Painter Alyssa Monks

If you like the charade: is this real or not? is this a painting or is this a photo? you will love the New Yorker Alyssa Monks. She masters paintings with wet and naked people taking baths, showers or just hanging out (still wet and naked). As eper her own site: "Monks’s work explores narrative figuration. Currently she is playing with the tension between abstraction and realism in the same work, using different filters to visually distort and disintegrate the body." Alyssa has been awarded a Grant for Painting from the Elizabeth Greensheilds Foundation three times.

I love how she plays with an artful realism with the water and its forms. Wet flesh texture, glass, vapor, transparency and fog. 

I don't know, but I feel like taking a hot shower!

Bunkwaa - Street Illustrator from Australia

             

For the past two years Bunkwaa has been creating and selling his illustrations on King st, in Newtown (Australia). He has made approximately 1400 funny characters. His cartoons have appeared in newspapers, magazines, websites and books fro example. Bunkwaa is also an Art Teacher at the Pine Street Creative Center. According to Bunkwaa, busking in Newtown is awesome and he adds: "I'm always along side painters, musicians, poets and street artists. Creating my art out on the street has been like working in an open air studio, where I get instant feedback about my art from people wandering by; from complements to harsh criticism."

Bunkwaa is the one in the middle!

Bunkwaa Blog: http://www.bunkwaa.blogspot.com/

Bunkwaa Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwippy/

Bunkwaa Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/bunkwaa

Also, a great and leading art reference site from Australia is ArtsHUB, but you've got pay for it!

From Me to You - Jamie Beck

               

If you like photography, a great photo-blog is From Me to You by Jamie Beck. The blog was carefully designed by Kevin Burg to look like a pin board displaying memorable pictures. The photos are whimsical with strong colors and a well defined area focus. You will be delighted (and hungry!) with the food pictures and amazed by the city shots. Jamie can extract the perfect angles and add an artful pallete to her work. You know those pictures that incite you to visit the place, eat the food, to live? Those are Jamie's pics. It is worth checking out and have fun!

     

 

Jamie takes lots of pictures of herself. They are superb!

Thanks, Jamie, continue on your path!

Banksy - street artist

This is one artist I totally love. His art is controvertial, political and critical. Acording to Wikipedia, Banksy is a pseudonymous British graffiti artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate, South Gloucestershire, near Bristol and to have been born in 1974, but his identity is unknown. Some people asserts that Banksy's work is simply vandalism. In 2004, Banksy hung a painting of the Monalisa with a yellow smiley face at Louvre.

    

   

   

   

   

Banksy has several books and, recently, he released his first film, Exit Through The Gift Shop, at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

Ever since I saw a book of his works, I feel in love with his street art. I think is uneasy and funny!

Matisyahu + Dub Echoes Documentary

               
Last weekend, I had the pleasure to listen live to Matisyahu at Circo Voador in Lapa (Rio de Janeiro - Brazil). I don´t know why but I arrived four hours before the show and had to wait. I decided to have garlic pizza with a catupiry cheese filled boarder and to watch a documentary about dub called "Dub Echoes" produced by Bruno Natal. It was amazing how the fans were calmly seated down listening to a two hour documentary before the show. Matisyahu definitly attracts a distinguished audience.

“Dub Echoes is a documentary that traces the origins of the Jamaican dub music and it’s influence on the development of hip hop and electronic music.The film shows how the Jamaican invention called dub ended up influencing much of the music we hear today, from electronic music to hip-hop, transforming the studio in a musical instrument and giving way to all of sonic experiments.”

“Dub Echoes” was produced by a Brazilian crew in Kingston (Jamaica), London (UK), NY, Washington, LA (US), Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Brazil). It was appointed as the best dub documentary ever. It is definitly worth watching.

Some of the greatest dub music references given in the documentary are:

2MANYDJS, ABA SHANTI-I, ADAM FREELAND, AUDIO BULLYS, BASEMENT JAXX, BEAT JUNKIES, BILL LASWELL, BLACK ALIEN, BULLWACKIE, BUNNY LEE, CONGO NATTY, DAVID KATZ, DENNIS BOVELL, DJ SPOOKY, DON LETTS, DR. DAS, DREADZONE, DUB PISTOLS, G-CORP, GLYN BUSH, GUSSIE CLARKE, HOWIE B, KING JAMMY, KODE 9, LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY, LTJ BUKEM, MAD PROFESSOR, MARCELO YUKA, MARIO CALDATO JR., MUTABARUKA, NAÇÃO ZUMBI, PETER KRUDER, ROOTS MANUVA, SLY & ROBBIE, STEVE BARROW, SWITCH, THIEVERY CORPORATION, U-ROY, VICTOR “TICKLAH” AXELROD & ZION TRAIN.

Watch "Dub Echoes" trailer here and also watch Bruno Natal´s portunol (portuguese + spanish) interview for the website El Parlante Amarillo here!

Yoko Furusho - Ilustration

I love Japanese artists. They are always so tender and subtle. Here is Yoko, an "Tokyo" illustrator based in NY.

Yoko also has shoes with her designs:

Rodolpho Parigi - Brazilian Painter

The Group 2000&8 was appointed by managize Veja as the promissing artists in the city of Sao Paulo (Brazil) what concerns painting, sculpture and collage. Ana Elisa Egreja, Bruno Dunley, Marcos Brias, Marina Rheingentz, Regina Parra, Renata de Bonis, Rodolpho Parigi and Rodrigo Bivar are those eight artists.

One painter that particularly called my attention was Rodolpho Parigi. He decided to become a painter with 25 years old during a sabbatic trip to Spain where he cried for 7 hours straight in front of a Rubens painting. Back to Brazil, he got a scholarship at FAAP, a prestigous university in Sao Paulo and, from that moment on, he has dedicated each minute to painting. In 2009, he was selected for Cité of Arts, an artistic residency in Paris.

Rodolpho is now 31 years old, he lives at Aclimacao neighborhood with his family, his mom is a needlewoman, his paintings range from 5.000 to 20.000 reais, he is loaded of painting requests and life is good!

Diego Stocco

In a rainy day, the Italian sound designer and composer Diego Stocco was moving some sandbags out of his backyard when he noticed the interesting sound that they made. That's when it all started: music from sand. Diego "creates eclectic musical experiences with custom built instruments and experimental recording techniques".

You can watch online how he does that in his own website or at Vimeo!

We feel fine - Jonathan Harris

            
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar designed "We feel fine" to explore and explain the human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds, the system records the sentence up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). A really interesting thing is that further information sucha as age, gender, weather, and geographical location of the author can also be extracted.

We Feel Fine is a live almanaque of human feelings structured in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

                                 Metrics:

                                 Murmurs:

Try it here!

Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray & Love

One of my finnest resources to scape the crazy talks of my co-workers is to listen to online videos. For that matter, I love TED! TED is an online conference site that bring together people from three worlds: technology, entertainment and design. One speech that I liked a lot was Elizabeth´s. The author of Eat, Pray and Love talks about the artist X geniuses concept and shares a different way to think about creative genius.

I particularly like the passage that begins at the 10th minute and 12th second. She quotes one fine 90-year-old poet, Ruth Stone, about criativity and inspiration.

Check the movie trailler for Eat, Pray and Love with Julia Roberts!

Joshua Allen Harris and his Air Bear

Amazing urban art on the streets of New York has provoked a joyous reaction for the passing foot traffic. Joshua Allen Harris creates inflatable animals by tying plastic shopping bags to the subway grates. When a train passes, they come to life. Its just lovely to walk among plastic dogs, bears and huge monsters. Check it out here! 

              

Gaping Void

Recently, I´ve came across a great cartoonist, Hugh MacLeod. He has the ability to take the most complex subjects: Emotions, Business Challenges, Angst, Love, and reduce these feelings into a few words and some scribbles.

You can check his gallery online or purchase his work. Also, you can receive a daily cartoon in your inbox if you subscribe to his site!

Antoinette-Fleur

Antoinette-Fleur is a great French sensation newadays what concerns fashion + art. She has a wonderful hand for subtle and delightful body lines. She also does portraits of some famous boys for Gala Megazine: Robert Pattinson, Tom Burton and Johnny Deep.