We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

We love the weird, wild, and kitschy illustration and artwork of Theo Gennitsakis, who lends his prodigious talents to everything from type illustrations to flyers to album covers to the (above) ingenious memorial to Malcolm McLaren. Gennitsakis is also the Creative Director and Founder of La Surprise, a design agency whose slogan is “Audacity is the safest path.” That’s a good one.

Science lesson!

The term “fluorescence”was coined by one George Gabriel Stokes in an 1852 paper for the Royal Society of London titled “On the Change of Refrangibility of Light”. Chemically speaking, fluorescence occurs when an orbital electron relaxes to its ground state after being excited to a higher quantum state by some kind of energy. Then it gets really complicated.

Fluorescent lights, on the other hand, were first brought to the public at the 1939 World’s Fair, and we can thank that event for eventually precipitating glow sticks and highlighter pens. At the very end of this long stream of influences lies Dan Bina, an artist who creates images that often incorporate hints of fluorescence. The paintings are magical—check ‘em out at Dan’s blog. Deploy shades if your eyes are sensitive.

Visually speaking, the categories of “beautiful” and “challenging” overlap far less frequently than they should. This applies to any creative pursuit: architectural, musical, sartorial, and most definitely when it comes to painting.

Paul Wackers’ work exists in that tiny shared zone between the two categories. His paintings of abstracted machinery, natural growth and mountainous landscapes are as thought-provoking as they are stimulating, mixing recognizable geometric elements with head-scratching piles of…well, interesting-looking stuff.

Wackers’ paintings remind us a little of the psychedelic dreamscapes (nightmarescapes?) of Kirsten Deirup, but there’s no doubt he’s doing something all his own.

Perusing the website of designer Rob Matthews (whose zine, If Drawings Were Photographs, we posted about recently), I came across a boss illustrator named Trevor Burks, Matthews’ dear friend and the inspiration for an amusingly creepy art piece/t-shirt entitled I Miss Trevor Burks. Burks’ cleanly geometrical drawings seem to suggest the story of a generation growing up on a trajectory parallel to the increasingly complex polygons of their video game platforms. He also made an awesome mural depicting a dog licking a cat licking a gnome.

Perhaps the most intriguingly nostalgic series in Burks portfolio is Skate Myths, a set of drawings examining “personal mythologies surrounding growing up skateboarding in a small town.” Burks was kind enough to break down some of the influences behind these pieces for We Love You So:

The illustrations were based off of different environments we would skate as kids, and the characters were constructed with forms and colors from their surroundings with the idea that those were an integral part of our personalities. All of the gestures and interactions between the characters were formed from real situations too.

Every now and then when we skated in public, a small audience would gather; generally one or two younger kids who were horribly fascinated by what we were doing (despite how well we were doing it). In one illustration that character is shown as a kid with a grass and dirt colored head holding a football as he watches an older kid with a cement colored head skate in a parking lot.

Another thing we would do was alter our surroundings to make them more skate-friendly. It was so natural back then to put together some janky set-up to skate on. It might have been the juvenile carelessness of looking at the world of objects exclusively for their form and how we could use it to our advantage, but it was creation at its purest and we loved it. As children, our attempt to rationalize only went so far, we had to fill the rest of our time with our emotional response to the environment.

A pastel rainbow of brash, geometric lines are contaminating a disquietingly familiar landscape. Sharp streams of light are pouring down upon us now like extra-strength silly stream, firework trails fading into the night– precariously dangling fiber-optic cables transmitting the secret signals of an impotent global conspiracy. Jules de Balincourt’s artwork is fixated on depictions of an America on the verge of collapse, contrasting the dark drone of a disaster premonition with the relentlessly colorful spurts of his bright abstractions. Pitting nostalgic depictions of luxury vacation resorts against comically ominous text and the threat of a natural world in crisis, Balincourt’s work often feels like a smiling pastiche of political art– but you get the feeling that his concern for the future is entirely genuine. Terror and humor overlap in a bewitching duality of the kind that only a Frenchman living in New York could hope to produce.

The hardest part of writing a blog post about multimedia artist Carl Kleiner is choosing which pictures to share. Since nearly everything he makes is stunningly beautiful, it’s difficult to determine which images best highlight his genius. Should I post his photographs of everyday objects arranged to produce mind-melting geometric shapes? What about his graceful and stirring series of paper airplane photos? And then there’s the creepy life-size Barbie dolls haunting the uncanny valley with their human faces, and the cute series of self-portraits that features Kleiner trimming his Parent Trap-style imaginary twin’s moustache. And his playfully odd yet classy fashion photography! It’s all so brilliant– so stop reading my gushing hyperbole and go see for yourself.