such curvy shapes. The artist explains that after using hammered nails to depict abstract shapes, he realized “the interplay between the rigid, angular nails and the soft curves of the human torso, would be fantastically striking.”
Probably the most impressive thing about Marcus Levine’s art is that he doesn’t sketch anything beforehand, the picture is just in his hand. He admits that after finishing a piece he stares at it and wonders “now how did I do that?”, but then reminds himself that in order to make a start you have to take a first step, so he picks a point to hammer a nail, then adds another one, and another, until the work starts to take shape. At this point, he’s already in his “zone” and his no longer thinking about it, he just hammers nail after nail.

Surrealist artist Margo Selski

2012-01-07T20:40:00.000-08:00

Banksy Art

2011-12-21T13:52:00.000-08:00

Street Art Utopia

2011-12-20T17:23:00.001-08:00

Tom Seidman-Freud

2011-12-18T18:57:00.001-08:00

Salvador Dali Dreams of Pantagruel

2011-12-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

Chocolate Dresses that make your mouth water.

2011-12-11T11:41:00.000-08:00

Fabrizio Riccardi

2011-12-10T16:50:00.001-08:00

The Weird Art of Franz Sedlacek

2011-12-07T19:09:00.000-08:00

The art of Claude Verlinde

2011-12-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

3D Pavement Art by Joe Hill & Max Lowry

2011-11-07T09:55:00.000-08:00

Cool Street Art

2011-11-05T06:41:00.001-07:00

Mom's imagination

2010-12-30T09:48:00.000-08:00

This little girl’s mother is a computer specialist from Helsinki, Finland. While her daughter is soundly asleep, she creates a completely different world … from whatever she can find around her!
That’s how both of them became really famous. What a truly fabulous imagination!

weirdest statues around the world

2010-09-06T06:34:00.001-07:00

Erik Johansson

2010-09-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

The art of Bohumil Stepan

2010-07-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

The art of Steve Hanks

2010-06-16T05:31:00.000-07:00

Dulux ‘Walls’

2010-06-01T05:28:00.000-07:00

This video directed by Adam Berg is brilliant.

The photography of Clive Stewart

2010-05-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

Incarnation by Mark Ryden

2010-04-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

Creative Photography by Romain Laurent

2010-03-10T10:50:00.000-08:00

Clever scarf designs

2010-01-20T03:47:00.000-08:00

The art of Shane Devries

2009-12-16T15:59:00.000-08:00

The Story Of "The Pink Lady of Malibu"

2009-12-02T05:55:00.001-08:00

Pink Lady

Claim: An artist secretly painted a 60-foot-high image of a naked woman above a tunnel in Malibu Canyon in 1966.

Status: True.

Origins: If you Pink Lady have lived as an adult in the same area where you grew up, chances are you can recall at least a few fondly-remembered local landmarks of your childhood that no longer exist — places or things that had special significance for you (if only in their familiarity) that have since been removed, replaced, or destroyed. They might be landmarks as considerable as a house you lived in, a school you attended, or a restaurant you frequented, or as unremarkable as a street sign, a water tank, or a tree.

One such memory of mine is a rather unusual one. It involves a landmark that lasted only a few days before being destroyed; a landmark I never saw and was too young to be aware of during its short lifespan. Nonetheless, I grew up hearing the folklore of how it came to be and what happened to it, and studying the tantalizing remnant of its brief existence.

The landmark of which I speak was the infamous Pink Lady, a 60-foot tall drawing of a naked woman which mysteriously appeared overnight on a sheer rock cliff above a tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road (one of several canyon passageways through the Santa Monica Mountains connecting the northwest portion of Los Angeles County to the Pacific coast) in October 1966. Pink Lady

The Pink Lady was the handiwork of Lynne Seemayer (now Lynne Westmore), a 31-year-old secretary from Northridge, California. Motivated in part by the ugly graffiti adorning the rocks above and around a tunnel four miles north of Malibu — "[T]he tunnel was an eyesore," she said. "If someone was going to that trouble, why not do something creative?" — Ms. Seemayer spent several months planning her art project and preparing her "canvas." Starting in January 1966, she whiled away several nights each month (on evenings when the full moon provided adequate light) climbing the cliff and, tethered by nylon ropes, erasing the graffiti. Finally, by August 1966, the cliff face was sufficiently graffiti-free for her to sketch an outline of her planned drawing, which remained undisturbed (and largely unnoticed) for another two months. (She had originally hoped to draw a bird, but after she realized that its wings would be obstructed by brush she opted for the more vertical figure of a woman instead.)

Finally, at 8:00 PM on Friday, 28 October 1966 (another moonlit night), Seemayer began her final assault on the cliff with brushes and paint cans. By dawn, she had completed her work: a 60-foot-tall painting of a naked, pink-skinned, large-breasted woman with long flowing hair, captured in a running pose with a batch of flowers clutched in her right hand.

For the first two days of her existence, the Pink Lady (as she was quickly dubbed) was mostly known only to those who glimpsed her while traveling northbound on Malibu Canyon Road. But by Monday word of the mysterious, titillating image had spread, and by Tuesday the Pink Lady was receiving widespread coverage in local newspapers and TV newscasts. She was also deemed to be a serious traffic

Forseeing potential traffic jams (motorists were already stopping their cars along the road to gaze) and accidents caused by distracted drivers, Los Angeles county officials quickly decided that the Pink Lady had to go. Early eradication efforts failed spectacularly: firefighters were unable to wash the Pink Lady away with their high-power hoses, and the liberal application of paint remover only deepened the blush of her pink skin. (Seemayer had used house paint for her creation, a substance which proved quite difficult to remove.)

Only after the county's assault on the Pink Lady began did Seemayer step forward and reveal herself to be the artist behind the work. (The difficult-to-reach location and subject matter of the painting had led most observers to speculate that its creator was a man.) As the Los Angeles Times reported twenty-five years later:
Westmore arrived on the scene, and was horrified. She had assumed that she would feel no sentimental attachment to the Pink Lady, but would easily forget her as with other art projects and move on to the next. But when she saw the road crew trying to erase her work, her emotions changed.

"I usually don't have a feeling that everything I do is precious," Westmore said. "But in this case, I became its mother, and it became important for me to save her. It was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen."

There was little Westmore could do. She had always wondered if the painting might land her in jail, and the county's response only heightened that concern. She stayed silent.

Finally, when she realized the only way to stop the lady's removal was a court injunction, she went public. She appealed to [county Road Division head I. L.] Morhar to stop the proceedings. It made no difference.
Neither petitions nor injunctions availed in saving the Pink Lady. On Thursday, 3 November 1966, as onlookers booed in disapproval, county workers blanked out the scarcely five-day-old Pink Lady with 14 gallons of brown paint. (The folklore that developed over the years later held that the Pink Lady had been removed only through the recourse of sandblasting her off the cliff face.)

Although Lynne Seemayer [Westmore] saw some positive results from her efforts (art galleries, for example, quickly offered to show her work), much of the experience proved negative. She sued Los Angeles County for $1 million over the destruction of her work and the invasion of her privacy, and the county countersued for about $26,000 to recoup the cost of erasing the Pink Lady and managing the "public nuisance" she created. (Both lawsuits were thrown out after the court determined the Pink Lady had been painted on private property, and therefore neither party had standing to file suit.)

On the Pink Lady's 25th anniversary, the Los Angeles Times chronicled some of the negative repercussions of her creation and removal:
"As I was leaving that day," said Westmore, who couldn't bear to watch her creation be removed, "this woman came up to me and said, 'Let me
just touch you.' That's when I knew this was starting to get out of hand."

Another woman called Westmore every other night for two months, contending that the Pink Lady was an exact portrait of her young daughter who ran away from home.

"She thought I had used her daughter as a model," Westmore said. "It was so pathetic. She was so convinced." Westmore received hate mail from people offended by the nude portrait, including one letter from someone threatening to tar and feather her and her two children and dump them off at Sunset Boulevard. She turned the letter over to the FBI.

She received pictures of men masturbating. An arts group asked her to judge pictures that apes had painted.

"It was too crazy," she said. "One woman accused me of all the rapes that had been committed, that the Pink Lady brought out the lust in men."

Westmore changed her telephone number, but the calls kept coming. Finally, the stress was too much, and she was hospitalized with pneumonia and lost her job as a legal secretary. But even in the hospital she wasn't immune from attention.

"This nurse came in, wanting me to sign something," Westmore recalled. "I thought it was for some kind of medical work, but she wanted an autograph."
In the end, a sad result for a woman who had not sought to make a monetary profit or a grand political statement, but who had simply felt the urge to create a piece of art — to "do something that was [her] own." (Lynne Seemayer professed surprise at the controversy her Pink Lady created; she had even left a rope at the site so that she could go back and touch up her work later.)

I never saw the Pink Lady myself. My childhood landmark was an enigmatic and impenetrable blur that marked the spot where something of interest had once stood, augmented by the (often inaccurate and embellished) memories of those who knew the Pink Lady during her brief lifetime. Somehow that made her all the more intriguing.

Last updated: 12 November 2006

Sources Sources:

Arkush, Michael. "Legend of the Pink Lady."
Los Angeles Times. 27 October 1991.

LIFE. "Cliff-Hanging Drama of Art Censorship."
18 November 1966 (p. 49).

Candles

2009-11-24T05:25:00.000-08:00

Alice in Wonderland – Illustrated By Salvador Dali

2009-11-15T06:27:00.000-08:00

Eat your heart out, Tim Burton.

These were some of the awe inspiring illustrations made by Salvador Dali for a 1969 edition of Alice in Wonderland, published by Marcenas Press and Random House.

Sand sculptures in Portugal

2009-10-18T20:32:00.000-07:00

Liu Bolin - Invisible Man

2009-10-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

35-year-old Liu Bolin, from Shandong, China, manages to camouflage himself in any surroundings, no matter how difficult they might be.

Liu works on a single photo for up to 10 hours at a time, to make sure he gets it just right, but he achieves the right effect: sometimes passers-by don’t even realize he is there until he moves.

The talented Liu Bolin says his art is a protest against the actions of the Government, who shut down his art studio in 2005 and persecutes artists. It’s about not fitting into modern society. Despite problems with Chinese authorities, Liu’s works are appreciated at an international level.

Photos by CATERS NEWS and Liu Bolin

Street Art

2009-09-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

Sand animation

2009-08-26T16:45:00.000-07:00

This clip is from UKRAINE ’s GOT TALENT!
This young Ukrainian girl tells an entire story via pushing around sand on a table. She uses nothing but sand and her hands to create these images. What amazing artistic talent!

astonishing 3D murals painted on the sides of buildings by a trompe l'oeil artis

2009-08-05T05:48:00.000-07:00

At first glance, it looks as if some natural disaster has shaken away the walls of these buildings to reveal architecture hidden for thousands of years.

And at second and third glance, it looks like that too.

But these spectacular images are not the unexpected result of an earthquake.

The incredibly lifelike scenes are actually huge works of art, painted on the side of perfectly intact buildings. Even that woman peering into the ruin above is not real.

The paintings, which have fooled many, were created by John Pugh, who specialises in trompe l'oeil - or 'trick of the eye' - art.

He uses his skills to delude the viewer into seeing 3D scenes painted on flat surfaces.

The Californian-born artist said: 'It seems almost universal that people take delight in being visually tricked.'

His works can been seen all over the world, including in the artist's home state. The 'earthquake' work shown here is located on Main Street in the town of Los Gatos and was created following a genuine earthquake in 1989.

The temple-like interior apparently exposed features jaguar gods, regarded as the creators of earthquakes by the Mayans.

Another picture is of Taylor Hall at the California State University, Chico, where Pugh studied. The mural features Doric-style Greek columns behind the seemingly shattered wall and is called Academe.

Another work, featuring a colossal wave about to crash on to a pavement in Honolulu, Hawaii, took two months of studio work to plan and a further six months to execute with the help of 11 other artists.

It features Queen Lili'uokalani, the last monarch of the Hawaiian Islands with Duke Kahanamoku - the ultimate father of surf.

The scene is so realistic that just as it was near completion, it attracted the attention of the fire brigade, which stopped its truck in the middle of traffic.

Mr Pugh said: ''They jumped out to rescue the children in the mural. They got about 15 feet away and then doubled over laughing when they realised what it was.'

This is the desired effect and Pugh enjoys the community-bonding properties of his public works.

He works on a large scale in public and residential areas and his paintings can be seen all over the world from New Zealand to Hawaii - with many telling a story of the area where they are positioned.

Pugh is used to people's amazed reactions when they pass his murals.

He said: 'They say "wow did you see that. I thought that was real."

'Public art can link people together and stimulate a sense of pride within the community.

'These life-size illusions allow me to communicate with a very large audience.

'It seems almost universal that people take delight in being visually tricked.'

Pugh is currently working on a mural for a police station in California and also one for a recreation centre in Calgary, Canada.

Beautiful Minds: Stephen Wiltshire

2009-07-22T21:20:00.000-07:00

Stephen Wiltshire from London is a star among savants. Stephen is autistic. He did not speak his first words "pencil" and "paper" until he was 5. Yet, when he was 11 he drew a perfect aerial view of London after only one helicopter ride. For this film we're testing the "Living camera" in Rome. (ColourField production)

Steve "Espo" Power A/C

2009-07-08T07:28:00.000-07:00

Kevin Van Aelst

2009-06-22T18:24:00.000-07:00

Alexander Calder performs his 'Circus'

2009-06-19T15:36:00.000-07:00

From Oct. 16, 2008 Feb. 15, 2009, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presents "Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933" http://www.whitney.org/calder, a new look at the artists early years when his radical innovations included open-air wire sculptures, his beloved and important miniature "Circus", and the creation of a new artform, the mobile. This video excerpts scenes of Calder performing the "Circus" from a 1955 film by Jean Painleve.

NEW CHALK ART FROM JULIAN BEEVER

2009-06-16T19:05:00.000-07:00

Fruits And Vegetables Art.

2009-06-14T04:42:00.000-07:00

3D Anamorphic Street Paintings By Tracy Lee Stum

2009-06-14T04:36:00.000-07:00

A professional street painter, Tracy Lee Stum, best known for her 3D street paintings, also called anamorphic or pavement chalk art.
"3D Anamorphic Street Paintings are illusionary 2-dimensional images that appear to become 3-dimensional when viewed from a fixed point through a camera lens. Tracy has been creating these types of chalk art images since she first started street painting and continues to challenge herself through this manner of visual expression."

Water Colors

2009-05-31T15:32:00.000-07:00

Storm Drain Art from Brazil

2009-05-31T14:22:00.001-07:00

The Art Of Moneygami - Origami With Bills

2009-05-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

Origami is the art of paper folding. The word is Japanese, literally meaning to fold (oru) paper (kami) and comes in many styles and varieties. Moneygami is origami made from currency; the subtle genius lies in the way the artist incorporates the prints on the dollar bills into the facial characteristics of the finished figures.

The Incredible Snow Globes of Walter Martin & Paloma Munoz

2009-05-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

Mural Art By John Pugh

2009-05-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Kathleen Dustin's Otherworldly Bags

2009-05-29T03:57:00.000-07:00

Jamming On FAO Schwartz Piano

2009-05-27T05:53:00.001-07:00

Watch CBS Videos Online

Kim Graham’s Horse Legs

2009-05-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

This cool work, known as Digitigrade leg extensions, is done by Seattle-based sculptor Kim Graham.

They are made of steel and add 14 inches of height to the wearer. But these are not ordinary stilts; they give a person the uncanny and graceful appearance of an animal. It is really cool! The movement of the legs is genuinely graceful and naturalistic. It is a great deal of fun being so much taller.

In this video, Kim Graham shows how they work. You can buy yourself one also. The core leg extensions are between $750 - $780 plus tax. The spring loaded hooves are $200 extra.

The Intimate Diary of Frida Kahlo, a Singular Literary Self-portrait

2009-05-18T14:08:00.000-07:00

MEXICO CITY.-(EFE) The intimate diary of Frida Kahlo is really no such thing - rather it is a literary self-portrait comparable in quality to the pictures the artist painted of herself, an Italian researcher told Efe.

The specialist in intimate literature Cristina Secci, a native of Cagliari, Italy, presented Saturday in Mexico City a study of the literary genre to which Kahlo's diary belongs.

"An intimate diary is so personal that you hide it in the bottom drawer. But Frida didn't. She read certain parts to her guests and friends, she allowed herself to be photographed with it and even gave away pages to her friends, so they say," she said in an interview.

The diary was written during the last 10 years of Frida's life, but even so contains few dates, an unusual trait in writings like this.

Secci said that when the reader opens any "intimate diary," he or she expects to find such elements as love affairs, dreams, sufferings and betrayals.

Frida (1907-1954) included all that but also included her thoughts on politics, art, poetry and other subjects.

"The elements of this work are different from those of an intimate diary," the Italian said in stressing the originality of Frida's writing.

Secci said that the diary can be seen evolving, with the handwriting very straightforward at first but getting more and more complicated later as Kahlo, almost without thinking, began to fill the blank spaces with drawings, the kind of doodles "we draw when we're talking on the telephone."

"Since Kahlo is a painter, it all gets away from her and painting overflows the diary - she includes color" so that it becomes a fundamental part of it, with the words becoming pictures and the pictures words, she said.

At times Kahlo would write a large part of the diary with a paintbrush, she said.

She said that sometimes the handwriting of the text "overflows" and becomes landscape as well, so that the words lose their literal meanings and acquire new ones.

Secci recalled that Kahlo had on her bed a mirror in which she always looked at herself, an object with the peculiarity of reflecting images backwards.

"Myself in the mirror is not the real me. It is similar, but not the same thing," Secci said, a truth expressed in the book she entitled "With the Image in the Mirror: The Literary Self-Portrait of Frida Kahlo."

She recalled that one characteristic of self-portraits is that they show the image the artist wants others to see, which is not necessarily the real one.

"I don't mean it's a lie, but it is very subjective," she said.

Another clue proving that this is not a traditional diary are the words erased and crossed out in the text.

The expert explained that when people write in a diary something they later regret, they usually tear out the page. Kahlo, however, crossed it out and wrote over it, as if defying the reader to decipher what is hidden there.

"More than a diary, Frida wrote it as a self-portrait, to place beside the many she painted," said the Italian philologist, adding that this does not mean the writings are any the less intimate.

"Frida had a great ability to express her intimacy, whether in painting, letters or prose...that's why I don't believe she would need a genuine intimate diary," she said.

For Secci, at the end of the diary and before the artist died it becomes more intimate and the effects of pain and drugs can be observed, even in the difficulty she had in writing. EFE

Bruno Torf's Tree Sculptures

2009-05-14T19:06:00.000-07:00

The chalk guy is back

2009-05-12T15:52:00.000-07:00

Dance of a thousand hands

2009-05-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

REALLY BEAUTIFUL!!! Read the paragraph below FIRST before you watch the video. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!

There is an awesome dance, called the Thousand-Hand Guanyin, which is making the rounds across the net. Considering the tight coordination required, their accomplishment is nothing short of amazing, even if they were not all deaf. Yes, you read correctly...all 21 of the dancers are deaf.

Relying only on signals from trainers at the four corners of the stage, these extraordinary dancers deliver a visual spectacle that is at once intricate and stirring. Its first major international debut was in Athens at the closing ceremonies for the 2004 Paralympics. But it had long been in the repertoire of the Chinese Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe and had traveled to more than 40 countries. Its lead dancer is 29 year old Tai Lihua, who has a BA from the Hubei Fine Arts Institute. The video was recorded in Beijing during the Spring Festival celebrations.

Sculpures by Ron Mueck

2009-05-01T05:40:00.000-07:00

Ron Mueck is an Australian hyper-realist sculptor working in the UK. His incredible sculptures of creepy, grotesque, mottled skin and uncannily gigantic proportional figures have adorned the Millennium Dome as well as Charles Saatchi’s living room for a number of years now. It would be fair to say, Mueck’s one of the leading contemporary artists of today.

His early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children’s television and films, notably the film “Labyrinth” staring Bowie. Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. This eventually led him to conclude, “photography pretty much destroys the physical presence of the original object”, and so he turned to fine art, in particular, sculpture.

In the early 1990s, still in his advertising days, Mueck was commissioned to make something highly realistic, and was wondering what material would do the trick.

Latex was the usual, but he wanted something harder, more precise. Luckily, he saw a little architectural decor on the wall of a boutique and inquired as to the nice, pink stuff’s nature. Fiberglass resin was the answer, and Mueck has made it his bronze and marble ever since.
It’s the attention to detail, technical brilliance and the (odd) scale of his figures that takes your breath away. His work, while proportionally correct, is either over or under-sized. For example, an enormous 4.5m crouching Boy, a 3 ft tall naked man, a 20 ft long newborn, a replica of his own head (seen above) 6 times its actual size. Consequently his hyper-realistic sculptures, while extraordinarily lifelike, challenge us by their odd scale. The “psychological confrontation for the viewer is to recognize and assimilate two contradictory realities”. However, the real magical appeal of Mueck’s sculptures lie in the meticulous process, which begins with…

1. Crafting of a series of small clay models - this enables him decide on figure positioning.

2. Mueck then creates a series of drawings in different sizes - this enables him to make decisions about scale.

3. Next, Mueck sculpts the figure in clay - this includes fine details of expression and skin texture.

4. A mould of the sculpture is made using silicone (or in the case of larger works, fibreglass).

5. Mueck completes the process by meticulously painting (by hand) finer details (like veins and skin tones) on the surface, before finally sculpting the eyes, bringing his creations to life.

Selection of Autostereograms

2009-04-23T16:06:00.000-07:00

Autostereograms are 3D images hidden within another picture. In order to view the 3-D images, simply stare at the picture until the image starts to take shape. Allow your eyes to relax, don’t just stare AT the image, try to stare THROUGH it. You’ll notice your eyes will go slightly out of focus. This is normal. Keep staring, don’t give up, once you begin to see the first image, it gets much easier. Hope, you’ll be more successful than me. :)

Magical Photographs To Believe That Are Not Photoshopped

2009-04-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

s there are hundreds of posts available on the internet about photoshop and photo manipulation. But our today’s post is really different than those. In this post we are listing another set of 23 Magical Photographs To Believe That Are Not Photoshopped. This does not mean that they haven’t been photoshopped for cropping, coloring etc, but originally all the photographs are real using only in-camera tricks and photographer efforts. You will need to grab their creativity in these photos. These are the wonder creations of photographers who use their creativity with a different angle and approach to get the result that makes a difference.

Li Wei's Artwork

2009-04-22T09:03:00.000-07:00