Existential Before And After Portraits From Ana Oliveira

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Photographer Ana Oliveira‘s Identities II is a touching series of portraits.  She begins with old photographs of her subjects and through similar lighting, clothing, and poses she creates a parallel photograph.  As much as sixty years lies between some of the older and newer portraits.  The two portraits arranged side by side become a sort of existential before and after.  I find myself imagining what took place in the decades between the two photographs, evidence of something in the now more pronounced lines in each sitters face.  Its difficult not to envision expressions of expectation in the younger portraits, and mixtures of disappointment or content in their older counterparts.

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Todd Hale’s Grotesque iPad Drawings

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Todd Hale lives and works in Virginia. He is producing an ongoing series of vibrant and grotesque illustrations using nothing but his fingers and an iPad. Eyeballs floating in gloomy waters, skulls fused with dripping watermelons, and a deranged clown with a cherry for a nose are a few examples of what can be found in the drawings. It is refreshing to see a series of work that resembles vector illustration and discover that it was created in the age old manner of “Finger Painting”.

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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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The Many Male Profiles of Stef Cook

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America artist, Stef Cook has produced a series of wonderful watercolor portraits of men. The subjects are painted in their everyday clothes in profile. Take a look and study those jawlines!

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The Mangled Wooden Figures Of Aron Demetz

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Aron Demetz‘ newest work shows him to be extremely adept at sculpting in wood.  His figures seem stand atop stumps, perfectly carved from tree trunks.  However, their sanded smooth skin is in stark contrast to parts of their figure that seem mutilated and mangled.  While the figures’ faces are peacefully inexpressive, there is an underlying violence to the sculptures.  The bare wood of the pedestals hint at the natural world and the sculptures at human’s often turbulent interaction with it.  [via]

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Andrew Myers’ Portraits Made of Screws

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Andrew Myers‘ uses unique medium to interesting effect.  His pieces are built of many carefully placed screws – up to nearly 10,000 in just one piece – inserted to just the right depth.  He then uses oils to pain the image on the heads of the screws.  Myers accepts the challenges of depicting soft surfaces, movement, and light with a material as hard and utilitarian as screws.  The result is an intriguing mix between painting and relief.  The screws add to the depth to that typically found in oil painting.

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Dead Zone At Nudashank

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Baltimore Gallery Nudashank has just wrapped a new exhibition entitled Dead Zone. The exhibition was presented as a “new film” about the future by Alex Da Corte. The materials used in the various installations are so vital to the exploration of the show that they are listed in the press release as characters in the “film” (along with additional artists): “Starring (in order of appearance) Paint roller extension pole, package of dish sponges, enamel paint, gold chain, Coca-Cola can, electrical tape, pink giraffe patterned dust broom,clamp, wire, John Roebas‘ AMONG THE MAXIMS,vertical blinds, Alex Perweiler‘s Chameleon (Juicy Fruit), miniature hand chair, Thigh Masters, metal gridwalls, display brackets, Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope cds, Kyle Thurman‘s Untitled (501 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014), John Roebas’ UNTITLED (THE ONLY ONE I CAN’T), IKEA frames, digitally printed hamburger ottoman cover, Borna Sammak‘s Borna Print Burton Jacket, gold foil, carpet, mattress foam, cheese head, shampoo, mirror, Jamie Felton‘s Fog II,ratchet straps, Christmas ball, Andrew Gbur‘s Untitled, Sean Fitzgerald‘s 16 Colors, fringe, leggings, foam, rubber glove, cardboard tube, metal stand, zip tie.”

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Australia’s Alpine Ready Their US Debut, A Is For Alpine

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Alpine performing at Bardot (School Night) on March 4, 2013

As I write this, Alpine just wrote on Facebook that while on tour in the US, their video for Villages went past two million views. With solid reports coming out of SXSW about their many performances and KCRW picking their songs Lovers 1 and 2 as a recent double header Top Tune, it won’t be long before this Aussie six-piece finds their way into your ears.

I was lucky enough to catch them live at both Bardot in Hollywood and at Brooklyn’s Glasslands and both shows had me dancing from the first beat. Filled with energy, singers Phoebe Baker and Lou James get the crowd moving with their catchy tunes and lovely harmonies. I guarantee that once their album is released in the US, you’ll be hearing a lot more of them.

Alpine’s debut album, A is for Alpine will be released in the US on May 21st on Votiv Records. Check out the video for one of my favorites, Gasoline directed by Kris Moyes and be sure to catch them when they’re stateside again.