How to Steal Like an Artist

I love this blog post by Austin Kleon. It’s a list of 10 things about being an artist that he wishes someone had told him while he was in college. Number two is really resonating with me at the moment:

I’ve spent a great deal of my life waiting to reach some magic point when things would just fall into place and everything would make sense and I would just KNOW who I was and what I wanted to make. The Big Secret? IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN THAT WAY. You have to make work to know yourself! Just do what feels interesting and the rest will fall into place. Even if you aren’t sure where something is going, keep going. The most exciting things happen when you get all tangled in an idea and then it just makes itself clear. But you’ll never get to that clarity if you don’t start!

Treasure book marriage proposal

This is probably one of the sweetest and most time consuming marriage proposals I’ve ever seen.

Illustrator Joel Kimmel wrote and illustrated short story describing the “history” of the ring he was using to propose to his girlfriend with. He then pasted the pages into an old Collier’s Cyclopedia and in the last bit, carved out a little hiding spot for the ring itself.

Here is the last page with the flap in the middle:

Which opens to reveal the ring!

What a huge amount of work!  Thank goodness she said Yes!  🙂

[via Joel’s blog]

Water Sculpture

Just a little bit of awesome to start your day.

UPDATE: Dangit, I forgot vimeo and wordpress don’t like eachother so much…Sorry, you are just going to have to click the link and trust me its worth it!

Water Sculpture video on Vimeo.

Water sculpture by Shinichi Maruyama.

{via boingboing}

Book excavations

It is no secret that I am a huge fan of books and book art.

This is the work of Brian Dettmer.  I’ve seen his work around without actually knowing who was doing it.  I love the idea of taking old books and finding something new in them.

From the artist statement on his website:

When an object’s intended function is fleeting the necessity for a new approach to its form and content arises. By altering preexisting materials and shifting functions, new and unexpected roles of old materials emerge. This is the area I currently operate in. Through meticulous excavation or concise alteration I edit or dissect a communicative object or system such as books, maps, tapes and other media. The medium’s role expands. Its content becomes recontextualized and new meanings or interpretations emerge.

Explanation of Book Dissections

In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the surface of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and other surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose a book’s hidden, fragmented memory. The completed pieces expose new relationships of a book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.

I’ve done some work with altered books, but I can only imagine the amount of time and patience it must have taken to work on these.

This last one I found on his flickr stream which I highly recommend you all go check out right now.  He seems to have done an excellent job posting a lot of his most recent work there.  What caught me first about this piece was the title: Do it, Complete Yourself Man (2010)

and here is a detail from same work:

For more on Brian and his work, you can check out his wikipedia page.

Fat Monkey

I love art that just makes me smile.  This site specific installation for Sao Paolo’s event Pixelshow by Florentijn Hofman makes me grin like crazy.

Flortentijn is the same artist responsible for the giant inflated rubber duckie that was first presented in Amsterdam in 2007 and most recently shown in Osaka in 2009.

I really love that someone went to the trouble to put this in the world.  There should be more stuff like this.  We spend so much of our time and energy focusing on what is wrong with the world, it is really nice to see something that has no other function than to make people happy.

artist: Jen Stark

Today has been such a wonderful, awful, crazy, emotional day that for my post tonight, I just want to celebrate the beautiful.

I want to share the work of the artist Jen Stark.  She makes these amazing cut paper sculptures that are just mind blowing to me.

Jen Stark / Flash Spectrum / 12″ x 12″ / hand-cut paper / 2007

Jen Stark / On The Inside / 34″ x 23″ / varnished hand-cut paper / 2008

Jen Stark / Over and Out / 19″ x 19″ x 5″ / hand-cut paper / 2008

Jen Stark / Coriolis Effect / 12″ x 12″ / hand-cut paper / 2007

I wish I had something more profound to say than PRETTY, but at the moment, that is all I can muster.  I just love looking at her work.  I love the pattern, the precision, the apparent simplicity that belies a far more complex underlying structure.  Each piece represents a huge amount of work and all I can think when I look at them is COLOR PRETTY.  Better than HULK SMASH I suppose. I’m also a sucker for works in paper, so that doesn’t hurt either.

For a slightly more coherent take on her work, read this.

To see what she has been up to lately, check out this awesome looking show in Thailand that happened in April of this year: