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Kim Graham’s Horse Legs

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

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

The chalk guy is back

Dance of a thousand hands

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

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.