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

Not only do we love Jon Boam’s mural at digital marketing and communications agency Code Computerlove, we love the process photographs on Boam’s blog that illustrate paintings-in-action (as well as selected shenanigans, naturally.) See here for more.

Gabi Kricheli’s sculptures and paintings are occasionally gruesome, occasionally pastoral and always intricate. We love the colors and the shapes and the abstractions and the crazy nuanced details. It’s not easy to describe, Kricheli’s work, but it is always worthwhile to spend time studying it.

Thank goodness for the web: it allows artists like Mark Mulroney to amass their high-concept weirdness into one viewing zone for home audiences to pore over. We dig the site’s surreal categorical distinctions almost as much as the work contained within: collages, drawings, scanned sketchbooks and more. Give it a look.

We’re fatally enchanted by Dadu Shin’s sketchbook pages, each scanned and documented online for voyeuristic sketchbook-snoopers to page through. Delightful!

As if it weren’t rad enough that artist Joe Biel names Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel as influences, he has to go and paint the most amazing primates we’ve ever seen. The elegance and detail of the paintings puts them on par with nature documentaries in terms of realism, but they’ve also got a subtle and alert creepiness that coexists with a strangely tranquil quality. Zoinks! These monkeys make us feel weird in the best way possible.

Painter, filmmaker and sculptress Allison Schulnik has complex conceptions of doom and gloom. She’s a natural creator with a formidable intellect and a far-reaching curiosity— someone who can talk about art as well as she produces it. Schulnik’s oneiric paintings of long-haired hobos, Klaus Kinski, monkey heads, clowns, skeletons, black cats transmute the strange subjects into striking totems; the results are not what you’d expect.

“I seem to be drawn to sad characters,” the artist explains in a Fecal Face interview. “The forlorn reject. Something about being on the outside. The outcast… I’m not really interested in what’s accepted by people. I like the things, places and characters that have been forsaken. On both sides of the field. The happy genius fool and the pathetic misfit. I guess I like drama.”

Check out more of the interview here. We also love that Schulnik fills her non-art-making time with making music, eating cheeseburgers and dancing. Whatta life!

Colombia-born Juanita Cardenas has lived in Bogota, Miami, New York, Buenos Aires and Barcelona. Her drawings? We love ‘em. Her puppets? Freaky and rad. Cardenas has a talent with color (dig her virtuosic use of pink—not an easy hue!) and an eye for unexpectedly pleasing compositions; there’s no doubt about either of those things.

We’re equally entranced, however, by the artist’s sketchbooks, which are been scanned and offered up for greedy eyes to devour. Each turning of the page reveals a fresh experiment, whether that be a figure drawing or a tangle of lines or a rainbow of abstracted faces, like sherbet spilled across the paper. Totally enchanting.

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.

Jaakko Pallasvuo has a name that sounds like a smoked Finnish delicacy and an aesthetic that blends wintry spareness with controlled riots of emotion.

Pallasvuo’s production rate and versatility are both impressive. There are the books and zines, a rewarding and oft-updated Flickr account, an alarming knack for painting beautiful scenes of distress and dischord, and an entertainingly stream-of-conscious tumblr to top it all off.

The website is set up so that it’s easy and fun to tour the premises of Pallasvuo’s impressive brain. Think of it as a mini-vacation of the mind, and eyeballs.

Andrea Carlson’s paintings have names that would seem to belong to late-eighties grindcore bands: “Cannibal Ferox”, “The Poison That Is It’s Own Cure”, “Vaster Empire” and “End of Trail”. These are extremely alluring titles, promising high-tempo paintings with aggro lyrics and long wavy hair. Happily, the paintings do not disappoint.

Carlson is a wacky genius, drawing on an encyclopedic breadth of objects and topics for her work. In her statement she writes, “The objects and texts represented in my work are displayed hovering like holy icons, floating and centered on the page. As these objects dangle over the seashore like a carrot, the shore rises up, itself fluid, all-consuming and assimilating as the earth takes back and buries it’s histories.”

To which we can only say, “Aw, hell yeah,” and pump our fists in agreement.