The Fresh Blood Hunt art competition is going strong in its second week with entries coming in from all over England.  Open to all illustrators, designers, and artists residing in the UK,  the Fresh Blood Hunt Art Competition is a chance to flex your design skills on the Tim Burton produced Vampire thriller Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter! Not only will the winner have their work immortalized in London by talented muralist Jim Rockwell but they will also win a brand new 17″ Macbook Pro and Adobe Creative Suite 6!

With a chance to collaborate with one of the biggest film makers of all time , have your work blown up to larger than life proportions, and win thousands of dollars worth of products there’s very little downside to this competition.

Did we mention that Beautiful/Decay gets to help pick the winner as well! If that doesn’t seal the deal I don’t know what will. The competition ends May 30th so get to it Britain and lets show the world how talented the Cult Of Decay really is!

In the current state of Reality TV and backstage blogs, we as a world have lost our sense of wonder. And it’s because of one brave artist, Jon Bernad, that we will get it back. He was part of the Venice Art Walk AUCTION, not just as himself, but as an offer for an experiential possibility that attendees could bid on for a good cause, since the money would go directly to The Venice Family Clinic. What that means was that he fearlessly walked up to strangers with a bid sheet around his neck, as opposed to on a table or wall like the other artworks in the auction, and pitched to each new person a different adventure he felt they would want to go on. Everything from skydiving to dinner came up and during his time there he was offered to join unfamiliar faces on white water rafting trips and treks in the Amazonian Rain Forest. I like to say that Jon takes people on Art Adventures, but it’s really so much more than that. He is the only artist that embodies the ultimate truth. For he is only but himself, but his self is great.

I first met Jon at the end of last year via a mutual friend. She told me to put his number in my phone without telling me what Jon did exactly. Was he an artist, a curator, or what? And as soon as I was about to ask him, they both walked off and away into the distance. Months went by and I would see Jon at various art openings, where I’d say ‘Hey Jon! So great to see you, but I’m curious as to what you do?’ And as soon as I would ask him this, he would simply turn and walk away. But it wasn’t in a rude manner. It was rather one of mystery. So, eventually I had a friend text him from their own phone and say ‘I am more mysterious than you’. To which he responded with a confident poem about winning staring contests.

After 4 months of having similar occurrences with Jon, he took out two white business cards from his pocket and said ‘Daniel, pick one’. I did. And when I flipped it over it said on the other side “A Life Without Mystery Is Not Worth Living.” I realized at that point I had been part of an artwork. And then of course Jon looked at me and said “I bet you want to know what’s on the other card” and then yes, walked away.

Since then, Jon and I have become friends, and I’ve still only heard a sliver of his wealth of projects that include going on a cross-country road trip with a stranger he flew out from South Africa, putting positive parking tickets on people’s windshields that have lotto scratchers and scarves instead of fines, and his stories of the Wonder Wars.

Beautiful/Decay is proud to present B/D Cover Artist Alumni and talented artist Aaron Nobel’s newest mural and exhibit in Los Angeles. Known for his comic book reconstructions, Aaron’s newest mural in the hip Melrose and Heliotrope intersection of Los Angeles measures at the over 30 x 50 feet!

To celebrate the unveiling of the mural Synchronicity Space (directly across the street from the mural) will be holding a three day exhibition of drawings and paintings by Aaron. The show and mural unveiling kicks off on May 24th from 6-10pm with a set by DJ BlackRainbow and refreshments.  Read more about the mural and see an assortment of Aaron’s work after the jump.

As is normal for Noble’s work, the mural is a highly energized semi-abstraction welded together from familiar-seeming comic book parts. As Noble explains,

“The title, Mojado, has a double reference. First the work is literally painted ‘wet’, with color and texture created partly through long drips of color poured down the wall, and secondly the title alludes to the theme of border crossing (‘mojado’ is the more polite Spanish translation of the English slur ‘wetback’). Since the piece is on the back wall of Eric Berg’s Early California Antiques I thought it should have an aged patina, like the stuff he sells. I also wanted to pay tribute, in my science-fictional way, to REALLY early California, pre-Colombian California, so I’ve embedded a design based on the Nahuatl pictographs for ‘River’, ‘Motion’, and ‘Drum’.  It looks like a pattern etched onto an alien spacecraft. One way to read the work is to imagine that it depicts an entity that is somehow crossing into our dimension from the past and the future simultaneously.”

Synchronicity Space Los Angeles
713 N. Heliotrope
Los Angeles, CA 90029

Thursday May 24^th from 6-10pm featuring a set by DJ BlackRainbow

Exhibition hours (Three Days Only!): 1pm to 7pm Thurs-Sat, May 24-26

Beautiful/Decay Issue: N featuring cover artwork and exclusive article with Aaron Noble. Available here.

Calling all UK based designers, illustrators, and creative minds: Beautiful/Decay has teamed up with 20th Century Fox to bring you the bloodiest, goriest, most epic art competition, Fresh Blood Hunt. Fresh Blood Hunt is a rare opportunity for UK-based creatives- lend your skills to design an art piece inspired by the upcoming Tim Burton film Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter!

The contest winner will have their artwork turned into a mural, painted by the talented Jim Rockwell AND win a BRAND NEW 17″ MACBOOK PRO and ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE 6! That’s one  “suite” prize! The chosen artist can join Jim Rockwell in London while he’s painting the mural and the whole event will be captured in a time-lapse video.

So get to it, Cult members across the pond, enter the Fresh Blood Hunt Art Competition and show the world that Britain’s got horror movie illustration skills!

When I walked into KAI’s solo show at Guetta Gallery I was taken back by the magnificent frames surrounding his pieces. Not to distract away from his paintings, but it’s just rare to see frames like the ones in his show on contemporary works. However, it was also fitting that they were around them at the same time, since the aesthetic of his exhibit “Now Royalty” is a mash-up of rappers and classical portraiture.

KAI has demonstrated a mastery of technique throughout all of his paintings. Whether it was Will Smith and his wife or of Biggie Smalls in the most elaborate of fashions, they all retained the subject’s signatures. It’s especially incredible to see, considering that KAI is better known as a street artist in the Los Angeles area – whose MORONS parodies of Marlborough ads and stop sign stickers literally cover all of Hollywood.

Jennifer Celio’s delicately rendered landscapes manipulate perception, creating fantastical iterations in which artificial and natural imagery fuse to become newly impossible sites. Working in graphite pencil on paper, she creates obsessively detailed scenes inspired by urban environment. Hinting at the contemporary threat of environmental degradation, Jennifer’s drawings depict seemingly mundane spaces that have been artificially altered or supercharged. The artificiality of our natural environment as well as our quest for it is questioned. See Jennifer’s work in person until April 21st in Los Angeles at Katherine Cone Gallery.

For their exhibition, Telephone Blue, taking place at Synchronicity Space on April 20 – May 19, Aaron Anderson, Eric Carlson and Crystal Quinn (founding members of the artist collective Hardland/Heartland) continue their formal practice of intuitive collaboration to produce narratives of playful allegories and coded symbols that materialize as drawing, video, and sculpture. This exhibition will exist as an extension, literally and figuratively speaking. Physical work existing in a digital world that happens to be an extension of our physical world.

In addition to the physical gallery show the three artists have collaborated with LA artist Spencer Longo on a web based project that lives on the Synchronicity website called LA Internet. See LA Internet at www.syncspacela.com at anytime and visit the shows opening tonight from 7-10pm at 713 Heliotrope, LA, CA 90029.

Los Angeles has always held a special place in the hearts and minds of Americans, but for most it exists in an almost fictional capacity.  Hollywood isn’t a real place – it’s a postcard, a huge sign on the side of a mountain bracketed with strategically placed palm tree silhouettes.  Certainly not a place to call home, but for artist Justin John Greene that’s exactly what it is.  Hollywood is a part of his heritage, and the work reflects that.  Born and raised in the Los Angeles area, Greene’s work is strongly imbued with the history of the most romanticized industry in American culture.  In his most recent solo show at Actual Size (an exhibition space he co-runs in the Chinatown gallery district of east L.A.) the influence of the film industry is in full focus.  You Oughta Be In Pictures is a comprehensive installation that utilizes painting, sculpture, and video to create a truly immersive experience for the viewer.  Installation may seem like a bit of a leap from Greene’s primarily two dimensional practice, but a closer look into the artist’s process bridges the gap seamlessly.  His work is a distinctly enjoyable blend of sly historical references, direct compositional tactics, and cleverly applied humor.  If you have the opportunity to see the work in person I strongly encourage you to do so.

Most people draw at some point in their lives, but for a select few the action becomes compulsory – the impetus behind a lifelong obsession.  You are clearly one of those few.  How has drawing played a role in your development as an artist?

Drawing is certainly at the root of my practice, it is part of how I think and solidify concepts.  I can recall at a very young age understanding drawing as an essential tool to engage with my soundings and imagination.  Drawing was seamless with play.  As I grew older and began to associate drawing with art, it was quite clear to me that I was going to be an artist.

I’ve noticed a certain level of immediacy to your drawings that I do not see in your paintings.  Is there a difference in the way that you approach the idea of painting verses that of drawing?

When I approach painting, I set out to make a work that shows the intuitiveness of drawing, but I also engage a more analytical approach.  I’m focusing more on the elements that make a picture; its composition and mood.  I am also making direct references to imagery that requires rendering and layering.  I want my paintings to be able to stand on their own.  The paintings that have most influenced me were seen in museums, singular masterpieces that command a presence without the aid of their kin.  Those are the types of works that set the bar for me with regards to painting.  I am also interested in where these works will end up, beyond an exhibition.  Even paintings that were created as a series, once bought, will often end up on their own.  It is important to me that my paintings can feel complete in that setting and not just be an example of my practice.

I have a more fluid and casual relationship to drawing.  If I’m unsure of what to paint, I’ll draw. When I’m making drawings that are intended for exhibition, I don’t do a lot of the same preemptive planning that I put into my paintings.  Unlike my paintings, the drawings may be viewed as studies that rely more on repetition to solidify an idea.

Regardless of the medium, your work has an inherent structure to it.  What is your process for assembling an image?

For years I’ve been interested in collective nostalgia, and in exploring that   idea I have arrived at working with imagery that I think the viewer will approach with a sort of uncanny feeling of recognition.  I gather source material from film, the Internet, advertisements and objects I come across in my daily life.  I create composite images and use the application of my medium as a visual vocabulary that evokes emotion in specific elements of one picture.  The visual descriptions also often refer to other figures and styles from art history.  I build up layers of composite imagery in an attempt to transform this “research” into a singular visceral experience.  I like to work with a variety of aesthetics, which I think is very much inspired by the convoluted landscape of Los Angeles.

In the series Fashion Drawings the bodies and heads quickly become protagonist and foil in a well-composed comedy.  Where did the inspiration for this series come from, and how important is the role of humor in your work?

I was teaching art classes to some teenage girls that were interested in fashion design.  I was flipping through magazines and books filled with fashion illustrations that the school had on hand and I was struck by the aura of these drawings.  I had seen all sorts of design illustrations, for products and cars and they all seemed to share a similar cold accuracy to them that felt necessary for instructing production, but the fashion illustrations didn’t look like that.  They were full of attitude and the line quality was sparse and elegant. The idea that these were being used to draft the production of a garment felt humorously arrogant to me, which I really liked.  I then remember thinking of my students, and questioning whether they felt at all inspired by these fashion illustrations merely as drawings beyond their association with clothes, and I compared that in my mind to the types of drawings that inspired me at the age; drawings from artists such as R. Crumb and James Ensor.  I started collecting images from fashion runways and interpreted them in what I thought looked like the style of fashion illustration that most resonated with me, and I then topped them all off with a grotesque adolescent doodle.

The Fashion Drawings as an ongoing series enables me to engage with my compulsory desire to create cartoony doodles, while still making a piece that fits into a conceptual framework.  The monster-like heads of runway figures that I think represent a specific cultural ideal, act as the punch line in a joke.  Humor has always played an important roll in my work.  I’ve often felt that concepts of culture are often most vividly revealed when viewed through a parodical lens. I believe that humor even when it is dark is a positive force.  It lets me be optimistically critical about the concepts that I’m addressing.

Comparing the painting Some Mornings (2011) to that of Red Room (2009), I notice a definite shift in the amount of visual information you’ve chosen to present.  Do you see your paintings becoming progressively more reductive as time goes on?

At the time that I made Red Room, I was interested in creating an illusionistic space that had the type of bazaar impenetrable charm that I was seeing in what Jim Shaw calls, “thrift store paintings.”  However, the image Red Room is painted from is a picture of a lavishly designed interior.  That high and low contrast is of central focus in that painting, and I employed a wide array of clashing techniques to address that idea.  When I was painting Red Room, I realized how much I wanted to share my process with viewer.  Since then I’ve been simplifying the level of visual information in my paintings, because I think that will bring the viewer closer to understanding the process of how I piece together the work.  In the painting, Some Mornings, the various elements that make up that space are more easily distinguishable apart from the greater composition.  With that painting, I want the viewer to feel as if though there are mentally bringing the imagery together to then arrive at a space, as opposed to being struck with the illusion of one at first glance.

With the exhibition You Oughta Be In Pictures, you’ve arrived at installation as the next progressive step in a practice that relies heavily on composite sensibilities.  It is almost as if the different aesthetic departments of your mind had some sort of corporate merger, and that was the end result.  Did you set out with the intention of creating a participatory experience for the viewer, and is this “full immersion” method something we might be seeing more of in future endeavors?

Yeah, I’m definitely going to continue working in this method.  I see it as vital element to my practice.  It’s making a composite image in the fourth dimension.   A work like You Oughta Be In Pictures lets me engage in a more communal process beyond a solitary studio practice, which is important to me.  It took a collaborative effort to produce and like a performance it was not complete with out the viewer or audience present.  When I was planning, You Oughta Be In Pictures, I knew that I was making this self-parodying portrait that was flirting on the edge of being manically heavy-handed, and because of that I felt it necessary to create a way for the viewer to be directly placed into the show.  I wanted the viewer to feel like they were being approached by the exhibition in a manner relatable to a participatory performance.  Every element in that installation directed its attention at the viewer.

Thanks for letting me pick through your brain for a little while.

My pleasure, thanks for taking an interest.