The Mother Lode of Awesome New-To-Me Art and Design

I hit a jackpot today in my design blog nerding routine, so what follows is just a totally self-indulgent list of links which, incidentally, you may enjoy. Some are rights-managed, but the ones that appear here are not. Be sure to check out the others, though.

Very pretty things here, including free downloads of super high-quality images like the one below.

Next, you'll want to check out Texture Lovers, found via How About Orange. Par exemplo:

Next up that I somehow found is this guy Tycho's photostream. Go see it! I love all the vintage designs and typography fetish stuff. I can't put up examples because he doesn't give permissions, but you can look. *Wink.*

Holy crap, Fiodor Sumkin. I want this stuff all over the walls of my life.

Ansel Olsen. Yum.

And last but not least, a new line of free hand-drawn fonts here, and then (whew) still more free fonts here at Font Squirrel, at least a few of which are gorgeous. These lovely decorative dingbats caught my eye.

Oh. My. Paper.

Oh oh oh I could just explode my little head with excitement over this website I just found via All Things Lovely. I foresee spending way, way, way too much money at Paper Mojo. I mean, I click on my pet color range under "browse by color" and I get more pages than I can scan through in a day, full of things like this:

Somebody stop me.

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.

La Coiffure, le Cheval, et la Maison

The latest from BibliOdyssyey is a brilliant overview of satirical drawings and etchings from the 18th century, all about the enormous and elaborate high-class hairstyles that English ladies were attempting to copy from equally ridiculous French ladies on the other side of the pond.

Apparently, though, the ship-buried-in-hair was no joke. Women really did this. The accompanying article at BibliOdyssey is rather fascinating, if you want to know more.

Here's a very bizarre one from a collection of old prints on the theme of horse anatomy. You can see the entire 2006 post it comes from here.

Which reminds me...I am really looking forward to moving into a new place and starting to decorate. I have had a major itch to nest for a long time now, ever since everything in my life got yanked up by the roots when I left Asheville. Actually, it was probably happening before that, since I never fully moved in to the house in the woods--as soon as I had started settling in there, I was uncomfortable. Then I fell in love with someone who lived three hours away. Anyhow, it has been a long time since I have lived anywhere where I felt present, like it was in any way intelligent or even psychologically possible to get attached. But when I start making things for my walls, I want a big miscellaneous frame cluster stretching across a corner with things like this in the frames.

This light, spritzy rain is lovely. 

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.

The Poster for Sept. 26th Show

Poster for the Sept. 26th show, with art by Courtney Chappell.

Bohemians at Hotel Know It All, Be Advised

 

You've just got to blow this one up really large to appreciate it. This one comes from another great blog called Strange Maps that I wish the author (Frank Jacobs, I think?) would update more regularly. 

The next part of this story is that after I read the post attached to this map, I then tracked down the link to moonbuggy, where it came from...and I nearly peed myself when I pressed 'random image' and came up with this:

HAAAAA! ...and it just kept getting better after that. Go there. See it.

Oh, Julian!

Looking forward to checking up on Mr. Montague's latest work every day has become a regular part of life lately. I get very excited about it. I highly recommend The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification for those of you who understand the joy of bizarre information systems and taxonomies. Maybe sometime I will figure out how to articulate the other thing I love so much about it: what it is that is so eloquent about these images of broken, abandoned, de-purposed commercial waste. But don't hold your breath. You can get it here on Amazon, or see a photostream, or check out the main page and an explanation of the project here. 


Otherwise, I eagerly keep up with The Montague Projects Blog, where his most recent cataloging enterprise involves scanning and posting graphics from his impressive book collection. If I'm not mistaken, his original goal was to do this every day from February '08 to February '09. Below is one of my favorites from his recent posts.

Fanfare for BibliOdyssey

 

Check out this beautiful 17th Century Ottoman Empirical monogram I found here. There are so many gorgeous book clippings like this at my favorite new-to-me blog, BibliOdyssey. I could spend days sifting through it all.

Here's another detail of a tiny corner of a print from their most recent collection, Les Fleurs Animées. It's an gallant little bird drinking wine while adoring the lady of the grape vine.

The Tranny Ecuadorian Soul of Bosch Returns, and Happy Birthday Anne

I'll start by directing you to a good thing. First, I have to say thanks to Grace of Design*Sponge, Peter of Blend Photography, and Rachel of School House for the permissions to use your work in this blog. I'll be posting about Peter and Rachel soon.

Back to the treats. Design*Sponge has released some free desktop wallpapers by Lena Corwin and Deanne Cheuk that are just precious (as my great aunt Sarah Jane would say). You can get them here. Check out this manic thing, which I think looks like a girly 'Busy World of Richard Scarry' type of landscape, or like bizarre, half-comprehending cave drawings made by a Cro-Magnon whiz kid after visiting the future...
 

The others from August are nice too. Very over-the-top decorative floral print jobbies that rather remind me of what might have happened if Hieronymous Bosch had had a queenish side. I can just see the decorating show potential there.

Speaking of art that can easily be mistaken for the products of heavy drug use, check out Helado Negro. David and I saw them play last night at a free production by WUAG at the amazing space over at Lyndon Street Artworks. It would be hard to catch me describing anything this way normally, but this is some groovy, spacious Latin soul. Of course, David and I were wishing that the improvised parts had been longer.

Off to teach some English. I'll let you know how our dinner date for Anne's birthday went. (That's my mother out-law.) I am going to be in trouble with my second class of the day if I don't manage to grade their essays before they get there, so it's bound to be a busy day with no breaks. Yikes. Off I go.