Denise Nestor

I love Irish Illustrator Denise Nestor's work, check out more of her beautiful drawings here.

Hurvin Anderson

Hurvin Anderson’s paintings flirt between abstraction and figuration, their tranquil scenes merging unstable ideas of memory, conjoined histories, and cross-culturalism.

Angie Hoffmeister

I came across these beautiful prints by German illustrator Angie Hoffmeister....her tumblr is well worth checking out, i spent ages on there. She uses a wide variety of mediums including watercolors, pencils, graphite, markers, acrylics and oil paints. Angie draws from her experience in art school and is inspired by the city she calls home. Her first graphic novel, part two of the ‘Walled City Trilogy’, is due to be published at the end of the year.

Tilo Baumgartel

Tilo Baumgartel (born 1972) is a German painter. Baumgartel’s paintings have an air of fairytale about them. Suspended in space and time, his strange scenes unfold with wondrous uncertainty, suggesting fragmented dreamy narratives of his own invention. In The Fencing Lesson, Baumgartel composes his painting with surreal rigidity. His static figures, like statues, are frozen in the estranged aura of the room. Baumgartel uses his muted palette to extend the anomalistic quality of space; the planar walls and furniture seem transfixed, yet weightless in peculiar light. Picturing quirky innocence, Baumgartel’s painting is unsettling in both its inertia and expectant violence.

The Auerglass

The Auerglass is a two person pump organ created by Tauba Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow. The instrument cannot be played alone. Each player has a keyboard with alternating notes of a four octave scale. Each player must pump to supply the wind to the other player's notes.

White pine, plum, maple, southern yellow pine, blood wood, white oak, walnut, acrylic, steel, copper, leather, felt L=15’-10 ½”; W= 2’-7 ½”; H= 9’-8”

Performance outfits created for Tauba Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow by Ida Falck Øien. The Auerglass was constructed by Parsons Pipe Organs in Canandegua, New York.

Andrew Bick

Andrew Bick's works are executed in a combination of oil paint, marker pen, wax, acrylic paint and Perspex; the works play with elements of flat colour and mark, depth and surface, revealing the process of painting as a series of strategies or components within the visual puzzle of the whole. Bick's paintings contrast hard geometric or bluntly graphic forms with uncertain or dashed-out strokes or patches of scrubbed brushwork. Bick's painting calls into question false opposites; the replete subjectivity of the expressive artist against the anonymous and rationalised objectivity of 'processed-based painting'. His work has been described as 'gently disruptive and purposefully chaotic'. Andrew Bick was born in 1963 in Coleford, Gloucestershire UK. He lives and works in London. He received his BA in painting from the University of Reading, and his MA in painting from the Chelsea School of Art, and has shown extensively in Europe and the U.S.

Dak, 'Standthis'

I am pretty fond of the Leaving Records Label lately....some awesome stuff on there. Found on Boomkat Dak, “Standthis” is an amazing collage of chopped up jazz, funk and soundtrack samples, field recordings on top of intense beats. Seriously well worth a listen!!

Merlin James/Reverend Howard Finster

I went to The Douglas Hyde Gallery to check out the Merlin James/Reverend Howard Finster exhibition.

I enjoyed Merlin James paintings, there were a few paintings I wasn't into and some that i loved but there was work there from the early 80's right up to 2010.

Merlin James is a painter of small pictures in the 'easel' tradition. He is very much aware of the history of the medium, and the weight of the past is evident in everything he paints: it is both burden and ballast in a world of postmodern relativity. But James doesn't produce nostalgia or pastiche; nor does he opt for distance or irony. There is stubbornness in his approach to painting, and determination not to be daunted by the difficulties of engaging both with the past and the present. As a consequence, perhaps, James' paintings are not conventionally beautiful; they are unapologetically individualistic and, in many respects, difficult. The nonconformist quality of his work (which should not be confused with occasional elements of an 'outsider' sensibility) is reflected by his enthusiasm, as a writer and sometimes curator, for painters such as Jean Helion, William Nicholson, Giorgio Morandi and Serge Charchoune - artists often overshadowed by the reputations of better-known peers.

The Reverend Howard Finster exhibition was so interestng, I would love to see some of his paintings but his 'message' posters were on view and they were amazing.

'

The American artist Howard Finster (December 2, 1916 – October 22, 2001), believing that he was inspired by God to spread the Gospel, built an extraordinary Paradise Garden in Georgia, and produced tens of thousands of works of art. He first came to prominence in the 1980s, when his work was used on record covers by R.E.M. and Talking Heads. He is now probably the best-known 'outsider' artist of recent times. Finster's art includes paintings of icons of American culture such as Elvis Presley, George Washington, Marilyn Monroe, and Coca-Cola bottles, but the majority of his work was overtly religious. Every piece was numbered by the artist, who considered it important to produce as much art as he could for the glory of God.

These are some of his paintings.........

Rithika Merchant

I love Rithika Merchant's works on paper.

This is what Merchant says about her work....'I use painting as a means of telling whimsical stories which are inspired by experiences from my childhood and my present life. I explore themes of personification and anthropomorphism, where animals embody human attributes; be it in bodily form, or the environment they are placed in.I am interested in the patterns made by the placement or overlaying of shapes together and the way the individual pieces fit together to form a picture -much like putting a puzzle together. My paintings depict scenes from my own internal, personal folklore. They are filled with creatures from my imagination, who come together to represent my beliefs and ideology. My "Exhumed Books " involve the modification of used books. I am interested in selectively removing and revealing the content to create something new.'

Lisa Hannigan Knots

I thought this new video from Lisa Hannigan was pretty awesome!

Earth/Fleet Foxes, Stacey Rozich

So Earth were amazing the other night and of course Mount Eerie. Earth is an American musical group based in Seattle, Washington, formed in 1989 and led by guitarist Dylan Carlson.



Earth's music is nearly all instrumental, and can be divided into two distinct stages. Their early work characterized by heavy distorted droning, minimalist, lengthy, and repetitive structures; it is recognized as pioneering the genre of drone doom — an experimental offshoot of doom metal . I noticed they had some great artwork on their records by artist Stacey Rozich.

Check out this AWESOME! video Stacey Rozich did for Fleet Foxes