One of the most beautiful and surprising things about my birthday trip to Montreal was how many murals are around the city. The creativity and craftsmanship that went into each was astonishing. I highly recommend a walk down Saint-Laurent Street to see these works of art in person.
Nearly all subway stations have inlays in the tiled walls for advertising. For over a century, these inlays have been plastered with wheat-paste and posters were rolled on top, only to be shredded off, re-plastered, re-rolled, and re-shredded, again and again. The resulting collage of color in this accidental artwork is often quite compelling.
Over the last decade, whenever I encountered one I really enjoyed, I snapped a photo. Mostly, I just put these on my Flickr “Textures” gallery, or temporarily use it as the wallpaper on my phone. But recently, I’ve been thinking of printing/framing some of them and hanging them in my apartment or giving them to friends as gifts. What do you think? Leave a comment below or drop me a line if you’re interested.
Other [d]online “Art Collage” Posts:
January 24, 2009 — NYC Subway Art Collages
November 5, 2018 — NYC Wall Art Collages
Michigan illustrator David Zinn has brightened the streets of Ann Arbor with his off-the-wall (or technically on-the-wall) chalk drawings since 1987. The artist works with chalk or charcoal to create site-specific artworks that usually incorporate surrounding features like cracks, street infrastructure, or found objects. Over the years he’s developed a regular cast of recurring characters including a bright green monster named Sluggo and a “phlegmatic flying pig” named Philomena.
Many of Zinn’s artworks are available as archival prints, and he recently published a new book titled Temporary Preserves. You can follow his almost daily street chalk adventures on Instagram and Facebook.
(via Colossal)
The idea for Cubes came to the Dutch artists, Lernert & Sander, when newspaper de Volkskrant commissioned them to take a photo for a food-related feature. The only guidance the newspaper gave was that the work had to be tied to food. But, “food is an overwhelming subject,” Lernert said. “You can go so many different ways. How can you photograph something when you can’t decide?” So they did the only thing that could be done: make all of the food seem equally important by cutting everything into uniform pieces, he said.
As for the rationale behind which food they chose to use for the cubes? That was determined by what they could find in local grocery stores and shops. And the foods couldn’t be processed, at least in the traditional sense. “We realized that if you cut up everything, it has this nastiness of everything becoming processed,” explained Lernert. “That’s the inside story.”
(via bonappetit.com)
In 2007, an investment firm hired my studio, ERA404, to design an “Indiana Jones diary” for a global investor, as a unique way of showcasing their findings from a literacy study they conducted. Part of the project was creating a dozen or so original illustrations from his travels. One of the illustrations was of Huckleberry Finn rafting down the Mississippi River. I confess that I borrowed inspiration from an iconic book cover when creating the artwork.
A few weeks ago, a friend and colleague pointed my attention to an article on VentureBeat.com which incorporated a cropped version of this illustration. On a whim, I did a Google Image Search, and was able to find that this image has been reproduced, re-cropped, and re-used in 8 pages and 90 links worth of results, making it one of the most frequently returned images in Google searches with the keywords “huck finn river”.
Guess someone liked my Huckleberry Finn illustration for the Global Investment Literacy client so much, they decided to use it (without mention or credit) on VentureBeat. I suppose plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.
See the finished book and all illustrations for this project in the ERA404 portfolio. Follow me @citarella and @era404 on Twitter.
Special thanks to @todd_greene for finding and sharing the link.
I recently went to a Portrait Painting Marathon and Salon de Guerre, hosted by Dr. Barnaby Ruhe, at the Westbeth Artists Housing (original headquarters of Bell Telephone Laboratories) in the West Village. Essentially, it’s a studio where a bunch of artists set-up easels and pour wine and socialize about the art world while musicians play and aficionados pose, drink, and discuss trends and installations. It was very Basquiat, but on the other side of the island and nobody overdosed on heroin. My favorite quote of the evening came from a woman named Maggie, who said: “I moved to Manhattan, expecting it to be like this every night. It took 20 years, but now I’ve found it.”
Other artists include Eileen Coyne, and Emmanuelle Linard. Above is a painting of me by Michael Kronenberg.