The whimsical and transparent figures in Megan Diddie’s watercolors and paintings are busy doing all sorts of unusual things like eating small bony creatures, breathing flora into their lungs, and tarring and feathering themselves. See what else they are up to after the jump!
Something is different lately. The Earth has shifted its axis and now everything seems to have moved to the right by a couple of inches. A dark wind blows. The birds aren’t flying south like nature normally commands them to, and you can tell the animals know something we don’t. These are Strange Daze, Beautiful/Decay’s revelation of the phenomenal and paranormal minds of artists. In a world-surreal, where every night holds a full moon, strange has become an adjective that plagues and ponders our daily existence.
Seek creative passage through the barren void in the company of this book’s featured artists, as we first find Olaf Hajek, a painter whose work holds séance to colorful spectre. Encounter Shamus Clisset, who plays host to a glimpse into his work and its otherworldly humor-macabre. Become self-aware of a hole in your head as splashes of psychedelic work by Fredrik Åkum drip onto your synthetic brain. Witness the chemical rainbow that glows around the work of Timo Vaittinen, pulsating its life and character. Uncover Hew Locke’s sculpture and its ability to pierce through joint and marrow, straight into one’s fifth eye. Examine Jeremy Dower’s visceral work, which will haunt you like a howling spirit through the realms of both the flesh and digital until finally Neil Krug, whose photography will leave you coma-bound in a visual fever.
In line with apocalyptic forebodings, celestial encounters, and unexplained experiences, Strange Daze presents an astonishing collection of artwork that is documented proof of many famous speculated phenomena. Never one to disappoint Beautiful/Decay Strange Daze is filled to the brim with works that will shake the foundations of human culture forever if released to the masses.
Also Featuring: Christine Gray, Michael Willis, Raymond Lemstra, LNY, Kira Leigh, Todd Ryan White, Jeanti, Justin Williams, Robby Day, Andrea Wan, Henry Gunderson, Berto Legendary H, Nicholas Kennedy Sitton, Ben Beshaw, and Brendan Flanagan.
Get your hands on one of the 1,500 hand numbered limited edition copies of Beautiful/Decay Strange Daze Books by clicking the links below!
Only 99 copies Book:8 will be available on the B/D Shop. Get your copy before we sell out!
Have you ever walked into a gallery or museum and wondered “How did they ever install that giant sculpture or painting?” Well WRAPIT-TAPEIT-WALKIT-PLACEIT comes to the rescue with a collection of amazing behind the scenes shots of gallery assistants and museum installers moving, assembling, and dissembling all your favorite works of art. Go through their deep archives or submit your own behind the scenes images and share what it takes to make art magic happen. (via)
Mark Hunter Brown is a truly dynamic individual. I have known Brown for the better part of a decade, and I am relatively positive that I will never meet another person quite like him. With each day functioning more like the next chapter in a bizarre novel, his zest for life is infectious. Luckily, Brown is also an amazing artist, and has managed to document his interests and experiences through countless drawings and paintings. Though he gains inspiration from his travels, the work is not limited to the places and people he has actually interacted with. Brown is also heavily influenced by the written historical accounts of different cultures and people, but the work is not about visually representing his source material. Instead, he chooses to focus on the importance of the moments recorded history has chosen to ignore. There is this dead zone in between the great scenes of history that also warrants consideration, and Brown is keenly aware of this. When asked why he is drawn to this type of situation Brown replied, “because life doesn’t look like a Delacroix painting – it’s just people walking around and eating sandwiches. These moments seem more real to me…they’re equally compelling.”
While these scenes are not infrequent in his work, Brown’s practice is not limited to this type of subject matter. There is far less literal material in Brown’s oeuvre, and his vivid imagination becomes readily apparent when looking at paintings of huge figurative fortresses or anthropomorphized coo-coo clocks snorting bones off of a table. When viewed in context these paintings start to function as some sort of bizarre allegory, but their meaning is never explicitly stated. There is such a rich diversity in the distinctive worlds that Brown creates, and no piece is less detailed than the last. Whether he is teaching at Columbia, backpacking through Morocco, or boar hunting with monks in the Italian countryside – the need to process the world into visually compelling images has remained consistent within Brown’s life. Lucky for us, his mind seems to function like an endless supply of Google image search results that I have no desire to stop looking at any time soon.
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.
Philadelphia’s Kyle Fisher creates paintings on wood that move in and out of the grain with a mind of their own, compositions that present themselves boldly to the world while receding into contemplative distance all at once.
Deliberate, but slickly nonchalant, they could totally pass as the love-child of an Audrey Kawaski ageless vixen and a Mr. Jago aerosol android. But that description wouldn’t go anywhere near properly crediting these immersive works, which stand well enough on their own.
Fisher is a co-founder of Part Time Studios, a great gallery/collective in Philly. Read more »
Carlos Donjuan’s paintings combine his years of painting graffiti with the knowledge that he has gained in academia. By interweaving art history references with graffiti art’s history, Carlos creates a hybrid way of thinking made from art jargon and slang from the streets. His paintings work as narratives that are greatly influenced by everyone from Michelangelo to Alice Neel to Twist to Revok. There are elements in these works that deal with personal influences such as Catholicism, Mexico, Oak Cliff, illegal immigration, politics and family. The portraits not only tell stories, but also document several cultures and movements that these individuals are a part of. Movements and cultures such as skateboarding, fixies, turntablelism, street wear, sneaker heads, graffiti and Hip Hop.
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Carol Carter is a contemporary watercolor artist based out of St Louis, MO. She is such a prolific painter that it proved nearly impossible to select just seventeen images to feature out of the hundreds documented throughout her website. Her subject matter is incredibly varied, ranging from swimmers, nudes, flora and fauna, to interiors and landscapes of the Everglades and Italy. In spite of painting such a vast range of subject matter, her work remains consistent with her personal style; painting with an electric color palette, she saturates values of light and dark with a brilliant range of unpredictable color that often takes on the effect of solarization. Her technique shifts between wet-in-wet application and controlled execution, producing work that is peppered with an incredible amount of detail and spontaneity. Carol’s mastery of watercolor and divergent way of seeing the world is apparent in her remarkable paintings. Read more »
is a printed book series and daily art blog with a focus on experimental, grotesque, and groundbreaking art.
Amy gee: I love the softness of this art
bill: cool images, nice interview!
Kris Bazen: These are INSANE!!! Made me...
Jake: Hi there please let me know how you... Bill: Thanks Amy! Here’s a youtube...
Barbara Richardson: This work is AMAZING!
ivan arsiandi: awesome…..
Agripina Futrell: Great information :) Amy gee: This art makes me really HAPPY... Amy gee: This is really good it must of...
