inspired by the print work of artist Alex Katz today, which spans from the late 40s to the present day. you can see his entire impressive archive here.
Katz has admitted to destroying a thousand paintings during his first ten years as a painter in order to find his style. Since the 1950s, he worked to create art more freely in the sense that he tried to paint “faster than he can think.” His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality.
the Kontora Sisters are Katya and Nastia from Simferopol, a city on the Crimean peninsula in the Ukraine. Katya makes jewellery and Nastia is an illustrator (she also takes the photographs seen here). i like that their styles complement each other. also check out Nastia’s other illustrative work here and follow Katya on instagram.
it’s always wonderful to see what can happen in a year, and it was almost exactly a year ago that i featured the work of artist Winnie Truong. her most recent body of work Rites of Passage has just opened at Gallery Benoni in Copenhagen, playfully exploring the feeling of age and the precariousness of time.
Rites of Passage explores the transition from youth to oblivion. The subjects in her portraits are poised for no specific occasion, neither celebrating nor lamenting their experience of humanity and death. With the experience of getting older, personality and psyche are in a state of flux, making the feelings of growth and decay simultaneous and ambiguous. The rites of passage then become unclear, leaving mortality to be donned and adorned by these characters merely as ornament.
i love the cool hued work of Aussie artist Emily Ferretti. she is represented by the Sophie Gannon Gallery. these pieces also appear in her book!
Ferretti’s oil-on-linen paintings of plants, rocks, domestic settings, sporting ephemera and architectural details are remarkable for their lightness of touch and subtleties in process, tonality and mark making, sidling the representational and abstract via a quiet, poetic tenor. Isolated from wider narrative and context, her various fragmentary scenes – athletic tracks, skate ramps, pot plants or winter forest scapes – work to bestow the day-to-day with a particular gravity and significance.
Kemi Mai is an eighteen year old illustrator from Manchester who i am SUPREMELY JEALOUS OF. this girl can do amazing things with pixels. she makes her art using a tablet and photoshop. she is amazing, check out her work here and here.
My work starts with an idea derived from thoughts or abstract feelings, which I aim to express in a way that also appeals to me atheistically. Colour has become incredibly important to me, it can be so influential in setting the overall tone of the piece. I like to think of the majority of my paintings as visual representations of things that couldn’t exist organically in real life. Whilst an element of realism is important to me, I haven’t ever been interested in depicting a scene that resembles a photograph without a concept. My work isn’t weighted with messages intended to change the world, but it’s something through which I can be honest, and I appreciate that freedom greatly.
the modernist feeling in these rad illustrations by the very talented LA based illustrator & printmaker Chris Turnham made me want to watch Mad Men right away. luckily the last season is just around the corner, my pretties.
since it’s a bit of a design slash art history day around here – i dig these clever Archist posters by Italian architect & designer Federico Babina, where he imagines what buildings by 27 famous artists would look like (Architect + Artist – get it!)
the important question is – which of these building would you actually want to live in? i think walking into Keith Haring’s dog house every day would put a big smile on my face. otherwise i’d have to go for Duchamp’s building, for sheer wack factor.
all images c/o Federico Babina. see them all here. buy any of these as a print on Society6.
just gonna file this under coolest things ever. these are illustrations by French entomologist Eugène Séguy, from a book detailing his illustrations of insects and colourful decorative compositions of their patterns and colouring dating from 1925. he was, understandably, more well-known for his brilliant pattern design than for his work as an entomologist – though the two are undeniably intertwined. read more about him here.
Eugene Alain Seguy was one of the foremost French designers at the beginning of the 20th century. Working in both the Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles, he published many design folios utilizing the pochoir technique, a printing process that employs a series of stencils to lay dense and vivid color. *
images c/o the Beineke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, part of the Yale University Library. you can actually download the entire catalog in PDF form.
