The Lords Prayer

Convicted forger A. Schiller was serving his time in Sing Sing prison in the late 1800s when guards found him dead in his cell. On his body they found seven regular straight pins whose heads measured the typical 47/1000ths of an inch or 1.17 millimeters in diameter. Under 500 magnification it was found that the tiny etchings seen on the heads of the pins were the words to The Lord's Prayer, which is 65 words and 254 letters long. Of the seven pins, six were silver and one was gold - the gold pin's prayer was flawless and a true masterpiece. Schiller had spent the last 25 years of his life creating the pins, using a tool too small to be seen by the naked eye. It is estimated that it took 1,863 sepatate carving strokes to make it. Schiller went blind because of his artwork.

Source - Anomalies-Unlimited

Rubber Johnny - 6min Experimental Short Film

Rubber Johnny is a six-minute experimental short film and music video directed by Chris Cunningham in 2005, using music composed by Aphex Twin.Johnny (played by Cunningham) is an isolated deformed (possibly hydrocephalus) teenager kept on a wheelchair and locked in a dark basement with his chihuahua. Given his situation, he spends his life imagining all kinds of musical psychedelia to entertain himself.
Aphex Twin - Afx237 V7 (Rubber Johnny)

The Architecture Of Eugene Tsui

Antonio Gaudi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Santiago Calatrava and others have referred to nature but only in a visual and metaphoric sense, but Eugene Tsui's vision is beyond anything i personally have ever seen. It 'feels' as if one has stepped on a alien planet, stumbled upon homes that sprang forth from the ground and have been manipulated by craftsmen following a alien tradition. Very strange stuff indeed. But enough rambling on about how it makes me feel. I'll just leave you with some of my favorite pics and his website bellow. Enjoy.

Link - Gallery of Eugene Tsui's works

The Rasterbator - Posters for Free

The Rasterbator creates huge, "rasterized" images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size. The image to the left is what it will look like close-up! Now if i were you, i would burn the pdf file on a dics and take it up to Kinko's and print these bad boys on some nice matte photo paper. Now im off to make some badass posters on company time. Ha. Enjoy.



Link after examples :


Link - The Rasterbator

Antoni Gaudí's - Sagrada Familia

La Sagrada Familia [official site & wiki], or Catalan for "The Holy Family", is a yet-to-be-finished Roman Catholic basilica in Barcelona, Spain.

The church’s design is rich with Christian symbolism, with façades featuring intricate details describing the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most awe inspiring is the eighteen towers representing the 12 Apostles, 4 Evangelists, the Virgin Mary, and a central tower - the tallest of them all - representing Christ.

The construction of the Sagrada Familia basilica started in 1882, directed by Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who devoted his life to it. When people said that the construction had taken a very long time, Gaudí replied that he was building the church for God, and that his client wasn’t in a hurry. He then became known as "God’s Architect."

In 1926, Gaudí got run over by a street car. Because of his raggedy attire and empty pockets, no one wanted to take him to the hospital. Eventually, he was taken to a pauper’s hospital where no one recognized him until his friends found him and tried to move him to another hospital. Gaudí refused, saying that he belonged with the poor, and died a few days later.

Because Gaudí refused to work with blue prints, preferring to use his imagination and memory instead, construction of La Sagrada Familia was halted after his death. Part of the church was even burnt during the Spanish Civil War. Construction of La Sagrada Familia was restarted afterwards and continues until today.

Hisaharu Motoda - Post-Apocalyptic Art

Artist and teacher Hisaharu Motoda created haunting visions of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, complete with ruined buildings and plants growing through the cracked streets. Link -via Cynical-C

The Animation of Robert Morgan

"Robert was raised in the cursed town of Yateley, Hampshire. At the tender age of three, he developed a passion for cinema when his uncle showed him Fiend Without A Face (1958) on an 8mm projector. As a result, he became a strange child, obsessed with monsters, sharks and insects.

As a “sensible adult” he studied Animation Filmmaking at The Surrey Institute Of Art And Design and in 1997 made his very own film THE MAN IN THE LOWER-LEFT HAND CORNER OF THE PHOTOGRAPH, which won five international awards and several cheap sales to broadcasters.

In 2001, he made THE CAT WITH HANDS, a tale about a very bad pussycat . It was inspired by a recurring nightmare Rob’s older sister Eleanor had when she was young. The film was funded by Channel 4, and won six fairly prestigious awards, including the Soho Rushes New Director Award.

In 2003, having been given funding by S4C and SGRÎN, Rob made THE SEPARATION, another stop-motion piece that won 15 international awards. He currently has numerous projects in various stages of development. Some are live-action, some are animated. Some are long, some are short. He lives in London." - Source & Link's to all his videos for free - Animus Films

Below is Robert Morgan's animation "The man in the lower-left hand corner of the photograph".

Part 1

Part 2

Skulls in Culture

Skulls in Culture takes a look at how mankind has regarded and portrayed human (and non-human) skulls through the ages.


Skulls do more than just protect the brain — they also stimulate the mind. Often symbols of mortality and power, they have been employed in human ceremony, ritual, and art for tens of thousands of years. From the ancient animal skulls in Paleolithic burial sites to the curlicued cattle skulls that float like spirits over Georgia O’Keefe’s canvas mountains, cultures around the world have turned to skulls to express ideas about both life and death.







Link - Skulls in Culture

Photography - Manuel Libres Librodo Jr.

Manuel Libres Librodo Jr. is a photographer from the Philippines living in Thailand. His gallery has thousands of photographs all kinds of people from different cultures, but he obviously loves to take pictures of beautiful women’s faces. Link -via Metafilter

Walerian Borowczyk - Collection of Short Films (1923-2006)

Walerian Borowczyk is a prolific animator of the bizarre. His influence is far reaching, including the fabulous Brothers Quay. A collection of Walerian Borowczyk's short film works can be found here or Dom, posted bellow.

Dom (AKA HOUSE)
Dirs. Walerian Borowczyk & Jan Lenica (Poland, 1957) 12 mins
An eclectic collage of film fragments and styles bound together by a shared preoccupation of self-consciousness as being trapped in a cruel world.

Xia Xiaowan - Artist

Chinese artist Xia Xiaowan’s 3D artwork is made from "slices" of painted glass stacked in a row to create a 3 dimensional image. I find his work eye grabbing and the medium he uses as vastly original. Some of his darker work reminds me of Adam Jones' of the band Tool. A definite complement coming from this blogger. I think Shu-Min Lin sums it up best by saying :

Xia Xiaowan surpasses the boundaries of painting and establishes a new way of “looking” at paintings. He draws his inspiration and method from X-ray photographs, giving two-dimensional painting a three-dimensional effect. He combines material, technology and painting, thus maintaining the hand-made qualities of painting while adding elements of installation and sculptural art and displaying the cold, absurd and strange qualities of realism. In this sense, his painting installation alters the way the audience “views” art. The audience is encouraged to “appreciate” the artwork from different perspectives and to think about the method by which the work was created. As an integration of sculpture, painting, installation art, photography and medical technology, Xia Xiaowan’s works exude an air of ambiguity. His distinct artistic approach represents the trend of China’s contemporary new painting.

If this is the contemporary trend of China's new artist, count me a fan. After all one of the meanings of art is to have the observer question, to force them to find prespective in the object being viewed, and Xia Xiaowan does it well. For me personally it's humanistic, cold & haunting realism. Love it.
Links: Galerie Meile & artnet

The Manga Bible

Hodder Headline will be selling a manga version of The Bible(SMS Version). Ink and color are done by a guy called Siku of Marvel comics. Don't know about you but this blogger will be picking one up!
Link

Geoff Hudspith’s Steam-Powered Bicycle.

Geoff Hudspith created a steam-powered bicycle: Link - via BloggerFodder

Aleksandr Aksinin - Russian Graphic Art

These 3 etchings are © the estate of Russian graphic artist, Aleksandr Aksinin (1949-1985), killed in a plane crash on his way to an exhibition in Tallin.

Galleries: one, two, three, four. [Toronto Slavic Quarterly article]

Jan Švankmajer - Rakvickarna

UFO's in Ancient Artwork?

"In a time when there were no airplanes, weather balloons, or experimental military crafts, classic silvery discs, emanating beams of light appear in many famous Renaissance Era paintings, also religious text from China and India. Athough not always obvious, the resemblance is uncanny. Reports of unidentified flying objects appear even in our most ancient historical records. For anyone looking at the most ancient primitive cave drawings and petraglyphs it seems impossible now to take them for anything other than technology." Siriusly has brought togather an amazing collection of Artwork displaying what seems to be - well UFO's. Link below after some of my favorite images.

~ "The Baptism of Christ" ~ Fitzwilliam Musuem, Cambridge, England Painted in 1710 by Flemish artist Aert De Gelder

~ "The Madonna with Saint Giovannino" ~ Above Mary's left shoulder is a shining, or glowing, disk shaped object. A man and his dog can clearly be seen looking up at the floating object. Painted in the 15th century, Palazzo Vecchio lists the artist as unknown ~ although attributed to the Lippi school.

"La Tebaide" ~ Academy of Florence, painted c.1460-1465 by Paolo Uccello The close-up (right)

Haratonohama, Hitachi, Japan ~ 1803 The book "Ume No Chiri" (Dust of Apricot) tells us that a "foreign ship and crew" was once witnessed at Haratonohama (Haratono Seashore) in Hitachi no Kuni (Ibaragi Prefecture), Japan. The outer shell was made of iron and glass ~ and strange letters were seen inside the ship. Notice also four examples of alien heiroglyphs.

Many more images at - Siriusly

Video of the Day - MS Paint Master

We have all sat at our PC and screwed with MS Paint at one time or another. Drawing to our hearts desires, but this guy is a MS Paint master. Reminds me of some of the stuff my buddy Ronnie would do back in the day before getting Paintshop. Amazing stuff.

Junko Mizuno - Powerpuff Girls on Acid

Junko Mizuno [wiki] is a Japanese artist. She debuted in 1996 with a booklet called MINA animal DX. Her drawing style mixes childish sweetness and cuteness with blood and terror -a so-called kawaii noir style-. She describes her artwork as “The Powerpuff Girls on acid.”. Besides her comics, sometimes published in color, she designs T-shirts, calendars, postcards, and other collectibles. Mizuno has participated at Angoulême International Comics Festival. In the U.S., Viz Comics has published some of her work.
In this video, Jonathan Ross interviews Junko Mizuno for the Japanorama BBC series.

Kittiwat Unarom - The Body Baker - Weird Breads

Kittiwat Unarom, age 28, is a Thai artist and son of a baker who creates macabre edible sculptures out of bread. From the Associated Press:

“Of course, people were shocked and thought that I was mad when they saw the works. But once they knew the idea behind it, they understood and became interested in the work itself, instead of thinking that I am crazy,” said the fine arts masters degree student. He hopes his realistic artwork will make people ponder whether they are consuming food, or food is consuming them.

Lady’s Fingers? Anyone? Ok - Bad Joke.....

The Photography of Dora Maar

Dora Maar was a French photographer and painter, best known for being a lover and muse of Pablo Picasso. However, she was famous as a photographer, and also was a painter herself, before she met Picasso. Picasso was attracted by her beauty and self-mutilation (cutting her fingers and the table - he got her bloody gloves and exhibited them on a shelf in his apartment). She spoke Spanish fluently and lived a very secluded, quiet life. Their relationship lasted nearly nine years. On May 3, 2006, one of Picasso's portraits of her, Dora Maar au Chat (Dora Maar with Cat) was auctioned at Sotheby's at a closing price of US$95,216,000, making it the world's second most expensive painting ever sold at auction [1]. - [Wiki]

Examples of her Photography :