Another collective noun – today, a Dole of Turtles. When turtles are basking in the sun (as reptiles will do), they will crawl atop one another, jockeying for advantage. Or perhaps they just like it.
The turtle lives ‘twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
– Ogden Nash
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I saw a picture of Chie Aoki’s work on the Art Listings Professional blog and was pretty much blown away. These peculiar transformative sculptures are fairly opaque to me in terms of meaning but as visual object I find them, well, really neato.
All I can find out about Aoki is that she is a 29-year old and graduated from the Kanazawa College of Art from the Craft department. I’m pretty sure there’s more info on Aoki online somewhere, but probably in Japanese, at a guess. I’m kind of reminded of No-Face from the Miyazaki movie Spirited Away but that’s probably just because I’m seeing a Japanese artist and it makes me think of other Japanese cultural references.
There’s a quiet lushness in these surreal figures that plays with the synthetic/organic boundary in a very visually appealing way. More of Chie Aoki’s work can be seen in her fairly extensive Picasa web album portfolio.
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Jonathan Yeo is British artist that makes, among other things, fantastic paintings dealing with plastic surgery. Just a caveat for those of you in mixed company, many of the paintings involve waist-up nudity. Lots of breasts, but no gore.
Hi-Fructose wrote about Yeo recently (well, today) and I was absolutely floored (in a good way) by these exquisite surfaces – and poignant subject matter. I love how he paints skin, and how the paintings remain unfinished, reminding us constantly that these faces and bodies are really just images, perhaps meant to remind us of the transience of our own self-images. Maybe he’s addressing the superficiality of beauty culture, maybe it’s meant as a more Buddhist “live in the now” statement. Maybe it’s an update to the momento mori tradition in Renaissance art. Either way, I love these paintings oh so very much.
…Western culture is obsessed with normalizing the body to fit into a mold deemed more attractive or more “correct.” British artist Jonathan Yeo uses his talent for photorealistic portraiture to explore the way that people subject themselves to plastic surgery in an effort to chase eternal youth and beauty. …the works are at once peaceful and grotesque.
– Hi-Fructose Magazine
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
– Keats, from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Keats said “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”… but what of chasing after elusive standards of beauty? Awesome work. More of Yeo’s work can be seen on his website.
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Ernst Haeckel was a Prussian polymath (scientist, artist, physician, etc.) best known as a champion of evolutionary theory. He was a bit of a character (to put it lightly) and while many of his theories have been discredited such as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and his ahem, theories of Aryan racial superiority, he did come up with now-ubiquitous terms like “anthropogeny”, “phylum”, “phylogeny”, and “ecology” and discovered and named literally thousands of species. More to the point of this blog, however, his work in zoology and comparative anatomy led him to make a metric heckload of amazing illustrations.
Ernst Haeckel – Ascidiae
Kunstformen der Natur (German for Art Forms of Nature) is a book of lithographic and autotype prints by German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Originally published in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904 and collectively in two volumes in 1904, it consists of 100 prints of various organisms, many of which were first described by Haeckel himself. Over the course of his career, over 1000 engravings were produced based on Haeckel’s sketches and watercolors; many of the best of these were chosen for Kunstformen der Natur, translated from sketch to print by lithographer Adolf Giltsch.
– wikipedia
Ernst Haeckel – Discomedusae
So yeah, Ernst Haeckel. Boy, could that guy draw a jellyfish. There’s something deeply mesmerizing about old-timey zoology illustrations but these are downright mind-bending.
Ernst Haeckel – Copepoda
The entirety of the illustrations from Kunstformen der Natur can be found on the Wikipedia entry, along with tons of background information, should you be so inclined.
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Peter Ferguson is a mind-bogglingly talented Montreal illustrator that I have the good fortune to count amongst my friends. Imagine my excitement when I saw that he was mentioned by Hi-Fructose and that he has a current show at Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle.
Ferguson has done work for pretty much every Canadian magazine an illustrator could hope to work for and a slew of heavy-hitter international publications, plus a Marvel comic, plus book illustration et cetera and soforth. I’ve seen his work in galleries before but this is a step in the right direction in my humble opinion, as this guys’s work has to be seen to be believed and a wider audience for his unsettling and visionary work in the art world rocks my socks.
Peter Ferguson was born in Montreal & has lived across Canada, in Argentina, and Japan. I claim to be a raconteur and world-traveller but Peter is the real deal. Clearly this sense of adventure inspires his work. Did I mention that these are oil paintings? His ability to depict light and surface – in classical media, no less – flips my wig.
Ferguson is currently working on a solo exhibition, and he is represented as an illustrator by Three In A Box. More of his work can be seen on his website.
