Author Archives: Amir

Beautiful/Decay X Royal Talens Paris Trip

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Sometimes the lines between work and play blur at Beautiful/Decay. Such was the case last week when I joined premiere art supply manufacturers Royal Talens and Canson for a ten day excursion through Paris and Amsterdam to explore the sites, see the museums, and get a vip tour of the various factories that make the paints, pastels, and watercolors that the Royal Talens brand is known for. If you were keeping tabs of our Instagram (beautifuldecayofficial) and Facebook page last week you may have seen a picture or two from our trip but we thought it would be nice to give you an expanded glimpse into our travels through a three part blog post. Follow us as we start in Paris and make our way over to Amsterdam through out this week!

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Photos of Bedouin Communities Living Amidst Second World War Minefields

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As part of our ongoing partnership with Feature Shoot, Beautiful/Decay is sharing Greg Funnell’s interview with Photographer Andrew Youngson.

Andrew Youngson’s series, The Devil’s Garden, documents Bedouin communities living amidst Second World War minefields in Egypt’s Western Desert. It is estimated that approximately 17 million unexploded anti-personnel and anti-tank mines; artillery shells; bombs dropped by aircraft and machine gun, small arms and mortar rounds remain beneath the sand.

The Western Desert is an area rich in natural resources but whereas areas allocated for luxury beach resorts and Petroleum Company compounds have been cleared of unexploded ordnance, Bedouin land has not benefited from such programmes. Official records of incidents involving UXO have not been kept until recently but it is believed thousands of Bedouin have been killed or injured since the end of the Second World War.

Youngson is based in London and his new book, Aida, will be published by Black Box Press in July 2012.

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Briar Mark’s Hand-Stitched Typography

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Auckland, New Zealand based designer Briar Mark decided to take some jabs at the computer age with her meticulous hand-stitched typographic illustrations. Consisting of tens of thousands of individual stitches Mark’s retro technique rolls back the hand of time and critiques the ease of typography via the computer. Check out the in process time lapse video of Mark’s at work after the jump! (via)

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Shannon Finley’s Translucent Geometric Paintings

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Through an intensive process, Shannon Finley applies numerous, translucent layers of acrylic paint and industrial polymers onto canvas with specially designed palette knives. The results offer prism-like surfaces whose subtle nuances chronicle the build up of the material itself. This process draws from the history of geometric abstraction in painting as much as the reductive language of early computer graphics. But Finely eschews any simple opposition between the hand and the pixel, exploring instead the optics of the picture plane while constantly emphasizing the limits of the edge, which provide an unexpected archive of his painterly layers. Ultimately, these compositions remain suspended between the immaterial and the concrete, and are best apprehended as passageways into indeterminate spaces. In this, Finley invokes traces of sacred geometries and religious architecture within a technocratic context, but only as an alternate mode for engaging the unseen. (via)

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Beautiful/Decay Book 8 – Sold Out!

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After just a month and a half the eight installment of the Beautiful/Decay Book series is sold out! Beautiful/Decay: Strange Daze as with all other Beautiful/Decay books, will never be reprinted in its entirety turning into a limited edition collectible that will be passed down from artist to artist as the ultimate source of inspiration! If you didn’t get a copy of the book you have one final chance to get one of the highly coveted 1,500 copies. We have 10 copies reserved strictly for subscribers on a first come, first serve basis. Simply subscribe as soon as you read this and during checkout ask that we start your subscription with Beautiful/Decay: Strange Daze and you just might get one the very last copies available. We can’t guarantee that you’ll be one of the lucky ten but those that miss out will start their subscription with our following book set to release next month!

 

The Big Picture: An interview with Edward Burtynsky

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As part of our ongoing partnership with Dailyserving, Beautiful/Decay is sharing Seth Curcio’s interview with Photographer Edward Burtynsky.

It’s often impossible to fully understand the big picture of industrialized development from the limited perspective of the consumer. Each day most of us in the western world go about our business, driving to and from work, using plastics made from petroleum, enjoying foods shipped in from thousands of miles away, without a thought of the very resource that makes this all possible — oil. The impact of oil has consistently reappeared in the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky for well over a decade. Burtynsky’s photographs often soar into the air, freeing us from our limited perspective, offering us the ability to better understand the scale and impact that this material has on contemporary life. It is only through this expansive perspective that we begin to understand the magnitude and consequence of our complicit actions. Recently, DailyServing founder Seth Curcio was able to speak to Burtynsky by phone about his current exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, titled Oil. During this conversation, we learn how Burtynsky’s research has altered his own relationship to oil, how he uses scale and perspective to shape our understanding of the industrialized world, and what lies ahead of us with the future of oil.

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Chris Labrooy’s playful 3D illustrations

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I’m absolutely loving the 3D illustrations of Chris Labrooy with their dynamic sense of color, composition, and playful humor. If that’s not enough Labrooy also has a brilliant eye for typography, creating custom typefaces out of everything from people to architecture. (via)

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Cesar Santander’s Hyper-realistic paintings of vintage tin toys

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Cesar Santander’s hyper-realist paintings of vintage toys, trinkets, and carousels are gleaming and shining works that will make you take a double take to make sure you’re not looking at a photograph. Dealing with themes of Nostalgia these exquisitely painted images transport us to a simpler time when toys didn’t talk back and were simple images of our favorite cartoons.

“Once I conceive an idea for a painting, I arrange the objects and then use the camera to produce the strongest photographic example of my original idea. Then I paint the photographic image. Superficially, I appear to copy the photograph, but I make many adjustments to the photographic image as I complete the painting. I try to impose my own vision by subtle adjustment of colors, edges and details so that the finished painting is the strongest representation of the original idea.”

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