Robosnails

458mn is a stunning computer generated version of the romanticized sequence of mating snails from the documentary "Microcosmos", that bids goddbye to any possible cuteness of that image.
You'll never look at love making snails the same way again!

watch the video below

Cy Twombly - Some favorite works

“To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a
critical moment of sensation or release.”

Cy Twombly, 1957

Cy Twombly’s desk (Photo by David Seidner from Artists at Work)

Cy Twombly, whose spare, childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 83.

source

Haeckel's Visions

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted
with the memories and the dreams of Time.

H. P. Lovecraft

watch the video below

Visible - Invisible III

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it
with any clarity you must prune and prune.

Italo Calvino (from: If on a Winter's Night A Traveller)



Luke Elwes, Refugia 2006 (oil on linen)

Michael Schnabel - Cages

A Cage went in search for a bird.

Franz Kafka, Collected Aphorisms


Photographic series of empty zoo cages (2000-2002)
by german photographer Michael Schnabel

Shiohi no tsuto - Gifts of the ebb tide

Shiohi no tsuto (Gifts of the ebb tide)
The shell book. (1789)

Painted by Kitagawa Utamaro (?-1806),
edited by Akera Kanko (1738-98)

A colored picture book of Kyoka (satirical poems) about shell collecting. 

Detail

The mind is a strange machine ...

Events only become experiences through the interest we take in them

Bertrand Russell

“The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without material from the external world it is powerless, and (...) must seize its material for itself, since events only become experiences through the interest we take in them; if they do not interest us, we are making nothing of them. The man, therefore, whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and recombined into beautiful and instructive patterns."

from: Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930

watch the video below

Circles - Mandalas - Radial Symmetry VII

The World is Bound With Secret Knots - Athanasius Kicher

Laura Splan, machine embroidered lace based on the influenza virus



Barbara Mungenast, Kreis #2, 2006



Sheila Gallagher, Sea Urchin Smoke Print, 2009

Animals in Art - Roger Ballen

Many people say my work is quite disturbing. 

I am so pleased to hear that. What a great thing!

Animal Abstraction, 2002

Artist's statement:

I have been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years now. I believe I am part of the last generation that will grow up with this media. Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.

My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I guess I would have to call myself an artist.

Roger Ballen

Space Abstraction

Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.

Paracelsus

watch the video below

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves

An artist whose name has been lost to time painted the gold-studded illuminations around 1440 in a book of prayers for Catherine of Cleves, a Dutch countess. Her court commissioned the volume of hours, or illustrated daily devotions, around the time she separated from her spendthrift husband, Arnold of Egmond, and began a futile 30-year effort to unseat him. Catherine’s illustrator is most famous for weirdly fanciful borders; he surrounded Latin text blocks with bee swarms, devils, birdcages, pearls, pea pods, burst-open mussels and fish eating one another’s tails. (source)

Detail

Leonora Carrington dissolved into her dreams

Leonora Carrington, El recital de los sueños

“You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It’s not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can’t even remember your name. I remember your white flannels better than I can remember you. I remember all the things I felt about the white flannels but whoever made them walk about has totally disappeared. So you remember me as a pink linen dress with no sleeves and my face is confused with dozens of other faces, I have no name either.”

Leonora Carrington (06 April 1917 — 25 May 2011)

Leonora Carrington photographed by Kati Horna in 1960

Animals in Art - Roni Horn - Bird

bird presents the culmination of Roni Horn’s long-running photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl. Photographed at close range against white backgrounds (as though obeying the conventional format of studio portraiture) the birds are viewed from behind, their unique physiognomies and markings resulting in inscrutable shapes and patterns on the photographs’ surfaces. Despite the singular form of the title, the birds in this series are presented in pairs, images that are hung side by side one another highlighting the differences and similarities between the two. The gesture of doubling — as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy — has been a recurrent motif for Horn since 1980, a tool that invites careful scrutiny from the viewer, altering the dynamic of the work.

source

Artist - Hilma af Klint (1862-1944)

I found this artist while looking for new pictures for the Circles - Mandalas - Radial Symmetry series. Hilma af Klint was a swedish artist who was born in 1862 and died in 1944. She is concidered one of the first abstract painters together with Mondrian, Malevich and Kandinsky. I immediately liked the strong colors and her use of forms. They remind me a lot of alchemistic illustrations.

If you want to read more about Hilma af Klint, I recommend this article , from Sally O’Reilly in frieze.

frieze has a whole issue from the end of last year about the connection between art and spirituality, which you can find here. It contains another very interesting article that mentions her work, titled Soul Searching - The complex relationship between science and the spirit – and how to represent it written by Mark Pilkington

Animals in Art - Tim Flach

There is no exquisite beauty, without some strangeness in the proportion...

Edgar Allan Poe

Skin - Hair - Fur - Feathers

Meret Oppenheim, Fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, 1936

Black & White - Windows - Looking In, Looking Out

It’s easy enough that on a balcony / or in a window frame /
a woman pauses … to be / the one we lose / just by seeing her appear.

R.M. Rilke

Eugène Atget, Au Tambour, 1908

Chris Marker - Passengers

Chris Marker, PASSENGERS , Untitled # 78


New works by Chris Marker can be seen in an exhibition in New York at Peter Blum Gallery,
displaying more than 200 photographs originated between 2008 and 2010

Black & White - Hands II

Tina Modotty, Hands of the Puppetier, Mexiko 1929

Paper Art - Cut Outs

Hina Aoyama