Art & Photography

Justin Van Genderen gets hired to do a lot of advertisements and photo processing for big companies; his work often features paint splashes, light trails, and smoke effects. While most of those works are bright and exuberant, there’s something about his personal works that are darker and much more interesting to me. I’ve seen a lot of shoddily done photo manipulations in my days- lord knows Deviant Art is full of emo girls who spend hours carefully blowing out the contrast and slapping multi-hued butterfly wings on photos just this side of homegrown. Justin’s are anything but, with carefully created landscapes and environments that toe the line on the border of dark and slightly malevolent. Check out a gallery of his fascinating work after the jump.

Peter Callesen is a Danish artist who creates incredibly complex paper sculptures using only standard acid-free A4 paper and glue. Born in 1967, he has a long history of creating these little snapshots of reality, many of which leave me with a distinct sense of Blade Runner déjà vu. Why? It probably has a little something to do with the origami unicorn that Gaff hands Deckard in the movie. I assure you, the association is a good thing.

All of his tiny sculptures are extremely intricate, especially given the simple materials he uses to make them. How he manages to fold and cut the pieces with such precision, I would love to know. Peter’s exceptional skill aside, each of the pieces

It seems like everywhere you turn these days, there’s a hipster in too tiny pants and an ‘ironically bad’ moustache or haircut. Since these underground fashion disasters will never be cool in their own right, illustrator Fab Ciraolo has attempted to lend them some cred by re-imagining notable celebrity hipsters. To be fair, Salvador Dali had the hipster facial hair before it was cool, which is -of course- everything that the alternative lifestyle seeking attention whore lives for.

Zero Petrol is an awesome competition on right now to celebrate the release of the 100% electric Nissan Leaf.  (Which is awesome, truly… but whoever came up with that name needs to die a painful death.) In any case, old gas pumps are being recycled into interactive show pieces with an entirely different purpose than doling out petrol. Check after the jump for some truly amazing and definitely wacky ideas for a gas free future. These bizarre arts and crafts are being given away, albeit to people in Australia.

I always love weird art and photography. It’s amazing to see how people choose to express their views on society through a camera lens; in this case, photographer Henry Hargreaves chose deep fried gadgets. There’s an underlying message of how we so easily consume our technology, and how we’re ready to toss out our devices when we’ve had enough of them. But really whether or not you care for the commentary, the photos are pretty great. I’ve never thought to myself, “Gee, that Gameboy looks disgusting, and totally delicious.” Congratulations to art for continually breaking small bits of my brain.

If you had asked me a few years ago what I thought of comic book art, I would have said “silly and unrealistic”. I can’t say why exactly, but it really didn’t resonate with me at the time. Then, I started to get more exposure to the medium, and began to find fantastic artists like Ben Oliver, and the incredible comic book artist responsible for the Catwoman covers below, Adam Hughes.

I stumbled onto Adam’s work a few days ago after one of the commenter on our Fairy Tale Fantasies chimed in saying that his work is incredible, and that the woman look a lot more realistic than they’re portrayed by most comic book artists. I happen to agree, and I think it’s that quality (among other things) that really sets

I know right away that I’m going to take some flak for this post, but what else is new? Enjoy these totally awesome Legion of Doom inspired posters of real life super villains. I know that it’s a bit sensational to refer to some of the worst people in history as the equivalent to dastardly comic book fiends, but outside of the immediate humor and aesthetic value here, there are remarkably thought out underpinnings. For the full set of these glorious golden age images, keep reading.