David MacGowan: going through Blade Runner shot-by-shot and illustrating each in MS Paint.

via Motherboard

If you read Motherboard regularly, it should come as no surprise that we’re hugefansof Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic, Blade Runner. A gorgeous, smoggy neo-noir dystopia? Artificial intelligence and highly sophisticated bioengineered beings? Serious questions about free will, reality and what it means to be human? Yes, please.

So when we discovered David MacGowan’s tumblr MSP Blade Runner, our response was one of collective awe and fascination. MacGowan is quite literally going through Blade Runner shot-by-shot and illustrating each in MS Paint. The drawings aren’t perfect in terms of artistry—it is MS Paint, after all—and they’re not 100 percent complete in detail. But each moment is instantly recognizable even to someone with only a passing familiarity with the film. And MacGowan has nailed that elusive, pitch-perfect Internet Ugly aesthetic so many of us try and fail to, well, replicate.

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Dave Allen working on the Kong model.

via TTEXED

ronaldcmerchant:

Dave Allen working on the Kong model used in a Volkswagon commercial in 1972-heres a link to the video-

https://youtu.be/ClCad9F8U3U

Franco Grignani (Italian, 1908 –1999), Psicoplastica 505, 1973

Franco Grignani (Italian, 1908 –1999), Psicoplastica 505, 1973. Acrylic on Schoeller cardboard, 73 × 73 cm. via

Moira Hahn’s Watercolors Offer Ancient, Anthropomorphic Animals

via HiFructose

by Andy Smith

In 2016, the watercolors of Moira Hahn recall the woodblock prints of Japan’s Edo period, which ended nearly 150 years ago. Even with endearing, anthropomorphic animals in the place of human warriors or villagers, there’s a refined quality to the work that feels centuries-formed. And hidden within these pieces, you’ll often find charming, humorous narratives and modern-day commentary. (That last part is evidenced in a piece below that even integrates the Donald, subtitled “Wind Demon.”)Hahn has exhibited across the world for two decades. Influenced by the Japanese genre ukiyo-e, she also cites Tibetan Thanka paintings, John James Audubon, and Persian miniatures as inspirations for her work. (And for several years, she studied Japanese art in Japan and Hawaii.) Through May 15, her latest solo show, titled “Night of 1000 Fire Monkeys,” is shown at Gregorio Escalante Gallery in Los Angeles. Works in the show run the course of her career.Part of the humor found in Hahn is the juxtaposition between that familiar Japanese imagery and contemporary embellishments, like a Monopoly board or iPhone. As stunning as her works feel in whole, these are the details that compel you to take a closer look at each corner of Hahn’s elegant scenes.

STREET ARTIST FRANCO FASOLI, A.K.A. JAZ, SHIFTS TO COLLAGE

via Juxtapoz

After experimenting with different materials, Franco Fasoli, aka Jaz, has taken a new artistic direction. The substantial change in his work is based on the use of collage as the fulcrum, and came about after his residency in Miami, culminating in his solo show "Choque" in the Celaya Brothers Gallery in Mexico City.

His work, which we've posted on before, is in a constant state of flux. His large scale figurative murals, which combine anonymous people, animals and masks, act as metaphors for the human condition. They allow him the possibility of working within a broad spectrum of performance, offering different elements for an open interpretation without losing sight of the sensitive canvas of the public space. Over the years we have seen him experiment with different materials such as latex paint, gasoline, spray paint and tar. Harsh black lines contrast with watercolour effects, and these techniques are also reflected in his works on canvas and paper in small format.

In the case of his small format works with collage, we see this route reversed, where experimentation is born as opposed to translated. One can observe an extreme synthesis achieved through the careful juxtaposition of planes of colored paper to create different effects of light and shadow in relief, which in turn coexist with flat, 2D figures.

Conceptually, his work is still concerned with the human condition, its culture and its environment. We find references that encapsulate a story, a problem, a message, enabling a more open reading of the piece by the viewer. Features such as symmetry, which Franco has used in the past as elements for generating tension and confrontation, are still present in some cases, but in this new phase of his work, the tension is mainly expressed through planes of colour.

Franco made two small scale murals with paper collage; one in the Dominican Republic and another in Mexico. More recently he completed "The Shoe Thief" for the Jidar Festival in Rabat, Morocco and the mural "El Popular" for the Mural Festival in Montreal, Canada.

For the last two, he used latex paint, but visually, the works were based on his new collages, which were previously selected by taking into account the location, shape and texture of the wall. Collage forces him to use color on the wall in a very different way, demarcating large-scale plans before he begins painting.   —Mimí Carbia

LORENZO ALESSANDRI, FATHER OF ITALIAN SURREALISM

via Dangerous Minds

At the end of World War II, Italian artist Lorenzo Alessandri opened up his first studio, naming it “Attic Macabre,” a clear indication of his artistic direction. It wasn’t until 1964 though, that he coined the term “Surfanta” (a portmanteau of surrealism and fantasy) to describe the movement he spearheaded—a wide-ranging genre of other-worldly creatures, horror, sex, mystery, occultism, and a healthy dose of religious and historical farce. He titled a magazine Surfanta, and you can even catch the word in the signage of his paintings, like morbid little Hidden Mickeys. The sheer diversity of his work makes it impossible to do a comprehensive retrospective, but I’ll cover a few of the weirdest highlights—pictures below are relatively safe for work, embedded links are… less so.

Throughout his career, Alessandri had a fascination with grotesque sexuality. He utilized a variety of subjects for the theme, including sentient genitals, anthropomorphic animals and horrifyingly lewd monsters. Not all of his prurient material was disgusting though—there was also his campy “groovy chick” phase, which often featured regular pin-up style ladies in surreal settings. Sometimes the babes themselves were psychedelic—often a shade of electric blue, and sometimes they hung out with his occult characters or his sex-monsters (though they stop short of doing anything hardcore).

In my opinion, Alessandri’s most fascinating and sophisticated work is his series of contemporary fantasy scenarios, which deal most readily with the politics and history of the modern world. The KKK lord over a naked woman before an atom bomb and a gorilla. Mona Lisa does a striptease before an animalian bourgeoisie (he also did a version where she had a penis). There’s also a ton of occult imagery. Airplanes piloted by skeletons (he loves those) roll by estates, landmarks and villages. Shadowy figures—perhaps demonic creatures or paranormal monks—are busy, perhaps frantic. The worlds he created are complex and mysterious—an inscrutable delight.

Mike Lee’s Graphite Drawings of Miniature Urban Places

via HiFructose

New York based artist Mike Lee draws tiny, typical urban places that seem to float in negative space. We previously covered his graphite drawings here, mostly portraying an aerial view of a dollhouse-like world. Lee’s latest series, currently on view at Giant Robot’s GR gallery in Los Angeles, pushes the peculiarity of his artworks a little bit further. They still contain simplified spaces populated by chubby Lego-like urbanites, but have been spliced up to a more abstract effect. There are fantasized reimaginings of actual street corners, homes, and coffee shops that Lee visits in his every day life, like “37 N Broadway” or “W 218th St,” as well as still life of house plants and other objects. Of his new works, Lee says, “I opened up walls, rotated sidewalks, dissected objects and really tried to dramatize the lighting. I also wanted to push the contrast between the simple and the complex by controlling the amount of detail.”

The Drawings of André Masson

via Hyperallergic

PARIS — In the polyvalent and multilayered drawings of André Masson, you can sense a free hand in love with its own movement, but not with itself. There is a speeding, automatic, ritualistic, and revelatory mode of iconographic mark-making in all the drawings in André Masson dans l’antre de la métamorphose at Galerie Natalie Seroussi, which seem to flow from one key piece: the sex-machinic “Automatic Drawing” (1924). This jittery work sets up a conflict between hard angles and the feminine litheness of curves. Aggressive lines cut through the supple curves of a centered, nude woman made of Francis Picabia-like cyborg parts. The drawing evidences an artistic method that plays on the line between chaotic control and non-control, aiming toward a capricious alliance that likens mechanical grinding to organic sexuality, an association that opens up both notions to mental connections that enlarge them. In this work, the subsequent cyborg woman of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is already undone by disturbances she cannot contain.

An expanded field of subjects pervades the visual lexicon of Surrealism, but Masson is generally considered to have pioneered the automatic drawing technique with an opulence that borders on the decadent. Masson’s graphic automatism was a visual analogy to the écriture automatique, a writing method based on speed, chance, and intuition. In doing so, he also revealed a certain amount of reflection and artistic strategy............Continued

André Masson, “Benjamin Péret — Automatic Drawing” (circa 1925) 

However, around the exact same time (summer of 1924), the English artist and chaos magician Austin Osman Spare — a late-decadent, perversely ornamental graphic dandy in the manner of Felicien Rops and Aubrey Beardsley — produced a sketchbook of “automatic drawings” featuring disembodied fabula on a par with Masson’s. Entitled The Book of Ugly Ecstasy, it contained a series of outlandish, pan-sexual creatures produced through automatic and trance-induced means. This swank book was purchased by the art historian Gerald Reitlinger, but in the spring of 1925 Spare produced another, similar volume, A Book of Automatic Drawings, which has been reproduced. Spare claimedto have been making automatic drawing as early as 1900 (when he was 14), yet he was unknown to the Surrealists. Nevertheless, the dates of his automatic drawing books parrallel Masson’s semi-automatic drawings “Benjamin Péret — Automatic Drawing” (circa 1925) and “A Louis Aragon” (1924) in uncanny ways. Masson’s beautiful, drowsily drawn “Benjamin Péret — Automatic Drawing” fluidly depicts the French poet. Like Spare, Masson began automatic drawings with no preconceived composition in mind. Like a medium channeling a phantom spirit, he let his pen travel hastily across the paper without conscious control, soon finding hints of images emerging from the abstract, lace-like web.

Like Masson, Spare claimed that twisting and interlacing lines permit the magical germ of an idea in the unconscious mind to express — or at least suggest — itself to consciousness. For Masson, artistic intentions should just escape consciousness. Although some shapes are discernible amid abstract lines, others seem to be open to interpretation, allowing viewers to use their own subconscious cues to decipher the images. In time, shapes might be found to emerge, suggesting forms.

André Masson, “La ville cranienne” (“The Cranial City,” 1939)

André Masson, “Le génie de l’espèce” (“The Genius of the Species,” 1939) 

Bookcover Illustrations by Johanna Maria Hendrika Daemen (1891–1944)

Jo Daemen’s The Sacred Flame

Monster surrealiste a son repas by Victor Brauner

Monster surrealiste a son repas by Victor Brauner, 1936. Ink and graphite on paper, 13 × 19 ⅝ inches. Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

PAUL MAVRIDES "ART WORK MAKES YOU FREE"

via Juxtapoz

Juxtapoz is going to make a field trip today to a show that we are really exicted about, but seeing that it comes down on Saturday, we think you need to head over as well if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area. Paul Mavrides, a member of the influential Zap Comix! underground comic collective and longtime resident of SF's Mission District, has a show up at Steven Wolf Fine Arts. This is Mavrides' first show in 10 years, and is a collection of found object wood paintings.  

From the gallery... "Mavrides is member of the ZAP Comix collective, as well as a founding associate of the Church of the SubGenius, a rogue psychotronic religious cult, which he still serves as official apostate. His many collaborators have included Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, film directors Alex Cox and Ron Mann, Survival Research Laboratories and The Residents, and he successfully fought a high-profile taxation and free speech case on behalf of cartoonists and comic book readers against the State of California.

"Having trolled for years in garbage cans and thrift shops for the post war-without-end religious icons, alien dolls and space-age weaponry that he sometimes alters into sculpture, it was only natural that Mavrides would find a way to repurpose actual "fine art." Unlike Jim Shaw, who collects found paintings for their outsider charms, Mavrides can't resist the urge to have the final say, ambiguously dealt with in the painting, Paint has No Power.

"Even though Mavrides has been combining words and pictures for years, with this series he elbows into a field with a high bar for success that almost no one reaches. Grandiose, overblown, self-important, simple-minded and obvious are the words that come to mind for most text paintings. There are some important exceptions like the work of Christopher Wool, whose black and white paintings marry the heroic questing of abstraction with the dry negation of pop art; and that of Ed Ruscha, whose pictures developed from looking at billboards through a car windshield, and deeply channel American modernity. However, it is Wayne White, the Los Angeles artist who paints candy colored word sculptures on vintage prints, whose work Mavrides most closely touches. But where White, who limits his source material to mass-production lithography, is anarchic, poetic and whimsical, Mavrides is more like a soap box preacher—or a conman—doing his ultra terse, highly critical graffiti on someone else's personal land."

PAUL MAVRIDES INTERVIEW!

First Class Portraits Robert Delford Brown

DAVID SHRIGLEY: Painter

via Juxtapoz

Juxtapoz x Superflat, co-curated by Takashi Murakami and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco, will feature a special installation piece by David Shrigley, his "Life Model" interactive drawing work

We got a chance to draw and check out this particular installation at Takashi's "Superflat Collection" show in Yokohama this past winter, and thought what better way of leveling the field of contemporary art than having all of us draw during our exhibition in Seattle. So we encourage you to come and get a few portraits in. 

Shrigley has long been a favorite of the Juxtapoz staff, and are excited that he will be included in "Juxtapoz x Superflat" in this way. Today, we gathered a collection of Shrigley work for you to enjoy, as well as images of the "Life Model" installation.

Artists selected to appear in the show by Murakami include: Chiho Aoshima, Urs Fischer, Kim Jung Gi, Kazunori Hamana, James Jean, JH Kagaku, Friedrich Kunath, Takashi Murakami, Kazumi Nakamura, Otani Workshop, Mark Ryden, David Shrigley, Katsuya Terada, a selection from Toilet Paper Magazine, Yuji Ueda, Yuji Ueno, He Xiang Yu, and Zoer & Velvet. Artists selected by Pricco include Trenton Doyle Hancock, Todd James, Austin Lee, Rebecca Morgan, Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor, Paco Pomet, Parra, Christian Rex van Minnen. Erin M. Riley, Devin Troy Strother, Sage Vaughn, and Ben Venom.

Watch an Animated Version of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner Made of 12,597 Watercolor Paintings

via OpenCulture

The Swedish artist Anders Ramsell spent the better part of the last year and a half working on a tribute to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and now it’s ready for the world to see. Running 35 minutes, Blade Runner – The Aquarelle Edition follows the original movie’s general storyline while taking certain liberties. (Ramsell calls it a “paraphrase” of the original film.) Rather amazingly, the animated film consists of 12,597 handmade aquarelle/watercolor paintings, each about 1.5-x-3 centimeters in size. As Mike Krumboltz rightly observes, the “result is like a Monet painting come to dystopian life.” Ramsell is a student at Konstfack – University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Some of the individual frames/paintings can be found on his personal website. For more animated films, please visit the Animation section of our collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..

Elzo Durt: Illustrator

ELZO DURT

The Paintings and Collages of Javier Mayoral

MUCH MORE HERE

The Great Basil Wolverton

http://www.stevestiles.com/wolvert.htm

David Hockney - “1059 Balboa Blvd.” - Crayon on paper - 196

David Hockney - “1059 Balboa Blvd.” - Crayon on paper - 196