Jersey City.
Category Archives: Art/Craft
A series of paintings by street artist Ron English, putting various pop cultural spins on Picasso’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece (top). Sez he:
I approach the Guernica template cognizant and reverent of its meaning and cultural significance. It is a visual shorthand for the overwhelming and gratuitous horror of modern war. But I argue that the cultural takeaway of Guernica is actually the opposite. It transforms incomprehensible tragedy into a cartoon narrative, something we can more easily absorb. This is part of the human process, to distance ourselves from the immediacy of undiluted, overwhelming emotions by overlaying a narrative that simplifies, and in effect, takes us down from three to two dimensions. And this is the underlying concept that I grapple with in all my many versions of Guernica.
Never Forget
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The Staten Island Ferry Disaster memorial – a weathered monument in Manhattan’s Battery Park commemorating the 400 passengers who perished on November 22nd 1963 when the ferry Cornelius G. Kolff was attacked by a giant octopus, their fate overshadowed by the assassination of JFK that same day.
A rather wonderful multimedia hoax created by artist Joe Reginella.
Natural Form
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Polymer clay sculptures by Angela Schwer, monocolour representations of the form of sea urchins, flowers, fungi and more, clustered into (buyable) hangable tiles.
Arquicostura – by Spanish designer Raquel Rodrigo – a combination of architetura (architecture) and costura (needlework) – floral cross stitch (toughened and scaled up using wire mesh and thick coloured string) pleasingly deployed on the streets of Madrid
Grayffiti
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Murals by Norwegian artist Martin Whatson combining bleak greyscale figures and vibrant graffiti.
More of his work here.
Expressions from around the globe, taken from the Illustrated Book of Sayings by Ella Frances Sanders.
Massferatu
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From the 2015 photoseries ‘Live By The Sword, Dies By The Sword’ by London based photographer Ellen Rodgers.
In the 1960s, realising that the surrealist Salvador Dali and the fantasist mathematician Lewis Carroll were quite possibly of a mind, publishers Random House commissioned Dali to create illustrations for a special limited edition of Alice In Wonderland, of which the artist signed every copy.
Long sought after by bibliophiles and making rare appearances at auction, the edition is something of a publishing legend.
For the 150th anniversary of Carroll’s 1865 surrealist masterpiece, Princeton University Press reprinted the original edition.
Above: Dali’s illustrations forThe Mock Turtle’s Story; The Caucus Race and A Long Tail; The Lobster’s Quadrille; The Queen’s Croquet Ground; Down The Rabbit Hole and Advice From A Caterpillar.