Author Archives: Russ Crest

Made With Color Presents: The Grotesque Paintings Of Christian Rex van Minnen

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CHRISTIAN REX VAN MINNENCHRISTIAN REX VAN MINNEN

Beautiful/Decay has partnered with premiere website building platform Made With Color  to bring you some of the most exciting contemporary artists working today. Made With Color allows you to create a website that is professional and easy to use with just a few clicks and no coding. This week we bring you the beautifully grotesque paintings of Christian Rex van Minnen whose clean and sleek website was built using the Madewithcolor.com platform. See Minnen’s  solo show entitled “Welsh Rats” at Robischon Gallery in Denver Colorado running through May 4th 2013.

“Welsh Rats” is a complexly layered presentation of new and recent paintings by emerging, New York-based artist Christian Rex van Minnen. Extolling his lavishly ornamented personal vocabulary of subtle and outrageous grotesqueries, van Minnen’s unsettling and disfigured, yet comical portraits hang alongside still life paintings of twisted tulips and hyper-real glistening entrails. Equally tangential, the exhibition title of “Welsh Rats,” is the Anglicization of the German word ‘Weltschmerz’ a reference by John Steinbeck in “East of Eden” meaning “world pain.” This sincere yet somewhat naive American (mis)interpretation of weighty European concepts of the past, reflects the confusion of language and history which is crucial to van Minnen’s artistic stance. This extends not just to the artist’s perception of European culture and painting but, also to how Native American and other ancient histories are also assimilated through art. Likened to a modern Archimboldo, van Minnen states, “I find myself either suppressing or indulging of my own desire to associate personal narrative to the raw visual information inherent in the material and process. Construction, destruction and reconstruction are symbiotic elements in the creative process allowing the image to fluctuate between abstraction and representation, truth and illusion, personal and archetypal.”

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Leonid Tishkov’s Portable Moon Installations

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Leonid Tishkov

Leonid Tishkov

Leonid Tishkov

Russian physician turned turned artist Leonid Tishkov’s latest project consists of a portable crescent moon photographed in nostalgic and sentimental scenes all over the world. Creating images in china, new zealand, taiwan, the arctic, France and beyond, Tishkov’s global ongoing project tells the story of ” a man who met the moon and stayed with her forever.” (via)

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Milan Hrnjazović’s Swirling Orgies Of Paint And Lust

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Milan Hrnjazović

Milan Hrnjazović

Milan Hrnjazović

The works of emerging Serbian artist Milan Hrnjazović are a swirling and melting mix of body parts and abstraction. Hrnjazović’s figures morph and meld into one another in a psychedelic surreal orgy that at first looks photoshopped but in fact is painstakingly painted in oil revealing the sensual nature of love and lust through the ancient (and equally sensual) medium of painting.

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3D Drawings Come To Life In Eric van Straaten’s Hyperrealistic Sculptures

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Eric van Straaten - 3D printed sculpturesEric van Straaten - 3D printed sculptures

Eric van Straaten - 3D printed sculptures

Holland based Eric van Straaten is one of the most technical and talented 3-D sculptors in the world. According to trendwatchers, 3D-printing is the next big thing: in the near future, every household will own a printer that is capable of printing digital three-dimensional objects into a physical object. In the process that is best known under the name ‘Additive Manufacturing’, a 3D-printer builds up a model layer by layer by selectively hardening liquid or powder.

If this powder is a plaster-like material, a model can be directly printed in full color. The 3D-printing of delicate and colored models is far from being just pushing a button, but requires great technical skills. Therefore only a few specialize in this technique and there is no artist who pushes the boundaries of colorized 3D-prints as far as Eric van Straaten.

There is no technique that is capable of achieving such a great degree of hyper(sur)realism as 3D-modeling. At the same time, 3D printing is the only technique with which virtual models can be made actually physically touchable. Physical expressiveness in form and content is the biggest strength of the work of Eric van Straaten: while the sculptures remain to have a certain digital feel to them, the pieces contain a weirdly eroticized corporeality. Balancing on the edge of kitsch, the marzipan-like quality of the material resonates beautifully with the apparent innocence of the scenery. -Prof. Dr. Arnold Ratsberger

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Made With Color Presents: Colette Robbins’ Landscape Paintings Made With Graphite And Dremel Sanders

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Colette Robbins

Colette Robbins

Colette Robbins

Beautiful/Decay has partnered with premiere website building platform Made With Color  to bring you some of the most exciting contemporary artists working today. Made With Color allows you to create a website that is professional and accessible with just a few clicks and no coding. This week we bring you the desolate and eerie landscapes of Colette Robbins .

New York based artist Colette Robbins’ intricate works on paper lie somewhere between the medium of drawing and painting. Colette painstakingly creates each drawing by dissolving graphite powder with water to create thousands of transparent layers of graphite in a technique borrowed from old master glaze painting. She then takes various erasers and even a Dremel sanding tool to the surface to add highlights and other details. The result is a wondrous world of imaginary landscapes with monolithic heads that may remind you of Easter Island or some other ancient ruin filled with mystique and awe.

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Hilarious Baby Pictures Recreated By Adults

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My Precious Moments

My Precious Momentsmy precious moments

Everyone gets annoyed by the bombardment of photos of babies on Facebook and other Social networking sites. It seems like parents want to document every smile, fall and giggle that their kids make. But what about the rest of us that don’t have kids? Well a few fun loving folks in NYC decided to fight fire with fire and create My Precious Roommate, a hilarious collection of photos taken by Molly (we only have her first name) of her roommate recreating the good, the bad, the cute, and the ugly baby photos that we all come across on Facebook. The images are somewhere between comedy skit, performance art, and too much time on their hands. We love them for their ingenuity and creative take on G rated imagery.

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Keita Sagaki’s Classical Drawings Made Out Of Thousands Of Doodles

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　Keita Sagaki 51

　Keita Sagaki 51d

　Keita Sagaki 52

Japanese artist Keita Sagaki’s intricate drawings of classical sculptures and figures are not what they appear to be. As you walk closer to the intricate drawings you’ll notice a sea of cartoonish and playful doodles that cover every inch of the drawing surface. These doodles not only differ greatly from the subject matter that you first see but they are continuously contracting and expanding to create the light and shadows in Sagaki’s pleasantly misleading drawings. (via)

“All things are composed of whole and part. For instance, The human body is built from 60 trillion cells. Moreover, Every matter is formed by an atom or a molecule. When all people live in this world, everybody belong to some organization such as a family, school, company and nation, even if we are unconsciousness. Let’s broaden your horizons. Your country is part of nations all over the world. And, The solar system including our planet is a part of the Galaxy. However, the concept of “ whole and part” is not fixed. It’s in flux. If we interpret from a different viewpoint, the wholeness which we defined is converted into the partialness. Domain in the relations of both, it never ends. The concept of my creation is the relations of borderless “whole and part”. As I draw a picture in this concept, I want to express conflict and undulation from relations of “whole and part”, cannot be measured in addition and subtraction (The whole in the grand total of the part, and the Part by the whole division.)”

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