A Hungover Giant by Rory Kurtz

Rory Kurtz‘s magical realism illustrations range from portraits musicians, beatific beauties with wolves, dead soldiers and toxic children in a post-apocalyptic snapshot. But for today I want to shine a light on a piece of editorial art Kurtz did for the Malibu Monthly. The work is officially untitled but I like to call her “the hungover giant”.

Untitled | Editorial Art for Malibu Monthly

She has just escaped from the hospital or rehab – you can still see that she is wearing her ID-bracelet – and is now bathing in a bed of pills that have spilled into the ocean. She is the archetype of a young troubled addict, how has fallen asleep with her cigarette still burning. You can imagine her inaudible murmurings just before she gives into her state of slumber. She is like an intoxicated Gulliver as the little people find her on the beach and play with red and white candies. At any moment someone might start climbing on top of her and start surveying the new mountain. No body seems to be bothered and much rather ignore the beast, let it remain in it’s daze, until it becomes part of the landscape or simply get’s up and walks into the sound of the Pacific.

For me, I just want to stroke her hair until the pain goes away, but for now [Continue]

The Beauty of Melting

The summer when I was fourteen I spend camping on a field with a couple of Swiss hipsters, at night we would light candles and watch the wax melt while talking in a mixture of English, German and Swiss-German. I don’t remember what was discussed exactly, because it is more than ten years ago, but I do remember watching the candle melt.

Livia Marin | Broken Things / Cosas Rotas | 2009

Drawn in by letting something solid disintegrate. The destruction of a shape, resulting in half a stub and a pool of fluid. An image of ‘broken things / cosas rotas’, like that of Livia Marin’s work from 2009. In this Marin exhibited work that features everyday objects – cups, bowls,jars and plates – modeled with crevices and a puddle of melted ceramics. ‘the fractures represent fatality and loss’, but in repairing and keeping the object the Chilean artist ‘stresses the relationship of care and continuation.’

Orest Keywan | Melting Ice Cream Truck | 2006

Another work that lingers on a same image is that of Orest Keywan’s Melting Ice Cream Truck, the winner of Sculpture By the Sea in 2006. The irony of a vehicle made to give-out ice cream melting isn’t lost on me. What it has in common with Marin’s work is the pool of disintegrated [Continue Reading]

The Eerie Hyper Realistic

At first I wondered, is it a photograph or is it a painting? A couple of months ago I discovered the work of Lee Price and since then I’ve developed a healthy obsession.

Lee Price | Self Portrait in Tub with Chinese Food | Oil on Linen, 44” x 44”

Not just by being in awe* of the skill of creating pieces so real they are bound to get off the canvas. It is moreover, on the intimate moment of a eating Chinese Food in the bathtub, sleeping with peaches, or grilled cheese caught by the artist. Documenting a human moment in pure form. Of an intimate relation with food.

Lee Price | Grilled Cheese II | Oil on Linen, 38″ x 72″

The eerie feeling of a honest moment creeps up. Of a painting capturing life more truthfully and real, much better than some documentaries. You don’t objectify this person but observe the whole and get lost in splendor. You sense the crunch of the bread and the warm melted [Continue reading]

The anticipation of a kiss

The old truism that the anticipation of something is better than the actual thing, comes into realization in Jarek Puczel‘s Lovers. The actual moment of interaction is left in a swirl of pale pink oil-based paint. It’s a piece that comes to completion in the experience of the viewer. The audience sees the edges of the bodies touch, their mouths opening up and the sweet emotion of a kiss exchanged. The artist anticipates an event through the painting that is realized in the observer.

Jarek Puczel | Lovers | 2010 | Oil on Canvas

These are minimal paintings, Jarek Puczel refers to these works as “abandoning the developed form”. And it reminds me of the Inez van Lamsweerde classic [Read On]

"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world"

Sunday Morning Short: ‘The Old Man and The Sea’

Today will be short: A Hemingway classic, animated by Marcel Schindler.

How to make a Rainbow

Street Art Starring Mystic Silhouette Wall Man

Are you looking for a bit of color and joy in your life, why not make a rainbow. The optical and meteorological phenomenon that exposes spectrum of light.

All that is needed is a collection of different colored (at least red, yellow, green, blue and violet) spray paint, an empty wall and a robo-rainbow.

A how to guide by mudlevel:

robo-rainbow from mudlevel on Vimeo.

[source]

The Art of Memento Mori – Remember you must die

A couple of years ago Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God” was in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Tracking through a carefully curated – by Hirst himself – maze of 17th century Dutch and Flemish masters the onslaught of people would arrive in a dark room with a platinum cast of an 18th century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond on it’s forehead known as the Skull Star Diamond diamond, on display.

Damien Hirst | “For the Love of God” | platinum, diamond, human teeth | 2007 | White Cube Gallery, London, England

This work is a confrontation with death and one’s own mortality and the march towards it was along works of a similar nature, although I doubt that many of the masses noted any of this as the slowly made their way toward the center chamber. The gaze into death as the affirmation of the limit of being, to paraphrase Georges Bataille. The image of skulls is a haunting beauty, beyond the confines of mere hard-rock apparel. The hollowed orifices which one’s housed the eyes – the window to the soul – pull you deep into their darkness. The thought persists there is nothing there, it is all gone. Death is empty and we will all meet it one day, we will all become this object. You touch your own skull to conform the bones underneath the body tissue. Standing in front of an object is a dancing with death.It is what the Mexicans do on Día de los Muertos, a feast where one transgresses the boards of existence, to release this tension and live with death in your heart and in the morning one returns to the routine. [Continue] 

A Zacharevic Perspective

Today I want to focus on Ernest Zacharevic‘s street paintings or rather installations, as they are an interplay of objects and a vivid style of painting.

The children are are suspended in animation, it is not until the bike is placed before them that the piece makes sense. In another example he painted a man or boy on a red door sitting on a bike.

It is when you look closer that you realize that the man or boy isn’t real. It is a fusion between painting and street art, installation and magical realism. It only makes sense in relation to it’s object and it is the artist’s vision that foresees this magical interplay. [Source]

And then Bill Murray Appears…

The Image of Babylon

I assume that we all know the famous images of The Tower of Babylon by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The spiraling glory of this ancient cacophonous society mentioned in the old testament. The hotbed of ‘otherness’, this society in the east was mysterious  and a threat to early Christianity. It had to be demonized in order to make the new religion and social structure attractive to the masses. Unity as opposed to a conglomeration of languages and religions.

This image and these thoughts about a different type of civilization enters my mind when I first came across, Chiharu Shiota‘s Room of Memory.

Chiharu Shiota | Room of Memory | 2009 | 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

It might not be the memory imagined by the artist but the use of the Babylonian image is undeniable.

It can also be a quite reflective memory, as memory usually is, when the audience is standing inside the tower of glass and sees [Continue Reading]

Sunday Morning Short: ‘Believe’

The Urban Poet

London-based artist and urban poet, Robert Montgomery has a preference to hijack advertising space to put up his own text, intended to make the commuter stop and think for a moment. A type of guerrilla aesthetic that I appreciate.

Robert Montgomery - 28

Robert Montgomery - 4

But that isn’t all that he’s done. He also has [read more]