Found at bOING bOING. Linked from an ARTNews post. Renaissance art and video games. Why haven’t you clicked yet?
What If Fra Angelico Painted Space Invaders?
Tag Archives: art
Surreal Sunday: Michael Sowa
Here we have one of my favourite German artists. Even before his pictures showed up in the movie Amelie, his hyperreal animals and their expressions had formed a lasting impression on me. There is something in the composition he uses, his muted colours, and especially the just-slightly-off shapes of the animals that is indelible.
Surreal Sunday
And I’m not just talking about my attempts at writing and rewriting, this time. I’m sitting in my studio drinking caffè napoletana and browsing an amazing collection of surreal art. And that, I think, is my theme for today… art of the surreal and hyperreal. First up is Igor Morski, a Polish artist whose wonderful eerie paintings have not so much as lodged themselves in my mind as they’ve brutally carved a living space underneath the old chip wrappers and apple cores that surround my Muse’s workspace.
Wink, or the Wonderful Art of the Paper Book
This Tumblr Collection is curated by Carla Sinclair, who along with her husband, Mark Frauenfelder, is one of the founders of bOING bOING. But really, all you need to know is that they highlight a different paper book every weekday. If I weren’t desperately trying to finish editing this chapter, I could easily spend the rest of the day lost within it.
Inspiration Tuesday: Weird Art
If you’re not already a fan of Weird Tales, I highly recommend you check out their Facebook page and their website. Lately, they’ve been my source of odd, inspiring, and chilling artwork. Here’s something from one of the artists they featured today. Enjoy…
New “LORD OF THE RINGS” Footage Found
Via bOINGbOING
When I was un piccolo bambino, I discovered The Hobbit in my school library, sometime during the winter of second grade, and I fell in love with that. Shortly after, I started reading The Lord of the Rings (I was an odd child) and after one of our family’s friends saw me reading the first book, a tattered tenth-hand Balentine paperback from the 60s, he decided that an 8-year-old was not reading and understanding that book. So, he quizzed me about the book. Hard. Once he figured out that I really was reading the book and not just carrying it around (an aside: I remember being particularly peeved at the review in the front of one of the books, the one that started “This is not for children, nor is it for whimsy-lovers and Alice-quoters…”) he got me a good boxed set of the four books, and either he or my parents got me the calendar with images from the just-released movie.
Now, this was mid-to-northern Michigan in pre-multiplex, pre-cable (for our town, at least) and even pre-VCR. Plus, the movie was something of a box-office bomb. The story I remember hearing is that it didn’t even last a whole week at one of the theaters in Flint. So, I had nothing to console me and my drive to see a movie made from what I would proudly tell anyone who asked, and quite a few people who didn’t, was the best book written in the history of forever. I think I was finally able to track down a dubbed copy when I was in eighth grade or so, after I’d already read the books a second time, along with the first section of The Silmarillion, which I enjoyed until my brain melted. And while I liked the movie (and still do) it could not hold a candle to the sounds and dialogue and music I had put to the images that I would stare at from across the room while I was reading the books.
All this is just to say that I damn near had heart failure when I read this article in bOING bOING. Okay, maybe it’s just a few shots (from one of the scenes I laminated and hung on my wall) but it still impressed the high holy hell out of me). Check it out.
Salvador Dalí’s Divine Comedy
More from the excellent Brain Pickings site. I’ve seen a few of these, and his mythological sketches, and they’re absolutely stunning.
Salvador Dalí’s Sinister and Sensual Paintings for Dante’s The Divine Comedy
Poetry Monday: The Grain
He sat gripping his pen
The words came quick, but
they weren’t the right words.
They said what he wanted to say
But not what he wanted to mean
So he waved to his friends,
waved to her,
And wrote
And wrote
He sat gripping his pen
The words came slow, but
they circled his point
They said what he wanted, meant what he meant
But did they mean the right thing?
Were they said the best way?
Would they hit their target, and
Was their target worthy of being hit?
So he sat and wrote and burned and wrote and
She watched
And watched
And waited
And watched
Then she turned one last time
Walked to the court
and away
He sat holding his pen
It took two hands to hold it straight
But the words behaved!
The words stood still!
The words so dense with meaning, yet so clear
They burned through the veil of the world
As a sun.
And he sat and he smiled
He had created a Grain, pure thing, where none had existed,
Shedding its light, to feed or to grow
So he ran to them ran to her, yelling and laughing
But she wasn’t there
They were gone
His house was empty
His cats had vanished
No one he saw to play with his art
but a lonely little boy
walking across the street
So the old man walked outside
The boy held out his hand
And the man put the Grain, perfect Grain of art on his palm
And the boy looked at it.
He smiled
It was good.
If pictures are worth ten thousand words…
Sholim is an artist from Belgrade who specializes in bizarre animated gifs of, well… the description I read said they were a mix of Terry Gilliam and R. Crumb. Check them out, should you either (a) need inspiration for your writing and reading today, or (b) want to curl up in the corner and whimper for the rest of the morning. Amazing artwork.