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Inspire / Street Art: Classical Portraits Liberated From Their Museum Frames by Julien de Casabianca

We are often inundated with images of famous artworks, pieces even the most disconnected art viewer can name on the spot. These portraits however make up a very small percentage of the work in museums worldwide, the majority of faces either nameless or not burned into memory—men, women, and children immortalized by brushstroke but forgotten by time. These anonymous faces are the ones that French artist Julien de Casabianca is most drawn to, and has been “liberating” for the last few years by placing recreations of the unknown on urban street corners and abandoned buildings as a part of his Outings Project.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com

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Inspire / Photography: Noell Osvald  “Self Portaits”

Noell Osvald creates startlingly bold works through simple gestures all performed in black and white. The self-portraits rarely show the 25-year-old artist’s face, instead expressing emotion through the way she tilts her head or slightly crooks her neck. Emphasizing line, her works incorporate a strict horizon or eliminate it altogether, segmenting the image from left to right. In one particularly powerful image the back of her head faces the camera and her hair is completely down. Her hair is gently separated over her shoulders and her part continues upward from the nape of her neck and meets with the corner of the wall above. She stands directly in the center of this division, making it seem as if her environment is splitting her in two.

The self-taught artist’s works are mostly composites that only allude to being photographs. She explains that she does not pre-visualize any of her works, all are completely spontaneous. “I find post-processing the most enjoyable part of creating,” she told Lines magazine. “I build my pictures up from several different ones, much like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Source: Colossal

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Inspire / Painting: Thomas Robson “Fluid Pigments” 

Fluid Pigments is an artwork serie by North Irish artist, Thomas Robson. It seems he first approached this way of combining fine art with contemporary graphic elements quite accidentally. One day, he was mixing up colours on a palette the moment before starting painting; he then cleaned the brush on a magazine and remained immediately fascinated by the visual interaction established between the physical oil paint randomly applied and the highly curated magazine imagery beneath.

His work is a direct creative reaction to his professional background as a BBC television graphic designer. For fourteen years he was responsible of the editing of everyday news, transforming imagery into transient new compositions, disassembling and reconstructing stories from multiple points of view.

Fluid Pigments is nothing other than the result of what he calls “Collision art”, as it subverts and recontextualises the cultural meaning of images, through aesthetic experimentation and manipulation, juxtaposing conflicting styles and elements.

Source: invasioni

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Inspire / Painting: Pierre Soulages "Outrenoir"

“I don’t work with black,” says Pierre Soulages, who, for over 60 years, has injected poetry into radical abstraction with paintings comprised of a single material, black paint. “I work with the light that reflects it.”

Liberating his style from centuries of Western decorative painting traditions and drawing from prehistoric cave art, Soulages’ work is a pure celebration of the very essence of painting: the primal instinct to create, and the spiritual power of lines and movement. “Outrenoir is not an optical phenomenon,” says the 95-year-old French artist captured here at his Paris studio of the gleaming, luminescent quality of the work. “It’s a mental state that you reach when you look deep into it, it’s beyond black.”

Source: Nowness

[instagram]

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Viewing Minsk through the Black and White Photos of @sergyshkin

To see more black and white Nikita’s photos of Minsk, follow @sergyshkin on Instagram

Nikita Sergushkin (@sergyshkin) is always looking for contrast and austerity in his photography. Currently living in Minsk, Belarus, he explains, “I was born in Vitebsk, in northeastern Belarus, where there is an atmosphere of calm, silence and loneliness. This inspired me to create a black and white feed on Instagram,” he says. Nikita often adds a person to contrast against the environment in his city portraits. “I love to explore new locations by bus or train, to find old factories, beautiful fields, and the quietness of places. The architecture of Minsk is always a challenge and inspiration for me—it is filled with places that combine elements and texture, that contrast the static nature of the city and movement of the hero.”

[kickstarter]

Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art 

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"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need" #Cicero #quote #southernfrance #garden #sunset #kennethvillamil #latergram #remember (at Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, France )

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Inspire / Art: Part tribute, part conceptual photography, part exploration of costume and set design, Wonderland is an ongoing series of portraits by UK photographer Kirsty Mitchell. After the loss of her mother in 2008, Mitchell found herself in need of a creative outlet to grapple with the emptiness that often follows the death of a loved one. To fill the vacuum, Mitchell began to revisit fragments of fairy tales her mother would share with her as a child and decided to use them as a starting point for a series of elaborate portraits that would make use of her background in fashion design and costume making. The resulting images would form a storybook without words, a sort of visual narrative that people might project their own stories onto.

Everything you see in Mitchell’s photos from the costumes to the sets have been sewn, painted, glued, and assembled completely by hand, requiring up to five months of preparation. By the time of each photoshoot, which generally happens in the woodlands around her home, an elaborate scene has been constructed that the photographer says is akin to a miniature movie set, complete with lighting and assistants, let alone her absurdly patient models.

http://www.kirstymitchellphotography.com

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Inspire / Installation Art: Selected Works by Olafur Eliasson

Eliasson’s work typically concerns itself with sensory perception and spectral phenomena. Like one of his early influences, Robert Irwin, Eliasson wants to make viewers aware of their own role in the process of experiencing art. And by using a range of media from the natural world—wind, ice, arctic moss—he often appeals to one’s senses of smell, sound and touch as well as sight. “In this increasingly technological, digital era,” says Grynsztejn, “art often separates us from our bodies, from our senses, from the world. Here is somebody who constantly refuses that, and who constantly returns us to a visceral, present-tense experience.”

  Source W Magazine

(Kenneth Villamil)

[artlog]

Inspire / Art: SKINWALKER by Schall & Schnabel

A collaborative, multi-disciplinary project by photographers Pierre Horn and Eileen Huhn (the founding duo of Schall & Schnabel) and painter Diana Wehmeier. Referencing the traditional concept of “skinwalkers,” which are humans said to have the ability to transform into other creatures, the dancers and models featured in SKINWALKER are painted as they move through space to slowly become one with the painting.

Read More

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Inspire / Design: Andaz Amsterdam by Marcel Wanders & Hyatt Hotels

It’s great when you love what you do for a living. It’s even better when you help oversee design for a brand like Andaz.

Andaz Hotels are intended to be social/cultural anchors in the communities they exist and are designed to spark the imagination of not only guests but also the locals. With that said, I can say without a doubt that Andaz Amsterdam by Marcel Wanders goes above and beyond both of these tenets creating an experience that connect with people on an emotional and intellectual level. Thus Andaz Amsterdam has become one of my favorite hotels (regardless of brand.)

It’s hard not to love a hotel that relishes in the quirks and eccentricities of a city such as Amsterdam – and with such flair! It’s no surprise that underneath the surface lie deep narratives that touch at the core of this infamous city. Narratives not only routed in its historical location of Prinsengracht (a central district directly on the famous canal) but also routed in the unique local culture - a culture the isn’t shy when it comes to flirting with fantasy or blending the benign with the wondrous. It is a true marriage Amsterdam’s storied past with its exciting and capricious future.

First off, I have to mention that the design of Andaz Amsterdam has so many dimensions that it’s difficult to describe – without seeing it in person. Some of the main themes/concepts are derived from the locations former life as a public library - hence the original library books found throughout the hotel as well as the historical texts/graphics translated into carpets, walls, and art. Another reoccurring theme is the celebration of the Dutch golden age as seen in the furniture styles, celebration of period Dutch crafts, the multitude of period Dutch maps found throughout, and especially the four-story dimensional light installation that illustrates the Dutch scholar’s understanding of the cosmos during this period. At this point I’m sure you are thinking this would be more than enough inspiration to create a memorable hotel design. However the design goes further, managing to demonstrate Amsterdam’s love affair with the fantastical. As seen with influence of Alice and Wonderland throughout the interior and especially exterior courtyard. You see play on oversized objects such as six foot tall clocks, as well as fictional characters such as royal subject and white rabbits. As well as the surreal mixing of objects and animals that couldn’t possibly exist – seen in the graphic walls in every guest room. 

I think its best if I stop before I spoil the rest of the playful anecdotes and fun archetypes – I'll let the images speak for themselves! 

Enjoy!

Kenneth Villamil 

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The details are not the details. They make the design.

Charles Eames

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Inspire / Jewelry: Shattered Fragments Jewelry Line by Gina Melosi

"Creating something beautiful out of something destructive"

As an artist and jewellery designer, I am interested in social behaviours and expressions - both private and public, individual and group, internal and external. I am interested in exploring visually what goes on between the lines, what is not said - the pauses, the gestures, the subconscious. My jewellery designs are borne out of the conceptual, drawing from my Fine Art background and Classical music training.

My work is very much research-based, which gradually develops over time as the idea formulates and takes shape. I use Jewellery design to fashion my ideas into the physical because I want to try to show visually what it seems we cannot always express in words. This drive was the focus of my research into my first collection: the need for expression through the body for those rituals for which there is no verbal counterpart. Initially I used glass in its rough and rugged state, more for its physical characteristics and socio-political connotations than for its clarity and gem-like aesthetics. While technically wearable, my glass shard jewellery is not for the faint-hearted. So I sought to alchemise those pieces into a luxurious, fashion-forward collection in precious metal inspired by broken glass fragments. The result is //SHATTERED fragments//. It is cast directly from shards of glass into recycled metals and set with fair-trade gemstones. Although my work is design-led, I believe environmental practice should be an integral part of this process. 

http://ginamelosi.tumblr.com

[artchipel]

Jerome Lagarrigue (b.1973, France/USA) - Iris

Jérôme Lagarrigue is an award-winning French painter and illustrator, living and working in New York. Lagarrigue captures the world in his work. Landscapes or human models, the subjects of his paintings are all serving his artistic quest. The Franco-American artist combines figuration and abstraction in his paintings, transparencies and dilutions, reliefs and layers, in order to capture the double dimension of existence. An extension of the philosophical conflict between pragmatism and the metaphysical, his works have two visions, that were opposed until now, reunites them and opens the way to a sensorial and emotional interpretation of form and of substance. His work is an invitation seize the immanence which lies restless under the traits of the ordinary. (src. Artsper)

© All images courtesy of the artist

[more Jerome Lagarrigue | artist found at angrywhistler]

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My / Designs:  During my time designing and directing for W Hotels, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to conceptualize, art direct, and execute an number of fashion show events at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week at Lincoln Center in New York City.

In the Spring of 2011 myself along with my colleague Mats Hakansson had been given an extraordinary opportunity to not only conceptualize the show, but also art direct all the photography and film for the Global Glam line of clothes and accessories showcased. All inspired by the unique narratives of three new W Hotel locations – W Taipei (Nature Electrified,) W Austin (Remix,) and W Mexico City (Masquerade.) A truly holistic approach with attention paid to every detail. It is still one of my favorite projects to this date. 

Kenneth Villamil

[introspectivepoet]

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

Edith Wharton