November 28, 2014

Work by Chyrum Lambert

Some amazing work by Chyrum Lambert. All Chyrum's work is hand-painted, with inks, arcylics, oils, wax, etc. He then cuts the shapes and assembles them onto paper.

They feel tactile, carved, almost. Looking at the jpegs, its difficult to imagine how they were made, a quality that I really love. The use of grids, borders, and large geometric shapes is familiar to me as a graphic designer, but then a lot of that structure gets erased and cut away to reveal other more organic shapes and lines. h/t to Able Parris for the link.

October 26, 2014

Concept Art by Nivanh Chanthara

I've been looking a lot at sci-fi concept art and paintings recently, and came across the work of Nivanh Chanthara. All of it is beautifully done, but I liked these best.

July 14, 2013

Space Vikings, by Mel Grant

Space Vikings

I just found this painting, called Space Vikings, while wandering around on the internet. It's by Melvyn Grant, a British sci-fi and fantasy artist. Something about the spacesuits caught my eye. So many of the suits we see on TV and in the movies are bland uniforms, but these look very personalized, almost like regular clothes. I imagine that in the deep future, spacesuits will have little resemblance to what we know today, and the painting is striking for that reason.

via Sci-Fi-O-Rama

June 9, 2013

On Matsumi Kanemitsu

north-wind-matsumi-kanemitsu
I bought a book of Matsumi Kanemitsu lithographs years ago, in college. It was a retrospective of his prints from 1960-1990. Im not sure what it was about his work that I found fascinating- perhaps the way he used litho washes, or the sly humor in the illustrations. In any case, I periodically look at the book again for inspiration. Here is a video on his life and work that you may enjoy.

(Image courtesty of Art Is America)

March 28, 2013

An Afternoon Boating on Lake George


I found this on artsy.net.

An Afternoon Boating on Lake George, NY, 1867 is an absolutely brilliant painting by Nelson Augustus Moore, an artist in New York in the mid 1800s. These works, and others from the Hudson River School, had a tremendous effect on the national psyche. They idealized the disappearing wilderness on the frontier, and encouraged people to migrate west of the Mississippi. The paintings seem quaint these days, but they helped define the nation.

If you look closely at a lot of my illustration and collage work, you will see bits and pieces fo these paintings all over the place. Just saying.

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