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Diego Velazquez, along with Goya, is one of my favorite classical painters. they both had a surreal and very stylized idea of what a work of art should be.


This one image, though, is an attempt at art imitating art. It's a recreation of Las Meninas by Velazquez done by Joel-Peter Witkin. And I have to say that this is one of his less disturbing photographs, he loved the macabre and enjoyed tickling our voyeur bone with his morbid images of mostly bondage.

Source: Fotodoc

Brian Dettmer - Book Autopsies

Finally something I can say I like from the Explorations in Media Modifications or Altered Books world. Brian Dettmer's probably been around for quite a while, but just now I've started to discover him.


It's surreal, chaotic and organized like the flow of ideas, like my own imagination creating images from within the pages and the words of the books I read. I love, or maybe need (I am a visual kind of guy) to create these kinds of magical images in my head drawn from reading, that's why it takes so long for me to finish reading something. Multiple layers of overlapping imagery, sometimes I have to drop the book to be able to assimilate what I just read.


Congratulation to Brian for evoking and reminding...

Kate Protage

Continuing with my obsession with perception and phenomenology, this post is about the art of Kate Protage, who seems to have studied architecture or urbanism, she seems to perceive the world as an architect does, feeling moments in space-time. This is very apparent partly because she works from blown up photographs that she takes on her travels, she blows them up to ten times its original size and extracts a detail from it. She remembers how a city feels and works, and tries to translate these feeling and perceptual moments into oils on canvas.

This is the kind of work that, if I had an office, I would hang it in the lobby.

Artist's Statement
"I have a love/hate relationship with the cities in which I’ve lived. Everywhere I look, evidence of planning and structure exists simultaneously with chaos and unpredictability. Depending on the time of day, there are two worlds that exist in the same physical space: streets that appear gritty, dirty and depressing by day turn into an environment infused with a strange kind of lush, dark beauty and romance at night. Taking it all in can be both stressful and exciting, and I feel compelled to capture these moments and remember them.

What interests me most is the junction between sensation and fact—the way different objects come together, a combination of colors, lines and geometric shapes working together in a lyrical fashion to form intensely vivid, sometimes quite abstracted compositions. The origin of individual shapes becomes unimportant as color and texture take over, and different emotions emerge.

My paintings are the beginning of a story—a space that is somewhat recognizable and familiar, but leaves room for the story of the viewer’s choosing. Whether it feels magical and beautiful, or oppressive and ominous, that’s up to the viewer; but the plan is to take people to another place, one that’s part memory and part imagination, and provide them with a momentary escape.

I seek visual harmony, order and polish—in a tumultuous world, these are the things that keep me balanced, and they are the tools for my escape. I choose to pursue beauty."

Source:
Kate Protage Studio

Robert Bruno's Steel House

Eikongraphia has posted information about this house in Texas, as with the previous house in Brazil I posted about this is a labor of love that has taken 23 years (and 110 tons of steel) to this date, and it's still unfinished. It's organic shapes and curves remind me of Expressionistic Architecture like the Einstein Tower Observatory by Erich Mendelsohn, and it definitely reminds of the movie Metropolis by Fritz Lang. Robert Bruno is a sculptor (though I haven't found anything else he has done on the web) who, like Richard Serra, works in what apparently is Corten steel. He has built the entire house out of steel, no concrete, and the only wood I've seen is on the stair treads.

Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"

Apparently he is influenced, or is of a new manifestation of the Expressionistic movement, although Bruno's work appears to be on the optimistic side of expressionism, instead of the pain and suffering that they usually portray.

The house appears to be a small group of steel trees sprouting out of the ground, the seemingly infinite amount of points of view that the interior offers appears to have come out of the mind of M.C. Escher, you could almost confuse up from down. It is built high on the side of of a river valley, so the views through the asymmetrical windows are incredible. There is little information on the house, for example, is the steel structure double layered so it works as a truss? (I would imagine so), how big is it? (it appears to have at least two floors).

Stimuli 0701

"Santo Paseo",Pedro Meyer

"This image is a representation of what would otherwise be a story, as told by ancestors who recreate myths of events that allegedly occurred at some moment in time."