Thursday, January 26, 2012

Members of the Society

As mentioned in an earlier post, though I'm brand new to Society6, I've already discovered so many wonderful artists and pieces of artwork posted there! Here are some favorites for now, but there really are so many... more that I've marked can be found here.
(Click titles/names to see the images on each artist's profile)
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In preparation for the journey: Angela Fox


Scales: Steven Womack


DG Aztec No. 2: Dawn Gardner


All That Glitters: Terry Fan


Bic Biro drawing on vintage envelope: Mark Powell


Bubo Bubo: Helen Vine


Valkyrie: Jamie Mitchell


Tree Rings: Rachael Shankman


Magic Wand: Brandi Strickland


Ursa Major: Anai Greog


Sunset Cat: Ola Liola


Additionally, the timing happens to be extra good for this post: there's a special running now on Society6 for free shipping worldwide through Sunday!

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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Studio Shots

I've been compiling a collection of the working spaces of different artists and designers over on Pinterest: I love catching a glimpse of where the process occurs! Here's a small handful of some favorites, both vintage and contemporary! Click description for the original source.


Cy Twombly

Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard


Emily Joyce


Maira Kalman


Brigitte Bardot by artist unknown


Elke Sommer


Emily Cox


Jockum Nordström


Isabelle Hayes from YeYe Design and Vintage


Karie from Shelter


Frida Kahlo


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And for a bit of a winter soundtrack, I made a short new mix over on 8tracks... eight tracks of shadowy vintage magic for the cold days.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Swiss Mysteries: Pictures from 1969














The other day I spent a little time going back through some old scans and came across these cool images from a 1969 Swiss music magazine that I got at one of my fantastic friend Jimmy's amazing yard sales.

When I uploaded these scans originally, I didn't make note of the title or anything other than the year of publication, which is really a bad habit - one that fortunately I've managed to get much better about! Because isn't it so frustrating when you see the coolest stuff out there on the internet and have no idea what or who it is, where it came from or who made it? Sometimes things are traceable (there's an amazing website called TinEye that can often track down a source for the image), but often they're too obscure to find. And even if you never plan on sharing an image and putting it out there into the immense open world of the internet, isn't it just nice to have that reference for the future, when - like me in this moment - you're looking at these pictures saved long ago in your own collection, have only the slightest clue about them, and the original magazine/book/whatever it may be, is hiding stealthily in a stack or pile somewhere among countless others.

In my own defense for this particular situation, at least these were printed in a language I can't read or understand! And I do have to admit that despite the importance of documentation, sometimes there is a bit of magic in not knowing the full story...



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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

New on Society6!




Over the weekend, I added several pieces to a new page on Society6. It's exciting to see what some of the drawings and paintings look like on tangible objects such as cases and skins for iphones and ipods, and there are also stretched canvases, regular art prints and framed prints!
Hopefully I'll be able to get some laptop skins up soon as well, and definitely some brand new designs and patterns that will be unique to that site alone.






I started saving some favorite images that I've come across on this site so far, and am looking forward to sharing them in a future post! So many beautiful designs from artists all around the world... definitely an inspiration.

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Thursday, January 12, 2012

::::\\ Drawing Days //::::



I've been really enjoying drawing faces lately. They're something I've loved to draw my entire life, but I guess sometimes you just break away from things for awhile. When we were little my brother would tease me a bit for always drawing glamourized fashion-type portraits, and he was right because I really did - they weren't great of course, but I had a lot of fun doing them. I'd get a lot of influence from all the sewing patterns and things like the Vogue Sewing magazines my grandmother had around her house. She had so many patterns in her sewing room, and I remember looking through the ones she'd kept from the '60s and '70s and tons from the '80s of course, and I just loved the illustrations on them!

Drawing "days", well... I guess a more accurate title for this post would be "drawing nights," but anyway. Just a few things in-progress that I've been sketching on for fun. . .

Hope to have some new projects finished up soon!



Friday, January 6, 2012

Zanis Waldheims: Geometric Abstractions




Thanks to the magic of the internet, I began to see images by Latvian-born artist and philosopher Zanis Waldheims (1909-1993) popping up all over the place - - - a very fortunate thing, because otherwise I'm not sure how I would have ever heard of him!
Over the course of his lifetime, he developed a theory of geometric abstraction that he expressed in his artwork: a series of over 600 pieces that mostly seem to be made late in his life.

Zanis Waldheims' grandson describes the immensely in-depth artistic planning and process for each piece in an amazing set he shares on flickr: "Each object, curve, line represents a philosophical concept or the interplay of more than one concept. In a very real sense, the images are an abstraction of those ideas and an attempt to find unity between them.
To my grandfather, the articulation of a unifying philosophy in visual form drove his production, and he has written copious amounts on this idea. Once the correspondence of shapes to ideas is understood, then it becomes possible to decode the individual pieces of art."

According to documenter Yves Jeanson (a friend of the artist for 35 years), "For Waldheims, geometrical abstraction consists in imagining a set of rules, associated to a set of primary geometrical forms, to illustrate and/or give an visual idea of the complexity of the human thought, in a language which seeks at the same time sensibility and reason."

These colorful images are just beautiful!



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Life of Zanis Waldheims