Scary Sarah Palin

Head of documentaries, Hamish Mykura, who commissioned the documentary for Channel 4, said: "From the icy snows of Alaska in mid winter, this is Nick's quest to find out about Sarah Palin from the people who know her best. Nick is one of our foremost documentary talents and this film follows in the tradition of many of his great portraits of influential figures." Director Nick Broomfield meets school friends, family and Republican colleagues that previously backed the charismatic and charming ex-hockey mum. But Broomfield finds it's not all plain sailing, and discovers a small town fraught with feuds where close friends have become bitter enemies, and the question on everyone's lips is ‘are you with her or against her?' He adds: "People are frightened to talk, Wasilla makes Twin Peaks look like a walk in the park. It's a devout evangelical community - 76 churches with a population of only six thousand."

This is a great Documentary and well worth the watch!! Check it out!

These are pretty funny too.

Cian McLoughlin

I went to see Cian McLoughlin's exhibition today in the Molesworth Gallery. I was super inspired, his works for this exhibition were all done in chalk on paper.

MadC @ Hallenkunst

Sacha Seguel

Sacha Seguel, artist from Santiago, Chile.

Coralie Bickford-Smith

Please judge these books by their covers. Design geeks and bookworms alike have fallen in love with Bickford-Smith's beautiful -- and thoughtful -- work. "The challenge is to entice a new audience to the literature and also to not alienate die-hard fans," she says. To re-create a collection of Penguin Classics -- think Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations -- the London-based designer chose Victorian-style cloth bindings that feature stamped patterns pointed to each book's content (for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, flamingos). An F. Scott Fitzgerald series features metallic art deco designs. "I want these books to be cherished like the literature inside," says Bickford-Smith of her obsessive attention to detail. "If something is well considered, it will entice. People want to explore it, feel it. That design shines through and connects."

Katharina Grosse / Graffiti

The Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse is known for her immense installations that examine how painting functions in an expanded field.

In this intereview Katharina Grosse says.... "There is no connection to graffiti, I don't mark areas, signifying that its mine. Graffiti is actually marking possessions, its making claims on certain areas, saying , if you go into that area you are actually trespassing, where as my work is about the opposite, it's about, inviting people to trespass, and the freedom that is implied with that activity."



Maybe contemporary artists are too quick to dismiss graffiti as an important art form. Graffiti artists have been making contemporary site specific painting installations for years,whether it is in the gallery setting or outside in the public space.

Graffiti/graphic artist Matt M Moore

Graffiti/graphic artist Barry Mcgee

Graffiti/graphic artists Os Gemeos

Graffiti/graphic artist Delta

And not to mention the artist from my last post....ZEDZ

ZEDZ

Check out this interview with Dutch graffiti artist ZEDZ for Graffuturism.

ZEDZ, the dutch graffiti-writing master, sculptor & artist realized a fine art print that subsequently went spread-painted on a huge bridge in Milan - Italy. The site specific public painting interested more than 1000 m² and was protected by an innovative paint developed in Japan. The artwork got the praise of City Council and citizens and was celebrated with ZEDZ's canvas & sketches exhibition from december 1st to december 18th 2011 @ Urban Center - right in the heart of Milan Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, in front of the Dome. STREETART.COM produced the fine art print in a limited quality serie and this video of the whole experience.

ZEDZ - From Art Print Study to Urban Regeneration - Milan from STREETART.COM on Vimeo.

Arno kramer

Dutch artist Arno Kramer’s recent body of work which features small drawings and site specific works, depict an array of figures: animals such as hares, swan, and deer which he relates both to human, female bodies or to fragments of the Irish Landscape. Kramer’s practice is rooted in his fascination in the development of contemporary drawing…

Jo Baer

Jo Baer was a key figure among the celebrated protagonists of Minimalist painting in New York in the 1960s and first half of the '70s. It was during that period that she executed her series of different-sized squares as well as vertical and horizontal rectangles in the hard-edge style, works she later expanded into multipartite arrangements as diptychs and triptychs.

The most prominent feature of her paintings of that era is her composition of white or grey central areas encircled by a very thin band of colour which in turn is surrounded by a considerably thicker band of black. In these works it was important to not consider the black paint as a frame nor the white as the centre. Both white and black were the frames for the colour - black functioning to enclose it on one side and white on the other, white pushing colour far enough apart to work as it did. Baer used the perceptual principle of Mach Bands: while the eye sees a band of darkness within a black area and of lightness within the light area, the contrast is accentuated. The sharper the border between contrasting areas, the more pronounced are the bands (= the negative of the the second derivative, i.e. the rate of change of the rate of change). Mach Bands are perceptual illusions, but exact and measurable, objective ones.

Baer describes her early ambition to make "poetic objects that would be discrete yet coherent, legible yet dense, subtle yet clear." The artist produced what she called a radical redefinition of painting by arguing that the root of painting was neither flatness, nor colour, nor shape. She placed the emphasis entirely on light.

While other painters composed their paintings part by part, Baer created her paintings as units that had to be arranged in enormous calculable numbers of variation (factor x!) At the height of her fame Jo Baer turned away from Minimalism. In 1975 she left New York, went to Ireland, later to London and then to Amsterdam where she introduced images to her painting. In her well-known article "I am no longer an Abstract Artist" published in the magazine Art in America in 1983 she explained her new approach to "radical figuration" as a means of leaving the formal self-centredness of Minimal Art behind and granting the subject and its reality a place in the painterly illusion.

The night before Christmas

When I was younger my little sister Catherine got mickeys christmas carol on video, and this amazing little cartoon was on it too. Catherine must have watched it everyday before school until spring time. My whole family know it by heart :)

Paul Wackers

How awesome is Paul Wackers work, this is what he says about it....
"My work is first a response to the world and then a reaction to what it has to offer. Images surround me as abstract concepts, presented by the curious interaction of forms, feelings, and situations. They offer a glimpse into the way the world is constantly being reloaded with opportunities and options for reinterpretations and impressions. It might start with a beam of light passing through a window in the afternoon and that within that beam there is the potential of a full spectrum to appear. In my paintings I try to create the feeling of getting lost in the thoughts that are easily ignored or put aside. Many of my paintings will come from moments seen in films or articles read in the newspaper or simply from a walk down the street. The images tend to be of non-places where the specifics of them are not important but how the elements within the picture interact as parts of another world that is sometimes jarringly familiar to our own. It might be seconds away from becoming reality or lifetimes in the past as a fleeting memory."