Astonishing bit of work by Polish designer Paul Marcinkowski - presenting the tattoo as an infographic. Sweetly done. His blog is here - and has some lovely sketching on it, plus other goodies.
The preparatory work for large paintings was not usually confined to one or more oil sketches, but generally included detail studies as well. The Studies of a Man's Head painted from life by Van Dyck are an excellent example of this.
Check out her stuff here, it's really pretty.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/40974947 w=700&h=350]
Five years. 25 countries. Shot entirely on 70mm film. Ron Fricke’s long-awaited “Samsara” looks incredible. Well worth having a sneak peek on the Samsara website. If you liked Baraka, you'll like this. If you didn't, chances are you won't.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/45188800 w=700&h=390] ART+COM was commissioned to create an art installation for the Departure-Check-in hall of Terminal 1 at Singapore Airport while it was being refurbished. “Kinetic Rain” is composed of two parts, each consisting of 608 rain droplets made of lightweight aluminum covered with copper. Suspended from thin steel ropes above the two opposing escalators, each droplet is moved by a computer-controlled motor hidden in the hall's ceiling. The drops follow a 15-minute, computationally designed choreography where the two parts move together in unison, sometimes mirroring, sometimes complementing and sometimes responding to each other.
Boom.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/Q34z5dCmC4M&w=700] A tip of the hat to Miss Daisy.
Düsseldorf-based photographer Rüdiger Nehmzow takes beautiful technical photos, nice and clean, with a sexy take on symmetry and geometry. His cloud images are smashing - could perhaps do with a bit less "shadows & highlights" work in post, but they're rocking nonetheless. Good portfolio on his website.
Charming series by Charles Paul Wilson III on Deviant Art.
Click on a pic below to launch the gallery. I think "Werm Hole Exparimunt" is my favourite.
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Says the artist, Rob Rickett "A series of informative posters detailing how some of the most notable drum sequences were programmed using the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine. Each sequence has been analyzed and represented as to allow users to re-programme each sequence, key for key.
"If you would like an A3 print please send a mail to shop@robricketts.co.uk and I will email you as soon as some become available."
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(via)
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/38840688 w=700&h=380] "The limits of the Kinect's unintended uses are explore again in this beautiful experimental piece by Daniel Franke. Using three Kinect's, Daniel recorded a dancer going through a routine before feeding the point data into a visualizer, adding sound distortion, random seeding of frames and post processing. The final performance is an uncanny visual spectacle, featuring a flowing form attempting to maintain a solid shape with every reset."
"The three-dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective. The camera also reacts to the sound and supports the physical imitation of the musical piece by the performer. She moves to a noise field, where a simple modification of the random seed can consistently create new versions of the video, each offering a different composition of the recorded performance. The multi-dimensionality of the sound sculpture is already contained in every movement of the dancer, as the camera footage allows any imaginable perspective."
(VIA)
In 1966-7 my Dad got a job as a young reporter for the Daily Mail's Manchester office, just as it was made Newspaper of the Year. All staff received the memo below from editor Mike Randall. When Dad sent it to me, he added: "Mike Randall left the paper soon afterwards. It became a tabloid and in ethical terms its downhill slide began. However, I think Randall's statement still stands as the model of propriety to which all journalists working for all media should aspire."
I couldn't agree more - and it's certainly how I'd hope people expect writers to behave. I'd add though that in the 15 years I've been writing, I haven't noticed nearly as much awareness of the dangers of libel, sensationalism and indiscretion in young journos as was drilled into [my generation of] pre-internet trainees. I don't think Twitter and the pressure of instant comment helps much though.
[EDITED TRANSCRIPT] 1. No member of the staff intrudes or is called to intrude into private lives where no public interest is involved.
2. No ordinary member of the public is lured, coerced or in any way pressed by a Daily Mail representative into giving an interview or picture which he is clearly unwilling to give.
3. It remains our duty at all times to expose the fraud and reveal the mountebank wherever public interest is involved.
4. In the reporting of Divorce Cases we use our own and not the Judge's discretion. We give details only where the case and the summing up are of valid legal or public interest. We do not at at any time carry reports which merely hold either party up to ridicule or reveal aspects of their private lives which cannot be any concern of the public.
5. No member of the Daily Mail invents quotes or uses subterfuge to obtain quotes.
6. We are not in business to suppress news. Where anybody is guilty of withholding information that ought to be made public we use every legitimate method to give our readers that information.
7. Daily Mail staff do not allow themselves to be used as vehicles for the promotion of publicity stunts which have no legitimate news value.
8. Anyone who works for the Daily Mail should be watchdog of ours standards and a person who commands public respect.
Freud was born in Berlin but his father, Ernst, moved the family to England in 1933 to skip the rise of Nazism. Grandson of Sigmund Freud, elder brother of Clement Freud (who told the world's funniest joke), he seems to have chosen to paint without much fuss or fanfare - it's what he was meant to do. He was one of a group of artists in Britain at the time, the "School of London", which along with Francis Bacon and a few others concentrated on figurative painting. He had a pretty crazy personal life (many lovers, at least 14 kids) - but there's plenty on that elsewhere.
Freud's subjects, who needed to make a very large and uncertain commitment of their time, were often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. He said, "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really." However the titles were mostly anonymous, and the identity of the sitter not always disclosed; the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had a portrait of one of Freud's daughters as a baby for several years before he mentioned who the model was.
In the 1970s Freud spent 4,000 hours on a series of paintings of his mother, about which art historian Lawrence Gowing observed "it is more than 300 years since a painter showed as directly and as visually his relationship with his mother. And that was Rembrandt." For me, the ones of his mum are the most emotive of all. She was in a deep depression at the time as Ernst had died, and you can instantly feel that mood in the room, almost disengaged (he couldn't paint her before because she was too animated and interested in him) as she stares into space.
A prodigious worker, Freud spent a huge amount of time on his paintings, and always needed to have the subject in the room. He'd work in five-hour sessions, and a single painting easily take over two thousand hours to complete. He'd start by drawing in charcoal, then paint a small area of the canvas, and gradually work outward from there. For a new sitter, he often started with the head as a means of "getting to know" the person, then painted the rest of the figure, eventually returning to the head as his comprehension of the model deepened. A section of canvas was intentionally left bare until the painting was finished, as a reminder that the work was in progress. The finished painting is an accumulation of richly worked layers of pigment, as well as months of intense observation.
It's crazy - the closer you get, the more abstract the paint becomes. I can't imagine how he could stare intently at someone's mouth, say, then go to the canvas and carve a green slash into a thick layer of paint on it, and yet, from a metre away, it looks exactly perfectly right in tone and texture and everything. Astonishing. And a lot of people talk about the distance between artist and subject, or the odd perspective (he often painted from above) and the inherent anger, but to be honest I didn't necessarily get that. To me it almost makes things more intimate, like he's there, but not necessarily intruding, a bit like Dad coming in and waking you up for school or something. There's a familiarity to it and passion, but I'm not sure anger is the word I'd use.
I also really like the way he does people's foreheads. Quotes below - and they're relevant for all types of artist, writers, singers, painters, the works.
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"There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so."
"I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them."
"The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement. The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with."
"A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure."
"Now that I know what I want, I don't have to hold on to it quite so much."
"Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin."
"Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid."
"The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh."
"The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn."
"I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do."
"A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art."
"The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really."
"The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real."
"I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."
"What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince."
(To Martin Gayford about his portrait) “The picture of you has always been linked in my head with the one of the back end of the skewbald mare."
"I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen. Perhaps if painters did know how it was going to turn out they wouldn't bother actually to do it."
"The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught."
"I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness."
"The painting is always done very much with [the model's] co-operation. The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body."
"I don't want any colour to be noticeable... I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent... Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid."
"The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell ... Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out."
"A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure."
(On Models) "And, since the model he faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model."
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5RpAxwPiGM&w=700] Overture from "Die Fledermaus" by Johann Strauss. Really kicks in after about 6.00, but you need the first bit (there's a beautiful piano arrangement of it here).
Beautiful campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - series showing musical instruments from the inside to nail the feel of the music they play. Nice bit of CGI and that. Hot.
Copywriter: Mona Sibai Agency: Scholz & Friends (Berlin) Client: Berliner Philharmoniker Photographer: Mierswa Kluska (via)
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BONUS BONUS BONUS! Here, have a pianogasm on the house, courtesy of Lang Lang's encore following his first performance with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2009:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz_BlYlBi40&w=600]
No words.
