Adventures with Face Paint

Here are a few things I've done in the last couple of months. First, Miss Katy:

And Taija:

And Andor:

And Phill:

These are some of the photos I got too frustrated to finish posting yesterday. This catches us up a tiny bit more...

Xtranormal #3: Dear Andrew

A very serious letter to my dear, dear friend.

Xtranormal #2: An Epistle of Great Import

I made this after I got annoyed with a lady at my Tae Kwon Do school.

My First Xtranormal Movie

I am admittedly obsessed with this website right now.

One of the Coolest Things Ever. By Blu.

Peter Lorenz's Photostream is Why I Don't Grade Papers Anymore.

Okay, so this is one of those times when I have to write without being embarrassed what the subjects of whom I speak may think about it. Hero worship of one's friends can be an uncomfortable thing to expose, but I'm going to go ahead and put that discomfort in brackets: [discomfort].

I have a huge crush on Peter's talent. His commercial venture is Blend Photography, which is all about beautifully candid keepsake photographs from weddings. They are gorgeous and I am so happy that he can make money that way, but his range as a photographer is very broad. His sensitivity and cleverness, not to mention sheer technical skill with that machine, keeps my jaw dropping every time he posts something new on facebook. He always makes our awesome friends look as beautiful as they are, too.

Here are a few gems I cherry-picked from his enormous photostream:

This one is from a photo shoot he did in Gary, Indiana. Mmmm.

And here is his gorgeous partner Alona, one of his constant favorite subjects. There must be hundreds of her, and they are some of my favorites. There's love all over that lens.

Here is one of my favorites from his shoot at Bele Chere this past summer. These fuckers are always around at big downtown events, hilariously outnumbered.

I love how beautiful and interesting he makes Asheville life look. It makes me a little nostalgic.

Here's one from the LAAF Festival that happens every summer in Asheville, from the infamous Bicycle Jousting event.

Anyhow, just pop some popcorn and watch his photostream sometime. I plan on spending a couple more hours doing just that later today.

Holy Crap, Chris Natrop!

I have been pretty enthusiastic about enormous paper cutout work, wall decals, etc. lately, and this shit blows me away. I might have to get some enormous pieces of black paper, an overhead projector, and an incredibly erasable pencil and give it a go myself. Check out this guy's website here.

Now accepting design submissions for objects that will hold together when negative space is cut out. Anyone?

By the way, I found it via Aesthetic Outburst, a great little design blog by Abbey Hendrickson, a baby-makin', sewin', design-lovin' upstate New Yorker.

Re-Photography: Pomo Orgasmo

I have a crush on this blog, Re-Photography. Their little manifesto reads, "Appreciation of the photographic moving image that is from elsewhere, a grab, a microexpression that we make a still of, revealing the scratch, the scan line, the layering, the double, the blur, the skew." 

The concept, of course, is to post images that are reconstituted from originals. There are photos of photos, or photos of television frames. Despite the differences in content, the longer I stare at reams of these images, the more the whole collection starts to seem like random snatches from a great sea of undifferentiated static. Each one seems somehow forlorn, or perhaps foreboding, but all together, they seem to me like a horde of sad ghosts, profoundly arbitrary and vacuous. Alright, now that I've maxed out my touchy-feely bullshit allowance for the day, you should just go see it. 

Let's Build a World Out of Wire.

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is mostly famous for his mobiles, which are impressive, precariously-balanced structures made from spindly bits of wire attached to brightly-colored, flat shapes and shards of...stuff. Anyway, very nice things. It turns out that Calder actually invented the mobile, according to Wikipedia. Another article raised a question about that particular fact, but I wasn't alive in 1931, and I'm willing to wager that you weren't, either. Besides, I don't want to talk about mobiles. I want to talk about his somewhat lesser-known wire works.

...or maybe just not talk about it at all.

These make me happy.

(It made a poopy!)

...I would like to live in this guy's world, inhabit his imagination, just for a day or two. Nevertheless, he is no longer living, and I would need a lot of heavy drugs to trick myself into thinking it was happening. Does anyone want to help me fill up rooms and rooms full of wire sculptures? We'll skip the acid and just drink lots of coffee, maybe.