Jiro Bevis is an illustrator with a rad name, a killer set of design skills and a knack for picking up on the grotesque element of everything from pizza pies to Nike sneakers. It’s fun to hop between categories on his website, picking out the signature elements and marveling at the variety of their deployment.
Bevis also distributes his work gracefully across a variety of mediums: tee shirts, silk screens, and so forth, some of it available for purchase at quite reasonable prices. Anyone looking to redecorate his or her clubhouse?
Jimmy Giegerich has a sequential collection titled Rude Dudes With Bad ‘Tudes, and we think that epithet describes his illustrations and comics well: they’re loud, funny, often gruesome and totally rad. Check out Giegerich’s work here and tell him we sent ya!
If you had a personal in-house artist to illustrate your nightmares (and maybe a couple of your dreams), the result would be something like Dantes Wharf.
Not sure what the overarching scheme of the site is, but it sure as hell does a good job at assembling all the classic nightmare signifiers in one place. We’ve got hominid skeletons, beady-eyed reptiles, de-gloved arms, swirling indescribable polygons, disturbing girls with Princess Leia buns, overenthusiastic canines, aliens, freaky kids, ultrasound machines, jellyfish, robots, anthropomorphism, googly eyes, human hearts, the food pyramid, blood, guts, horns, beaks, contorted mannequins and so much more.
The browsing might give you a heart attack but, hey, what’s a heart attack now and then? It’s worth it. We promise.
Joshua Ben Longo’s monsters weave together the darling and the disgusting. These hand-crafted creations beckon to you for a hug, in spite of their viciousness. Longo’s Monster Skin Chair looks like something Max might feel rather comfortable lounging about it. Students at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn have the privilege of studying in Longo’s three-dimensional design classes, where they basically learn how to make the raddest halloween costumes ever.
The rumpus never stops. Up top, a wild things bento by cookingformonkeys for a very lucky recipient. Bonus points for the inclusion of healthy carrot sticks, red peppers and edamame. Gotta keep yourself in tree-swinging condition. One question: what is the crown made of?
Second, an impressive entry into the growing category of wild things baked goods. This cinnabon streusal cake by cakebreak includes a Moishe made of fondant with lovingly detailed spikes and an excessively honkable nose.
The artist Petah Coyne refers to her sculptures as “girls”, and who’s to argue with her? At a given exhibition you’ll find the girls suspended from the ceiling or stationed on the floor, their anatomies formed of earth, trees, branches, roots, silk flowers, ribbons, wax, hair, chicken wire, plywood, rubber, tar, hay, sand, taxidermy and….other stuff. Lots of it.
The Oklahama City-born and NYC resident cites as her influences Dutch still lifes, baroque sculpture, her strict Catholic upbringing, Miss Havisham (from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The artist engineers her sculptures to look delicate but they’re actually behemoths, weighing enough to crush a human if they fell from the ceiling. Some of them are layered in 75 coats of wax. Others resemble wedding dresses. You could easily stare at a Coyne sculpture for two hours and still not exhaust the interpretive possibilities of the work, which can’t be said for most contemporary sculpture—even the best of it.
Two young girls striving to understand the mysterious, dangerous world: that’s what The Spirit of the Beehive is about. It’s not a film about plot, so why even bother describing the handful of vignettes that drift together to form its sparse narrative? It’s a universal story set in a specific time and a particular place: a tiny town on the desolate Castillian plains, just after the Spanish Civil War. That atmosphere is captured with shocking intimacy, and there’s a subtle political subtext running throughout– but there’s a sense that all of that context is just icing on the cake in this uncompromising portrayal of childhood.
The things you are likely to take away form The Spirit of the Beehive are: mid-afternoon light pouring through honeycomb windows; the capacity in children for complex cruelty and fearless sacrifice; the unpredictable power of cinema. Opening on the seemingly inconsequential event of a mobile cinema rolling into an isolated village with a print of James Whale’s Frankenstein, the film unfolds like a dream haunted by the images in that seminal monster movie. By the time you’ve absorbed all that The Spirit of the Beehive has to offer, you too will find yourself inextricably possessed– not by Frankenstein, but by the unforgettable images of Victor Erice’s masterpiece.
Oakland artist Swampdonkey is best known for his charming illustrations of wooly glass-eyed beasts boasting snarling tusks and jagged teeth. But those unshakable images, tagged on the walls of abandoned buildings and scrawled across yellowed paperback pages represent only one side of Swampy’s creative output. He’s also an extremely talented photographer, documenting his thrilling train-hopping travels through frantically captured breathtaking vistas and sublime portraits of crusty characters.
Perhaps most remarkable about Swampdonkey’s multidisciplinary body of work is just how comfortably his photographic aesthetic fits in with his illustrated one. Flipping through the images on his Flickr page, you get the impression that, while we know little about the man behind the moniker, he has an intimate understanding of himself, depicting his world with whatever tools are handy but always leaving an unmistakable signature of passionate autonomy.
British artist Sophie Alda’s pastel colored gouache paintings of mystical monsters and hoardes of sweatpant-wearing middle-aged folk are lovely and endearing, with occasional glimpses of unsettling humor shining through the confectionary sweetness.
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