Meret Oppenheim

I’ll have to admit when I heard that Patrick Mohr was parading a bevy of bearded beauties for his show during Berlin Fashion week, I got excited. The carny lover inside me pictured gorgeous raven locked women with tattoos and long beards a la P.T. Barnum. Needless to say I was rather disappointed when I saw them. Well, you can’t deny it. The combination of the earless fleshy heads mixed with the sparse ginger pubic hair beards is definately a new … interpretation?

[Stylecaster]

More gems here.

Scott Radke creates beautiful sculptures that take shape into delicate, bizarre and often frightening form.

They offer a darkness. Pretty and sinister. The expressions of his pieces are impactful. Sometimes giving one a feeling of uneasiness as if the piece is alive, then sometimes giving one an urge to protect them. They are helpless and beautiful. They have you under their spell.

Some film makers have brought the creatures to life with stop animation. Check out the Dark Matters project here.

His work is somewhat derivitage of my favourite sculptor Sergio Bustamante. Who’s sculpture of a crocodile on the toilet crying has been my conquest for the last 12 or 15 years. However Scott’s execution is unique and the range of emotion and cloak of mystery his pieces have are truly captivating and unsettling. Our fear of inanimate objects coming to life are burried deep with in them.

Scott’s work was in the recent Alice in Wonderland movie and can be found in this book.

Thu Tran is a mixed media artist who has a show on IFC called Food Party. Aside from The Mighty Boosh, this is my favourite show on TV right now. Visually this show is what I only dream of being able to one day do with my photo shoots. Call it ‘advanced DIY’ (*cough*- read:budget). I have been living in Thu’s fantasy world of slightly horrifying cardboard friends and living inanimate objects since about 1979 when I became entranced with Sid & Marty Krofft.

Artisan status aside, Thu is also naturally hilarious. Her delivery, cadence, and choice of words are being siphoned directly from the marrow of my funny bone. Some highlights of the show consist of a baguette having sex with a hamburger bun (complete with climax), a carnal representation of peanut butter and jelly finding each other to be soul mates, and crazy recipes like the noodle and ham pancake made in the video above.

Frank Frazetta died of a stroke today. He was born in 1928, which, to put it into perspective for most of the children reading/posting on this site, means he was alive for every single Marx Brothers theatrical release.

The man was incredibly influential, of course. Moreso than is generally acknowledged, even by his fans. His influence was not only near-universal in modern figurative genre art, but at no point has anyone surmounted the bar he set for his own style. Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and the rest of the artists working in the cheesy-paperback-cover genre absorbed his tricks and cheats, but somehow never achieved his level of charm. I believe Frazetta’s true talent lay in his power of suggestion: he knew what not to paint.

One of my favorite Frank Frazetta pieces. The colors here are what does it. Frazetta was a master of skin tone, and it was from him, via my father, that I learned the trick of combining contrasting colors to make realistic skin tones. Note the yellow ochre and lavender on the girl’s skin—eyepopping colors combining to produce a super-organic pallor. Nobody since Sargent could paint skin like this (see the infamous Madame X), and nobody but Frazetta bothered to render all the dimples, ruffles, creases and swellings of a voluptuous woman’s butt. His anatomy could be sloppy when he was in a rush, but he knew exactly how much to paint and how much to imply. Her hands are mere suggestive brushstrokes, her face is a sweet nothing, and the background fades into a mauve mist. The little realisms, like this princess’ fat ass and heavy breasts, sold the image, and transported her from yet another yawn-inducing pinup, to a vulnerable, round, strong, soft, sexy being.

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