Illustrator Tom Gauld, best known for his regular contributions to The Guardian, creates quirky, sometimes deeply poignant comic strips. There’s a little something for everyone: robots, dinosaurs, monsters, ghostly shades, Gilliamesque factory machines, baboon ladies… it’s good stuff!

He also has gorgeous screenprints, postcards, shirts and books for sale. Click over to Gauld’s Flickr to take a peek into the pages of his personal sketchbooks, revealing his fascinating creative process.

I got far too little sleep last night. For what reason, I do not know, but I was simply unable to get more than two or three hours of real rest and, as such, I am not all here at the moment. And while this is normally a bad thing, it does allow me to at least place the blame for this week’s FAM upon my delirium.

With that out of the way, allow me to present Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky from 1991, directed by Lam Nai-choi and starring Fan Siu-wong as the titular hero. Truthfully, that is all I would like to say about it, letting those who have not seen it just stumble in blindly but that would be, perhaps, irresponsible of me. So, as far as plot goes: The year is 2001 and all government institutions have been privatized. At the beginning of the film our hero, Riki-Oh Saiga, martial arts master, arrives at a prison to serve a ten year sentence for manslaughter, for killing the man indirectly responsible for the death of Riki’s girlfriend.

That’s all you get. However, I must warn viewers that the draw of this particular film (besides the amazing/bad dubbing) is, frankly, its outlandish violence. Saying The Story of Ricky contains some blood and gore is like saying Bill Gates has a few bucks. The movie is soaked through with gallons of fake blood. It is an orgy of ludicrous, cartoonish violence. If you aren’t down for watching a man punch the jaw off a laughably fake head, then don’t click the play button. If, however, that level of disgusting camp appeals to you, and you haven’t already seen this fine movie, then prepare yourself for an hour and a half of the most ridiculous martial arts mayhem ever recorded.

“Bufo Periglenes” by Madeline von Foerster. Oil and egg tempera on panel. 8″ x 8″

Shortly, the astounding artist Madeline von Foerster (previously mentioned here and here, and featured in Issue 02 of Coilhouse Magazine) will be showing her most recent series of paintings, “The Golden Toad” at the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, WA. (Her work will be hanging alongside several exquisite pieces by her good friend and contemporary, Benjamin A. Vierling.) Foerster’s exhibition statement:

“This new series of paintings envisions fairy tales of the future. The current, unprecedented devastation of Earth’s wildernesses foretells a time when the great forests are gone, and with them, half the animal species with whom we share the world today. In comparison, the present will surely appear as a sort of Golden Age, abundant with lush forests and wondrous beasts — what sort of tales will they inspire?”

“Frog Cabinet” by Madeline von Foerster. Oil and egg tempera on panel. 18″ x 24″

“Stylistically, these artworks suggest the rich paintings from the School of Fontainebleau, a sixteenth century efflorescence of French Art, which exalted the enchanted forest. An aura of mystery and possibility pervades the paintings, which are meticulously rendered using an uncommon Renaissance mixed-technique of oil and egg tempera.”

“Although imagining the future, a common theme of the paintings is memory. While researching these works, the artist hunted for a fairytale titled “The Golden Toad,” which she was certain she had read. However, memory was deceiving her, for the Golden Toad (Bufo periglenes) is actually a Costa Rican amphibian, recently extinct. Ironically, though humans are responsible for the planet’s vanishing forests and extirpated species, it is in human imagination and memory that these lost treasures will continue to exist. Therefore, the Golden Toad, now gone, returns in mythical form, to remind us what we can still save.”

“The Tale of the Golden Toad” by Madeline von Foerster. Oil and egg tempera on panel. 24″ x 36″

The Madeline Von Foerster/Benjamin A. Vierling show at Roq La Rue Gallery opens this coming Friday night, July 08, and runs to August 06, 2011.

Tim Hawkinson’s “Möbius Ship”

Echoing the working methods of ship-in-a-bottle hobbyists, Hawkinson created a painstakingly detailed model ship that twists in upon itself, presenting the viewer with a thought-provoking visual conundrum. The title is a witty play on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, which famously relates the tale of a ship captain’s all-consuming obsession with an elusive white whale. The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson’s sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville’s epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel.

Sadly, despite taking it’s inspiration from Melville’s most famous work, it does not appear to include an infinite loop of tiny Ahabs.

Via The Fox Is Black

Another beautiful day, another amazing Kickstarter project by a beloved curator of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.

Musician, composer, artist and storyteller Carla Kihlstedt‘s Necessary Monsters is a staged song cycle after Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. Carla wrote it with poet Rafael Osés for seven musicians and an actress. The narrative “follows a young writer as she tries in vain to corral the imaginary beings that parade out of her mind in the course of a sleepless night. In this journey, she encounters many beasts – some meddlesome, some winsome, some loathsome – and discovers that she is indeed the sum of their parts.”

Previous stagings of this work have provided stunning, intimate portraits of Carla and her colleagues’ creative processes– their intelligence, their playfulness, their sweetness. Since that time, the piece “has gone through a kind of distillation process, the way a good friendship does, that only happens with time. In this next chapter, we’ve recast, retooled, and redirected. The cast, the crew and the design team include some of my very favorite musicians and artists, all of whom have brought incredible ideas and energy to the piece. It is finally becoming the beast it was meant to be. We’re performing it in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on July 29th and 30th of this year. ”

As of this minute, hundreds of people have contributed approximately $23K toward Carla’s Kickstarter campaign. She just sent out an email saying “We’re right at the edge and the pressure’s on. We’ve got three days to raise another $2,043. So, If you’ve been waiting in the wings for these last giddy moments… NOW is your time!”

When I was a child, I had an ongoing and masochistic addiction to scale models. That is to say, that while I enjoyed miniatures, mostly of the military variety, I mainly enjoyed them in the idealized, finished versions in my head. I did not, however, take much joy in the harsh, time intensive reality of constructing a 1/48th scale German Tiger tank — a reality fraught with frustration and toxic substances. It was a truly volatile combination, I assure you, and usually resulted in my shaking with impotent rage over a pile of badly painted plastic, it’s surfaces ravaged by the effects of Testors Model Cement.

Despite a complete lack of ability (which I have learned to accept) I still find myself fascinated with diminutive, scale reproductions of places and objects. Randy Hage does not work in the area of war that so preoccupied the violent imagination of my youth, but his work is astounding. Focusing on New York City storefronts he recreates everything from the signage and shutters to the graffiti that adorns their facades and various bits of detritus inside and out. The level of detail here requires a patience that I never possessed or, no doubt, ever will.

“Oh la la”

“I paint my demons. I paint nightmares. To get rid of them.  I paint my fears. I paint my sorrow. To deal with them.” – Mia Mäkilä

Mia Mäkilä, a self-taught artist who lives and works in Sweden, describes her art as “horror pop surrealism” or “dark lowbrow” and further illustrates: “Picture Pippi Longstocking and Swedish movie director Ingmar Bergman having a love child. That’s me.”

Her work consists of digital paintings and vintage photographs manipulated and distorted to produce nightmarish mixed media portraits. The creations borne of Mäkilä’s artistic process are both uncomfortably horrific and unaccountably humorous– demonic entities lurk in the form of  gash-mouthed, leering Victorian families staring from within a tintype void. Fire-breathing/ennui-stricken and dandified gentlemen ejaculate from the precarious heights of a Parisian rooftop. All manner of flaming Boschian hells overflow with cavorting fish and flamingos and God knows what else.

“Holiday in Hell”

Eight years ago Nancy LeVine began traveling America, look photographing elderly dogs. A simple premise, cialis sale surely, and one, perhaps, ideally suited for the internet, where we love our pictures of both dogs and cats. She explains what drew her to the idea:

My interest in the world of the senior dog began as my own two dogs began to approach the end of their days. This was at a time when I had lived enough years to start imagining my own mortality. I entered a world of grace where bodies that had once expressed their vibrancy were now on a more fragile path.

I saw how the dog does it; how, without the human’s painful ability to project ahead and fear the inevitable, the dog simply wakes to each day as a new step in the journey. Though their steps might be more stiff and arduous, these dogs still moved through each day as themselves — themselves of that day and all the days before.

The result is an impressive set of portraits of the animals that, for many of us, are our constant companions.

Every once in a while I like to check in on Alex Jones, just to see how he’s doing. The man lives in a very dangerous world, you understand. Far more dangerous than the sphere that you and I inhabit. Crazy shit goes down on a daily basis in Jones’s ‘hood, so I just stop by every now and then to make sure that his head hasn’t exploded or, at the very least, to witness his head exploding.

There could not have been a better time. Truly, this is some of the man’s finest work. It’s got everything a conspiracy could ask for: government cover-ups, drug use, Philip K. Dick and elves. It’s awe-inspiring stuff. The gist is that powerful old men, who may or may not be ruling the world, are jacked up on the powerful hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Under the effects of the drug, they have come into contact with beings Jones’s claims they refer to as “clockwork elves” who instructed them to enslave humanity and build the Large Hadron Collider.

Now, Jones insists that he does not believe this (probably…maybe) and that this is “pretty David Icke”. He wants you to know that he doesn’t talk about this stuff because it would blow your mind. But he also knows that you need to know these things. You need to be aware because, as mentioned, Alex Jones lives in a pretty dangerous world and, with his help, you can too.

RESONANCE from Resonance on Vimeo.

In the 11-minute clip above, mind a group of over 30 animators and sound artists teamed up to create short pieces between 12 and 20 seconds with the aim to “explore the relationship between geometry and audio in unique ways.”

The result is a series of warped, surreal sound visualizations. Twitching biomechanical amoebae, self-assembling fractal cubes, watery UFOs, motile blinking rubbery art-gallery showpieces,

[via raindrift]