Rainbow Warrior

One of my favorite aspects of street art is the ability to turn the the world into an installation. It takes you out of your ever day life, your commute, the color and texture you expect to see around the next corner and flips it on its head.

Maya Hayuk is an artist with a particular penchant for turning the world into a canvas. With her intensely colors and patterned murals, she transforms forgettable spaces into wonderlands referencing quilt patterns, folk art, and psychedelia.

Via Maya Hayuk.

The Art of Natural History

My first love was drawing. I illustrated my first picture book when I was four, and all the way up through high school, kids were knocking on my door begging me to draw them pictures. Though I don’t draw nearly as much as I used to, it’s still an escape to pick up a pen and create something on paper that didn’t exist before.

I’m always drawn to contemporary artists and illustrators who use drawing in their work, and I was struck by the history of the practice looking at the work in the new book Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library. We forget that before the camera was invented, drawing was the only way to visually represent creatures encountered on far-flung adventures, and show people the amazing variety of nature that exists around the globe. Not to mention the role drawings played in science as you were observing and recording discoveries.Looking through the illustrations from the book featured on Brain Pickings, it’s striking how contemporary some of them feel. The fish above have a Milton Glaser, 1980s feel to them. And the detail in the trilobites and horseshoe crabs featured below are so detailed, its crazy to think that that pattern and shading could be achieved by hand.The book is available now.

Via Brian Pickings.

 

“I Do As I Please”: The Paintings of Martha Rich

I don’t remember how I happened upon Martha Rich‘s work, but I am so glad that I did. Her paintings are bizarre and funny, thoughtful, unexpected, mysterious. Everything exists in a world of flat, bright colors, and snippets of conversation. Her work features rebellious talking animals, women with blank expressions or plastic smiles, speech bubbles abandoned and out of context. Rich wrote that she learned early on of “the absurdity of life and to laugh at it,” and that sense of humor comes through loud and clear in her work.

She is both a fine and commercial artist, and has also experimented with low-cost original works, from $20 post-it notes to a series of $100 original paintings. It’s refreshing to see an artist making her work so accessible, and embrace sharing quick, sketchy pieces, in addition to more complex works. She wrote in her artist statement of “insignificant moments that accumulate and become something significant.” The simple moments and one-off jokes in her paintings do just that– collect moments and objects that might otherwise be overlooked and turn them into something worth hanging on the wall.

More of Martha Rich’s work.

 

Queer Icons

The last few weeks have been momentous– a mixture of triumph and tragedy, successes and setbacks. From Charleston to the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, singular moments of protest around the confederate flag and a movement that is far from finished, it’s a lot to sit with all at once. These types of ambiguities–loss, joy– are celebrated in Queer Icons, a series by photographer Gabriel García Román.Queer Icons features powerful portraits of queer activists of color transformed into religious icons. The photo collages borrowing Catholic symbolism, royal colors and jewel tones, hand-written poems and classical patterns, and exist as a critique and protest against art history– and history in general– that so rarely features voices or images from this community. And the results are stunning.See the full series on García Román’s website.

Via NPR.

 

View from a Plane

First things first: I am petrified of flying. I get one and off planes through sheer force of will, possible only while wearing the right shoes (sneakers, in case I have to climb out after a disaster), distracted by the right activities (crossword puzzles– not too hard, not too easy), and wearing the correct clothing (a sweater, because terror makes me cold). I know the law says the window has to be open during take off and landing, but if I’m in the window seat, I close that things clandestinely immediately after the flight attendants strap in. The last thing I want to see is exactly how far the plane might fall if something goes wrong.

That said, once we’re in the air, I get (a little) more comfortable. At 30,000 feet, everything below looks like a beautiful, surreal painting, totally unlike anything you see from the ground. Field laid out in precise geometry, cloud mountains rise and fall, cities sparkle in the distance.

These fantastic and otherworldly landscapes are captured perfectly by painter Jim Darling in his airplane window series. The pieces are gorgeous abstractions, just hinting at the reality of the scenes you see out the airplane window– a silver wing here, a skyline there. Contrasted against the crisp white window frame, they’re magical and familiar all at the same time.

via Austin Kleon.

Rope Masks

In the spirit of things you’re simultaneously in love with and a little repulsed by, I was floored to come across these rope masks created by designer Bertjan Pot. The project came about after a failed attempt at stitching together a large rope carpet– the material started to bow and curve, making it unsuitable for the floor, but fascinating as a mask.

The inspiration for the pieces seems to run the gamut– from African sculpture, science fiction, Native American weaving, natural coral formations, architecture. Even a bit of a spa influence with the cucumber eyes mask.

via Fontanel.

 

Vintage Poland

I found the most wonderful vintage illustrations via Pinterest the other day. Unfortunately, the source website is all in Polish and what I was able to translate wasn’t super clear. From what I can gather, these are midcentury postcards, telegrams and Christmas cards. But really, Polish or not, the pictures will tell you everything you need to know.

What Frida Wore

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Frida Kahlo didn’t live all that long ago. She’s become lionized as a painter, feminist, communist, Mexican icon, as a person living with a disability in a time when that wasn’t something to be spoken of. She was fierce and boundary defying.

The show “Frida by Ishiuchi Miyako” opened this month in London, documenting Kahlo’s own possessions in a stark and intimate series of photographs. The story goes that Diego Rivera locked away Frida’s belongings in a room in their home after her death with instructions that they not be disturbed until 15 years after his death. The room was finally opened up 2004, and these photos are some of the public’s first glimpses at these fragments of Frida’s life.

While her clothing are undeniably fascinating, it was a photo of two bottles of Revlon nail polish that struck me the most– they look nearly identical to bottles I own, smudged and half-empty. It’s a reminder that while the Frida Kahlo we tend to think of today has become something of a symbol, she was a very real woman first.

 

Cardboard Fairy Tales

It takes skill to retell a story we’ve all heard a million times and make it seem new all over again, and even more skillful is telling that story with something we see everyday. That’s the charm in the work of Spanish design studio Milimbo. Using the most ordinary of materials– paper, they bring classic fairy tales to life in playful and surprising ways. From dioramas to masks to toys, it’s a totally new twist of the toys and stories you thought you knew inside and out.

More on the Milimbo website.

 

Take Me To Your Leader: UFO Paintings by Esther Pearl Watson

When I was 13 or so, my dad came inside from smoking on the porch late on night and announced nonchalantly that he’d seen a UFO. Though my dad was known for his extremely dry and sarcastic sense of humor, he was not the kind of person to make up something like that, so we immediately perked up. He described a strange light in the sky unlike anything he’d ever seen before, and after a few minutes of my brothers demanding to know every detail, I got angry and told them to be quiet because clearly he was lying. In fact, I just wanted them to all shut up because it was freaking me out.

UFOs and I have had a long and tortured relationship, since the 80’s Time-Life “Mysteries of the Unexplained” commercial simultaneously terrified and fascinated me. These days, Esther Pearl Watson’s series of UFO paintings remind me of the weird place that UFOs hold in my own mind, and the way they’ve become a modern folklore narrative in our culture. Previously known to me from the Tammy Pierce is Unlovable comics, Esther’s paintings were inspired by her own UFO-obsessed father, and include snippets of her childhood journals. Their folk art feel is Grandma Moses meets flea market, combining giant spaceships, tiny figures, and swirling cosmos of endless possibilities.

Incidentally, the morning after my dad’s UFO sighting, there were reports of a unexplained lights in the sky from locations all around Southern Michigan the night before. Cue the spooky music…

Via Austin Kleon