A fascinating look into the work of David A. Smith, who makes decidedly intricate embossed glass signs. It’s almost frighteningly meticulous work, and Smith makes it look easy in a way that only someone with years of experience and copious talent can. Simply beautiful.
Via Bioephemera (Welcome back, Jessica. We missed you.)
Elegant finger waves, glass domes, cookie-cutter craters, robots and skyscrapers. What does it all mean? Collage artist Le Corbus‘ striking red/grey palettes, obliquely sinister themes and uncanny retro-future juxtapositions feel like a perfectly-blended mix of punk collage artist Winston Smith, anti-Fascist photomontage artist John Heartfield and Soviet propaganda poster master El Lissitzky. More from when the ’20s met the ’60s, after the jump.
Yog-Sothoth, from The Haunter of the Dark
Discerning seekers of rare or obscure artists will eventually stumble upon John Coulthart’s Feuilleton at some point in their virtual journeys. An artist himself, and a blogger “of some repute”, his site is a veritable Holy Grail treasure collection of luminous paintings, ornate illustrations & woodcuts, and salty vintage photographs that run the gamut from fin de siecle European art magazines to antique occult bookplates to queer themed eye candy from a bygone era for which to titillate our salacious modern sensibilities. One with an interest in such things could literally lose hours perusing his archives. It is with the striking of a dazed and dreamy midnight hour, head filled with inspiration and amazing discoveries, that one realizes where the time has gone.
John is perhaps best known for his own striking and complex “genre-defying” artistry; working with various styles and media in his singular, chimeric aesthetic, he is a successful graphic designer for a variety of mediums including album covers, book covers comic books and graphic novels.
“As a comic artist John produced the Lord Horror series Reverbstorm with David Britton for Savoy Books, and received the dubious accolade of having an earlier Savoy title, Hard Core Horror 5, declared obscene in a British court of law. … His collection of HP Lovecraft adaptations and illustrations, The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions, was republished in 2006 by Creation Oneiros.
As a book designer and illustrator John continues to work for Savoy Books, and in 2003 designed the acclaimed Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts.
John’s work has been showcased via Rapid Eye, Critical Vision, Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror, EsoTerra, CNN.com and the Channel 4 television series Banned in the UK.”
See below the cut for a Q&A in which John discusses fleeting fascinations, enduring enthusiasms, how the mystical and macabre manifests itself in his projects, and the mercurial nature of design.
Last week, we announced a new line of fund-raising merchandise: a poster, a scarf, a mug, and an array of buttons. Even Issue 05 and our Inform Inspire Infect hoodie are back by popular demand, all to help us make Issue 06 a worthy successor to the bling-a-licious 05. A big THANK YOU to everyone who’s pillaged our store so far. The sale ends this Wednesday at midnight PST, so if you plan to load up on Coil-goods, dally not!
Guest blogger Olga Drenda writes about war crimes and home-made drugs for a living, but it’s fluffy rodents who are her true love. She hails from the land of pierogi, supermodels and death metal bands, and is an editor at seelebrennt.com.
When going on an urban exploration trip, what do you expect to find in an abandoned building? Non-functioning devices, dilapidated furniture, calendars from 1975, some good graffiti on the walls, traces of cybergoth photo sessions. Sometimes you might even come across unexpected peculiarities like a carpet made of adult magazines and empty vodka bottles with rainbow-like, holographic labels (the last two, I’ve seen myself). However, occasionally you find something even more surprising, just like it happened earlier this year in Riga.
Inside a crumbling building (property the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art), the duo of fashion designers Mareunrol’s, together with Austrian scenographer Rūdolfs Bekičs, light artist Krišjānis Strazdītis and sound designer Kaspars Groševs created an unusual installation called Eden: a road to a luscious forest growing inside the structure. While the building was left unused for years, trees grew there on their own. With the help of Mareunrol’s and team, this abandoned space became a temporary shelter from the constant noise and hum of the outside world. After conquering a labyrinth of claustrophobic, somber corridors, the visitors entered a wild indoor microcosm, an urban garden of Eden.
But Eden isn’t the only indoor forest in existence. Another, completely different example, is Singapore’s Elok House. Constructed by Chang Architects, the “purposely wild”, however paradoxical it may sound, green area inside an utterly modern building is an oasis of foliage within one of the most industrialized cities on Earth.
Even if Elok House may be more designed rebellion than high art, the project is more than a mere decorative garden and and is still worth noticing. The architects indeed endeavored to equip the house with realistic forest qualities. Leaving enough room for plants to grow freely, letting rainwater collect in an indoor pond, covering the interiors with layers of moss is certainly more extreme than what most designers set out to achieve. The smell of wet soil completes the picture. I wouldn’t mind a squirrel or a deer running around, but even without them, the place – aseptic and nobly minimalist on the outside – appears to be alive enough to be called a radical statement of eco-design.
So how do you decorate an indoor oasis? Ayodhya‘s moss table certainly seems fitting – just looking at this photo makes me turn into a forest pixie in my imagination! The table would perfectly match a meal of blueberries and morning dew. And what about music? Apart from field recordings, which appear to be a natural choice when we think about forest surroundings, consider Pyramids and Stars. This little-known, but worthy of attention, music act with its aptly named song makes for a good soundtrack here.
I know I’m supposed to actually write something but, really, nothing I could say would do this man justice.
I have only a rudimentary grasp of the work of Benoît B. Mandelbrot. In fact, what I know is basically that through the use of complex mathematical formulas it is possible to create some kick-ass desktop wallpaper. This does, no doubt, a great injustice to the man’s work, but there it is. Krzysztof Marczak, obviously, understands the aforementioned mathematics better than me and has, with the help of a program called Mandelbulber, produced a hypnotic rendering of a flight through a fractal cube. It’s really great and you should go to the YouTube page to watch it in high def. I bet it would make a kick-ass screensaver.
Didn’t get enough of the heebie jeebies after viewing Ross’s Gimme Pizza post? It’s OK, evil scrambled Fox News is here to help. The mysteriously-titled clip, “auspice,” presents a ghostly double-exposure view of slowed-down Fox personalities, set to an unholy-sounding chorus. The music is not credited, and any help identifying the artist would be appreciated. “I hear a little bit of Diamanda in there at the halfway point,” notes Wobbly, who sent this in.
It’s the perfect companion to this CNN piece, also submitted by Wobbly sometime ago. “Listen to me. I want to tell you something. Come closer. Don’t be upset and don’t get emotional.” Which is scarier, that CNN clip (embed-disabled high-res version posted here for your viewing displeasure), or this FOX clip?
First Encounter
A young girl in a scarlet hoodied romper stares gravely up into the heavily furred, ferociously fanged face of a black wolf. A lesser creature might be shamed by the child’s frank gaze – her features set earnestly, courageously, eyes alight with curiosity, and perhaps, even compassion.
Is the wolf to be deterred by this sweet faced thing, obviously unafraid? Will it stray from it’s monstrously predictable fairytale course? No, it is not. Will not. Cannot — after all, that is what it wolves do, isn’t it?
And before you can blink it has swallowed the girl whole.
But, wait…
I can’t say I’m necessarily a huge fan of the entirety of Hunter Freeman’s portfolio, but I do very much love this series of photos of an astronaut going about his or her day; my favorite being the bored, newspaper reading individual above. It strikes me as the sweet spot of juxtaposition between far out adventure and the everyday.
via Cgunit
