Mystery Illustration 5

Why is this fellow masked at his writing desk? Kidnapper? Bank Robber? Sex games?

Find the answer here.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Feb 18, 2015 - Comments (3)
Category: Art, Disguises, Impersonations, Mimics and Forgeries, Twentieth Century

Kusama:  Princess of Polka Dots

Creator of the "penis chair," among other objects of art.

Posted By: Paul - Sat Feb 14, 2015 - Comments (0)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Pop Art, 1960s, Asia, Mental Health and Insanity

Custom Star Trek ‘Boogie’ Van For Sale

For $9500, this attractively decked-out vehicle could be yours. It's a 1978 GMC Vandura Van, with only 25,000 miles on the odometer. Exterior Star Trek murals by artist G.S. Roy. For sale on Vancouver Craiglist. Read more about it at the Toronto Star.

Posted By: Alex - Thu Feb 05, 2015 - Comments (7)
Category: Art, Television, Cars

Shampooed Hair Art

Photographer Cheuk Lun Lo has drawn inspiration from shampoo, creating a photo series in which he focuses on heads of hair all lathered up and twisted into various shapes. More info at Designboom.

Posted By: Alex - Tue Feb 03, 2015 - Comments (7)
Category: Art, Hygiene, Photography and Photographers, Hair and Hairstyling

Your Name Here

The latest Kickstarter weirdness. In return for a $10 donation, tattoo artist Illma Gore will tattoo your name on her body. Her goal is to completely cover her body with around 2500 names. She hasn't got all those names yet, but she's already got enough donations to get her project funded.

Posted By: Alex - Thu Jan 15, 2015 - Comments (11)
Category: Art, Tattoos

Pop Art Fridges

Come to think of it, why can't you buy fridges nowadays with decorated fronts?

Original article here.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jan 14, 2015 - Comments (18)
Category: Art, Appliances, 1960s

Lloyd Canning Update

A week ago I posted about Lloyd Canning, an artist who claimed that he had been abducted by extraterrestrials who were now beaming images into his brain, and that this served as the inspiration for his art. He's now done an about face and says that he was just joking about the whole alien-abduction thing. It was a stunt to get publicity.

I have to hand it to him that he knows how to work the media. First he gets free publicity with a crazy claim. And then he gets a second round of publicity for the hoax reveal. P.T. Barnum would have been proud.

However, since a week ago I described the alien thing as a "schtick" he was using to promote himself, I don't really consider myself fooled by this one. A schtick is exactly what it was. Just a more cynical schtick than I gave him credit for.

But it means that I'll now have to add him to the Museum of Hoaxes.

Posted By: Alex - Wed Jan 07, 2015 - Comments (1)
Category: Art

Phone Book Art

Artist Stephen Wischer has found a use for all those Yellow Pages phonebooks that still get delivered to people, even though they've long been rendered pointless on account of the Internet. (The Yellow Pages are still periodically dumped at my front door and go straight from there into the recycling bin.) Wischer has stacked up 3000 of them in a display at the Plains Art Museum titled "In Crypt: On New Worlds Re-Ordered."

Says Amy Richardson of the museum: "When people come into the museum and this is right in our entrance area they stop and they're astonished, because at first they think it's a huge wall of bricks or wood and then they realize it's phone books." [wdaz.com, plainsart.org]

Posted By: Alex - Sat Jan 03, 2015 - Comments (3)
Category: Art

Alien-Inspired Art

I think it makes sense for an artist to have some kind of schtick to differentiate themselves from the crowd. And Lloyd Canning's schtick is that he says his paintings are inspired by images that extraterrestrials project into his brain. According to him, this image projection began after the aliens first abducted him in 2005. The Mirror has more details. Also check out Canning's website.

He reminds me of Flora Marian Spore, the 1920s artist who claimed her paintings were inspired by ghosts. (See Paul's post from back in 2012.)

Posted By: Alex - Wed Dec 31, 2014 - Comments (9)
Category: Aliens, Art

The Guinness Artist

David Gilhooley is known as the Guinness Artist, because he occasionally uses Guinness beer to paint watercolors. But he now has a second reason for the name after winning the Guinness World Record for most pencil portraits drawn in 12 hours. He sketched 200 of them.

By my calculations, that means he had to complete approximately one sketch every three and-a-half minutes. [Huddersfield Examiner]

Posted By: Alex - Mon Dec 08, 2014 - Comments (5)
Category: Art, World Records