The Most Incredible Miniature Pencil Art [20 pics]

The Most Incredible Miniature Pencil Art [20 pics]

70 Million by Hold Your Horses!

Art History fun: How many paintings can you recognize in this music video from the band Hold Your Horses?

70 Million de Hold Your Horses !
by logreproduction

The Constitution: God's Gift to America

Did not know that Jesus Christ authored the U.S. Constitution himself. That's how it appears, at least, in this painting which was passed around the internet this week.

Hover your mouse over the image to reveal details, including Ronald Reagan, Nathan Hale, a non-Christian immigrant (now seeing the light), a smug college professor holding Darwin's Origin of Species, Satan, and that most pernicious of Supreme Court decisions, Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee (1816).

What's not clear from the painting is whether Jesus is holding a copy of the Constitution that includes the 14th Amendment, or whether his version maintains that whole "three-fifths of a person" bit from Article I.

Of course the internet loves to eat itself, so now there's an alternate version of the painting with alternative captions.

Original:

Farmer
Truly the backbone of America.

Revised:

Farmer
The government pays him not to grow stuff. Is against government handouts.

[via Andrew Sullivan]

Guerilla graphic design: Cardon Copy

via Chris Jobs at Curbly

Graphic designer Cardon Webb takes flyers posted in the neighborhood. Re-designs them. Not just re-designs: admittedly, he hijacks the flyer and overwhelms the essential content with design.

Then he puts it back where he found it.

Essential content is lost in the translation.

But, oh, what fun for fans of design.

Cardon Copy

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

(via boingboing)
For visual learners, artist/designed Jonathan Jarvis explains the credit crisis.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Trainset Ghetto

Yale architecture Peter Feigenbaum has built his model train set as an urban setting--variously evocative of the South Bronx, Jersey City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Graffiti, row houses, trash, and weeds accentuate his amazing attention to detail in this gallery of his photos.

Link

(Via Vestal Design.)

Jason de Caires Taylor, Underwater Sculptor

Photo gallery and video highlighting the work of Jason de Caires Taylor, whose sculptures live on the ocean floor.

I don't have a diving credential, and won't be visiting Grenada anytime soon, so I'm thankful Taylor is willing to share these snippets online.

Fantastically beautiful.

[Via Coudal Partners]

Improv Everywhere: Frozen New York

What's worse than an improv troupe that tries to be funny?

An improv troupe that doesn't let the audience know that there's a performance going on. In other words, they just like messing with people's heads.

In New York City, they get hundreds of volunteers to enact these scenarios, usually to the consternation, befuddlement, and confusion of retail shmoes and toursits.

Improv Everywhere is dedicated to causing "scenes of chaos and joy in public places."

This Grand Central Station stunt is the first one that didn't bug the crap out of me... probably because they aren't trying to embarass anyone.

DAve's Street Styles

[via Wooster Collective]

Local street sticker artist DAve launches an after-school arts workshop for middle-school and high school students in San Francisco.

Tax-deductible donations accepted through fiscal sponsor Youth Speaks.

Frameable Fruit Crate Label Art

Box of Apples offers a gazillion high-quality fine art prints of vintage crate labels.



Wow. One more reason to build that addition to the house.

M&Ms: Dark Chocolate

Okay, so you're a popular chocolate candy. What could be better than an interactive game for your fans?

Well, perhaps an interactive game that involves decoding visual riddles to find film titles, done in the style of, say, 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch.

Of course.

The Great Tortilla Conspiracy

Crying Virgen
Originally uploaded by El Rio.

San Francisco artist Rio Yanez hosted "The Great Tortilla Conspiracy" at the De Young museum last week, inviting artists (and the general public) to come by and have their art silkscreened onto tortillas with edible inks. Link is to the photo set on Flickr.

Cartoon Skeletons

Artist Michael Paulus visualizes the skeletal systems and bone structure underneath classic cartoon characters, from Betty Boop to the PowerPuff Girls.

Creeptastic and scienceriffic!

peter callesen: cut paper art

The link takes you to Peter Callesen's online gallery.
Look especially at the cut paper works.
Egad, is I believe the expression.

The Poster List

$7.99 each for a series of 12" x 18" posters that make me wish I had a dorm room again.

Street Art: Loro in Sao Paulo, Brazil

[via Wooster Collective]

ZeroOne San Jose

When I think of cutting edge contemporary art, and especially cutting edge contemporary performance art, I don't think of San Jose. I think of New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Amsterdam. Vancouver. Toronto. Maybe Minneapolis. Even Cleveland, Ohio (home to an annual performance art festival for nearly twenty years)

But now San Jose will host ZeroOne: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge & the Thirteenth International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA2006). (ISEA moves around the globe and is held a different city each year). It makes sense to bring the symposium to Silicon Valley, actually.

So what will a "Festival of Art on the Edge" be? Mainly an excuse to shell out $30 a ticket a non-narrative performances, chock full of eye candy (video projection, real time manipulation of data to create sounds/lights/images. You can see improvised cinema. You can see Peter Greenaway veejaying. Ironically, you can see all this 21st century cutting edge stuff in a restored 1927 theatre. Hilariously, Villa Montalvo is hosting the experimental/noise "Bleeding Edge" music festival within the festival.

But I can already tell you what is going to sell out first: Machines beating the crap out of each other. Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories don't build robots. They build machines. Machines that are built to destroy other machines. Machines that shoot fire, wield 8-ton crushing mallets, or hurl molten metal at other machines, or sometimes even towards themselves. SRL is known for putting on the most dangerous shows in the world. I tried to see them in San Francisco about 12 years ago, out on some pier in Hunter's Point, since Randall was working the tech crew (He's known as "Blaster" in SRL circles). The line stretched out to 3rd Street, and I never got in (counterfeiters had xeroxed thousands of extra tickets... and the fire marshall ALWAYS knows when SRL is in town). It is so hard to get the permits to host an SRL show that they only do about two shows a year.

Edgy? Sure. Noisy as hell (they attached jet engines to some of the machines just for the purpose of making noise). Digital art? Not really. Some of the machines require electronics: remote control, so the flying sparks, molten metal, and fire don't incinerate or puncture their operators, and probably some kind of built in controls so that the machines don't operate at their full lethal capacity. But SRL isn't about digital information.

SRL are taken very seriously in the performance art world. And I get their apocalyptic vision of contemporary life as devoid of humanity with just industrial technology unleashed upon itself. I even wouldn't mind catching their show --bring earplugs--(alas, I'm probably out of town). But if, given the choice between shelling out thirty bucks to see "stunning video images of landscapes... gradually abstracted into pure data" or machines the size of backhoes pummeling each other to death with fire and electricity, I'm guessing the population of San Jose is gonna spend their cash on the machines.

Okay. I'm done ranting about the performance art.

The actual contemporary art exhibitions and installations look really fun.

My waning passion for Cheetos

I love my Cheetos. But someone has come between us. Someone I don't want to share my Cheetos with.

(Please scroll down to ingest all the Cheetos art.)

Mary Potter, Peckerwood, WV

I backed into this four-part video documentary about a rural artist, her work, and the creation of an iron chair, and in fact the episodes sat unwatched in my FireAnt queue for months.

This is not a portrait of an outsider hillbilly artist, nor does Potter engage in capital-a Art. She creates because it is what she does, inseparable from who she is, embedded in the objects and environment around her. She evokes for me memories of Christa's grandmother Edith in her garden, or of her aunt Jean making batch after batch of cookies and hard tack at holiday time, or of the new "angry pillow" Mom made for Ben this week.

The rhythm of the editing matches its subject, so set aside a half-hour to tag along as Potter collects wood in the forest, buys a case of beer for her alcoholic blacksmith, and gives a tour of her basement gallery (where "the cats pee").

Hosted on Deep Maps, a thematic exploration by videoblogger Will Luers (Taylor Street Studio) of video encounters with place.

Video: Nice & Mean Art Show

An abandoned 1980s indoor mall in St. Louis is repurposed for an art show.