What would a 34 month long photo exposure made with a pinhole camera look like?
Earlier today in Brooklyn…
It’s not every day that you meet an artist who paints with their own blood. Over some beers last night, I was introduced to Nick Kushner a painter who does just that. The results are quite similar to water colors.
I sometimes forget that Coney Island is just a short subway ride away. I went for a visit yesterday. We had some fried clams and beer at Ruby’s and took in all of the craziness. Kids were diving off the pier. Impromptu boardwalk dance parties made for surreal cultural mashings of Latinos, African Americans, hipsters, and transvestites. The rhythms were provided by older Latin men. Then we made our way down to the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach and sampled the vareniki, pelmeni and pickled watermelon at Cafe Glechik.
Matt McMullen considers himself an artist, a sculptor and a companion maker. His passion for sculpting the female figure lead to a rather unique and lucrative business plan, the creation of RealDolls. He discusses his work and how it all started in the short docu-film Honey Pie. Here are images from his studio of dolls in different stages of construction.
If you’ve never had a few spare million dollars to spend on a painting, you probably haven’t put too much thought into how values of expensive art are determined or how great works are authenticated in a world of fakes. Though a controversial figure, Paul Biro became a go-to painting detective of sorts. He is featured in the 2006 film Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollack, a documentary about an elderly truck driver who believes she has uncovered a Pollock at a thrift shop. In the film, Biro is presented as an expert who is using science to irrefutably identify the painting and is seen as a contrast to the opinions of the upper-class art world that determines whether a painting is real or not simply by what their gut tells them. This fascinating New Yorker piece digs deeper into Biro’s past to reveal a thing or two about forgery. While on the topic of the validity of art work, another documentary was made a few years ago that follows the story of an alleged four year old Picasso in the making, My Kid Could Paint That. Common themes arise in the Biro article and both documentaries mentioned above.
I’ve always admired the dots, dashes and shapes that at one time adorned the covers of many jazz and classical music record sleeves. Project Thirty-Three is a blog dedicated to showcasing these kinds of designs that feature bold color combinations and geometric relationships.
I’ve long been a great fan of top notch nature programming like Planet Earth or Blue Planet. The lengths that some filmmakers have gone to take world class images that most of us would never see otherwise is simply astounding. The truth is that filmmakers are sometimes challenged not only to work around environments, but to also recreate environments and scenarios to fully illustrate what happens in nature. This has always been part of the field. Here is the making of a time-lapse shot that shows a full section of jungle come into bloom all at once. The shot took two years to make. Fascinating as it is, I couldn’t help but wonder why this wouldn’t be created entirely in CG. The end result is literally a composite of 95 separate shots put together in a computer to look as though they are all happening at once. Some elements are shot in nature while others are filmed in a studio. The result is beautiful but certainly doesn’t look real, and with good reason. It isn’t real.
Amnesty International always takes a poignant approach to getting its message of human rights across. This time they aim to melt away the Death Penalty.
From the Basement is the pet project of music production wunderkind Nigel Godrich. An impressive list of musicians are invited to play intimate live in-studio sessions that are filmed in HD and presented online. Godrich’s goal is to create an honest and laid-back environment for his guests to perform. He likens the project to the 70’s BBC 2 program The Old Grey Whistle Test. Here are a few wonderful solo performances: Andrew Bird, Tenuousness and Thom Yorke, Videotape.
I recently heard about a rather interesting service that allows people to share the things that they own with others in their neighborhood. The big idea behind Neighborgoods is to help people behave more like a community and consume less things that they simply don’t need to buy.
What if futball legend Pele had scored his final goal on the Brazilian national team instead of the Cosmos? The short film 1284 sees Pele on the pitch at age 69 finishing his career off the way he’d have liked it. The project was produced by Fernando Meirelles and created in conjunction with telecom company Vivo.
