Alex Gross makes long-dead Victorians into pop culture stars
How cool are these works by Alex Gross?
Alex Gross
They are mixed media pieces which take vintage Cabinet cards (those little Victorian portrait photographs like the example on the left) and transforming them into pop culture characters (as on the right).
You can see a whole range of the finished cards on his website – well worth a browse through. If you’re hoping to see more of Alex’s work he has a solo exhibition, Product Placement, coming up at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery – 25 Feb-24 Mar – in New York.
Fans who cannot get to NYC should keep an eye on Amazon for his upcoming book, Now and Then: The Cabinet Card Paintings of Alex Gross. It doesn’t appear to have a listing yet but according to his Facebook page it should be up in about a month.
Sandman - Alex Gross
(Via io9)
Did you see this gorgeous high res ‘blue marble’ picture that NASA uploaded to their Flickr account?
Blue marble view of earth. Photo: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
If I didn’t make the effort to do otherwise, I could EASILY devote this entire art blog to the stunning photos that NASA makes publicly and freely available (and which I am so grateful that they do).
Unlike the solar flare picture, I know exactly how this one was created – it’s actually a composite image made from pictures of swathes of the surface of the planet taken by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The VIIRS is aboard the satellite Suomi NPP.
You can get an idea for how detailed the image really by looking at the partial image below – it’s taken from the original sized image which is far too big (8,000 x 8,000 px) to fit more than a tiny bit of it on the screen in one go.
Lithuanian photographer creates tiny planets via photostitching
Tranquility park - Paulius (reproduced under CC licence)
Paulius (I’m afraid I only have the Flickr username to go by) has created these great panorama planets by stitching together a collection of photos taken from the same vantage point but turned a little each time.
It’s something I’ve seen done before but these really stood out because the positioning of the object in the frame is so dependent on the shape of the skyline from each ‘planet’. The one above is particularly beautiful, thrown off-centre by the trees and with some lovely vignetting in the corners.
Planet City Square - Paulius (reproduced under CC licence)
The Sun is squirting into interplanetary space
Image: NASA/SDO/GOES-15
I saw this image in the paper the other day and resolved to find out more about it. NASA gives it the following caption:
Still from video of Jan 19, 2012 long duration solar flare and coronal mass ejection (CME) which is expect to reach Earth on Jan 21, 2012.
So (having established that 21 Jan has been and gone and was clearly nothing to worry about) what the heck is a solar flare?
A solar flare is an intense burst of radiation which is caused by plasma (electrically charged gas) slamming into the surface of the Sun. Basically a massive explosive event.
And what the heck is a coronal mass ejection?
A coronal mass ejection is when, instead of colliding violently with the surface of the Sun as with the solar flare, the plasma is directed outward and – as NASA explains – is “squirted out into interplanetary space”.
Both types of explosion release a LOT of radiation of all wavelengths which apparently affects the Earth’s local space weather.
I couldn’t find out much about the imaging equipment that records pictures like the one above but I would assume it records ultraviolet wavelengths and converts them into colour images. Ultraviolet radiation monitoring seems to be the most common way of measuring coronal activity and plasma caught in the magnetic loops of the corona gives off ultraviolet light so that would make sense.
Don’t you think it’s a little odd that the conversion from UV to the visible spectrum has been set as blue and green, though? It makes the sun look like a strange version of earth with a particularly vicious aurora!
The marvellous martian art of Alvim Correa
Martian fighting machines destroy a town in England - Alvim Correa
While perusing the British Library’s new print service I found several beautiful works by Alvim Correa. They’re deep in early science fiction territory and have a wonderful sort of Batteries-Not-Included-meets-Hammer-Horror flavour to them.
Digging a little deeper (thanks, Portuguese Wikipedia!) I found out that the illustrator’s full name is Henrique Alvim Corrêa – a Brazilian artist working in Belgium around the turn of the twentieth century who specialised in science fiction art. There was also a smidge of military art and a touch of erotica in his oeuvre but his most famous work illustrating a 1906 French language edition of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
The Martians Arrive - Alvim Correa
Happily Abebooks actually has a copy up for sale and the item blurb attests to the splendour of the image work. Sadly the book is listed at £5632.62 and is therefore not within my whimsical purchase budget.
The reason that Correa’s work isn’t more well known is, I think, down to a couple of things. The first is that the 1906 version of The War of the Worlds only had a print run of 500 making copies of the work today both rare and out of normal price range. As such I’m guessing the images haven’t really circulated as they might have. The second is that Correa died young – he only lived to be 34 years old. This isn’t always a barrier to fame but it does mean there wasn’t as much work as perhaps there could have been.
The Martian Fighting Machines in the Thames Valley - Alvim Correa
It does strike me as odd that Taschen haven’t seen fit to bring out a coffee table book of his illustrations but until they do we must make do with images from the internet and be thankful for the “lifetime of the artist plus 70 years” copyright rule…
Martian fighting machine battles with warship Thunder Child - Alvim Correa
British Library launches online print service
The British Library has just launched an on-demand print service meaning you can own many of the stunning (and in some cases world renowned) images from the Library archives.
The service, which operates in association with Magnolia Box – a company who facilitate the sale of visual content – promises to
[Open] up the vast range of the British Library’s collection items, the prints available include images from past and present British Library exhibitions, such as gold-covered illustrations from medieval royal manuscripts and exquisite hand drawn maps. Also available are gems from the British Library archives, from Victorian circus posters, advertising the freakish and bizarre, to classic 1920’s fashion images.
The images on offer come in most of the usual gallery gift shop formats – framed and unframed prints, canvases, postcards and greeting cards. Sadly no word on printed teatowels. If you’re not London-based the online service has the added bonus of delivering straight to your door.
Prices start at £2.50 for a postcard and rise to £115 for the largest framed canvas print.
Oh, and I’d like to make an early bet on what the most popular print will be…
Note to editors:
Magnolia Box creates custom print on demand solutions for visual content owners.
They help artists, photographers, galleries, museums, publishers and picture libraries to sell their content online using their own dedicated e-commerce website or in-store kiosk. www.magnoliabox.com
Possibly the BEST Valentine’s Day card in the world
I challenge any of you to find a better Valentine’s Day card than this:
Pride & Prejudice Valentine's card - Mr Teacup
Seriously. Consider my gauntlet thrown down.
Pride and Prejudice/Mr Darcy Valentine’s Day card – $4.40 on Etsy
Carl Kleiner returns to organise more things beautifully
Carl Kleiner for Ikea
You may remember Carl Kleiner for his recipe book photography a couple of years ago which, rather than offering up the traditional sugar and flour porn, neatly organised the ingredients on coloured backgrounds. Since then he’s done a number of things including an ad campaign for the reward program Avios which keeps catching my eye on the tube. But most of all I’m really enjoying his work with furniture empire Ikea, whose products lend themselves to Kleiner’s clean geometric style with fabulous ease.
Carl Kleiner for Ikea
Carl Kleiner for Ikea
Carl Kleiner for Ikea
Carl Kleiner for Ikea
You can see all of Kleiner’s previous projects on www.carlkleiner.com
Are you the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012?
The Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012 competition is accepting entries, so what I’d like to know is have any of you ever entered or considered entering?
I ask because I’ve been going every year for the best part of a decade and you do start to see names cropping up again and again so I was wondering whether a lot of people enter but only a small group repeatedly make the grade/chime with what the judges like or whether the entrants are largely the same from year to year.
Every time the contest comes up I wonder whether I have anything worth submitting, but unfortunately the only animal photos I have that I would even vaguely consider submitting are ones taken at wildlife parks or zoos or of family pets. I say unfortunately, not because I love the pictures any less for being of domestic or captive animals, but because the WPOTY rules state what NOT to enter includes:
- Images of family pets or farm animals or cultivated plants.
- Except when illustrating an issue for inclusion in The World in Our Hands, The Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered Species or The Wildlife Photojournalist Award:
- Images of restrained animals
- Images of animal models or any other animals being exploited for profit
- Images of captive animals
I have a couple of thing which sit in a sort of grey area though, so I’m tempted to spend £20 on sending in the CenterParcs squirrel photo below. Nothing ventured and all that!
Squirreled Away - Philippa Warr
The competition closes on 23 February at 23.59
Inspired by places: From The Road at Eleven Gallery
Rob Carter - Travelling Still, Tulip Fields, Holland, XIV, 2006 (courtesy of Eleven)
Eleven Fine Art gallery is currently hosting From the Road – a group exhibition exploring artists’ relationships with their location and environments. The locations include London, Havana, Iceland, Holland and more and the artists are:
Rob Carter, Harry Cory Wright, Rick Giles, Ken Griffiths, Paul Hill, Jane Hilton, Josef Hoflehner, Peter Newman, Sam Pelly, Wim Wenders and David Yarrow.
You can see my favourite images in this blog post but I would definitely recommend going to the gallery in person – Rob Carter’s Tulip Fields manages to look almost three dimensional with its ribbons of colour and you can’t get that effect from looking at this image on the screen.
In case you were wondering, he created the photo using a rotating lens, rather than travelling at hundreds of miles an hour.
Rick Giles - The Last Gasp, 2011 (courtesy of Eleven)
Rick Giles’ photo was the one which made me visit the exhibition in the first place. It reminds me of the beautiful Per Pulverum Ad Astrum series by Eva Stenram where she created negatives from NASA images of Mars and then left them around her flat to collect scratches and dust.
Peter Newman - London, St Mary Axe, 2008 (courtesy of Eleven)
Peter Newman’s piece made use of a vintage wide angle lens attached to a digital camera with great results. The image is called St Mary Axe (after the street which contains the Gherkin – 30 St Mary Axe) and illustrates something I’ve noticed about images of London – namely that the Gherkin seems to be gradually coming to the fore as a symbol of modern London, usurping things like the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben and the London Eye. Perhaps that’s because while tourists still flock to see the traditional skyline pieces, those of us who live and work in London tend not to go to those areas and we become used to very different landmarks?
From the Road, until 17 March, Eleven Fine Art (SW1W 9LX)
