November 9, 2018

Famous IKEA photo of Amsterdam explained in documentary

Filed under: Art,Bicycles,Photography by Orangemaster @ 3:27 pm

Amusingly called Vilshult, named after a very small town in Sweden, this famous IKEA picture of an Amsterdam canal is world famous. It was taken by photographer Fernando Bengoechea, originally from Argentina. However, sadly, he apparently died during a surfing trip in Sri Lanka in 2004 when a tsunami hit, and his body was never found. You’ll need to watch the whole video below to get the entire story.

After having received the picture from his girlfriend as a present, Dutch director Tom Roes decided to find out all about the black and white picture with the red bike. He has been made fun of a lot and told he had no taste, which probably pushed him to make this documentary. And whether people like it or not, IKEA has sold a whopping 427,000 copies of it.

Here’s the Dutch documentary about the famous IKEA picture of Amsterdam here (cc available in English):

(Link and photo: vice.com)

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October 15, 2018

Christien Meindertsma’s new view on recycled materials

Filed under: Animals,Art by Orangemaster @ 1:33 pm

Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma, who got noticed in 2007 with her award-winning project PIG 05049 (shown above), featuring185 products made from a single pig, currently has an exhibition entitled ‘Beyond the Surface’ at the Vitra Design Museum in Basel, Switzerland, which examines her work with wool, flax, incinerator ash, and recycled wool.

Video and printed matter demonstrating her working process are displayed alongside products made from each material, to best demonstrate Meinderstma’s research-based practice. Rather than present the designer’s work chronologically, the museum decided to group the exhibition around the four materials.

“We realised that we would prefer a different format in order to give visitors a sense of the thoroughness that Christien applies to her work, which usually drives her to investigate a material or over long periods of time, producing a number of outcomes, not just a single product,” curator Viviane Stappmanns said.

The exhibition is the designer’s first outside her native country and is on display until 20 January 2019.

(Link: dezeen.com, Photo: Indexaward.dk)

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September 3, 2018

Connected Wi-Fi birdhouses attract singing birds

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 3:50 pm

Berlin-based Dutch artist Albert Raven has created a smart birdhouse that is connected to the entire world by Wi-Fi. An Internet Of Things (IoT) artwork, the Birdhouse needs to be installed indoors, and an algorithm determines which house the bird will visit. You’ll never see the bird, but you will hear it.

Raven (fitting name) believes IoT is an “Internet without people, an experimental playing field where time and space come together as never before”. There are currently 26 of his birdhouses in locations around the world, and surely more to come. The Birdhouse is perfect for a house without house pets or for anyone who thinks the idea behind the artwork is cool. A birdhouse costs 395 euro or you can support the project by buying bird seed or a T-shirt from the artist.

Find out more about the Birdhouse here:

(Link: bright.nl, Photo of Iago Sparrow by Hans Zwitzer, some rights reserved)

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September 2, 2018

An instagram of naked people drawn on mattresses

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 12:32 pm


Here’s a fun Dutch-based instagram account for you: the Mistress of mattresses: French woman Nastassja Guay Bonnabel draws naked women and men, both alone or together in all kinds of different configurations and poses on discarded mattresses in Amsterdam and clearly also abroad.

For over a year now, she’s been roaming the streets of the Dutch capital, looking for all kinds of mattresses to doodle on. Your old mattress could be next.

(Link: vice.com, Photo Mistress of mattresses)

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August 12, 2018

Rotterdam artist lives off drawing on bananas

Filed under: Art,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 9:49 am

Artist Stephan Brusche from Rotterdam, South Holland not only has a banana-filled instagram account, but also a wonderfully concise job description: “I draw on bananas”. Check out his instagram and be prepared to see bananas and other fruit like you’ve never seem them before.

This is Brusche’s day job now, having quit working as a graphic designer. He has been turning the yellow fruit (technically a berry) into works of art for about six years. He uses tools such as toothpicks, a knife, and a ball-point pen to transform his bananas. The entire process, from sketching out an idea to sharing it online, takes two to three hours. And yes, he does it the bananas afterwards, a question he gets a lot. He also seems to do a lot of cutting and sculpting, not just casually drawing. Subjects range from movies to animals to a lot of recognisable symbols and items.

“[One day at work] I noticed I still had a banana left from lunch and figured it would make a fun picture if I just drew a little happy face on it. I discovered how pleasant it actually is to draw on a banana – there is just something about how smooth the ballpoint pen flows on the structure of the banana peel.”

(Link and photo from iSteef’s instagram account: mashable.com)

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August 9, 2018

De Kooning painting stolen by couple 30 years ago

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 6:47 pm

American couple Jerry and Rita Alter have been posthumously identified as having stolen the painting ‘Woman-Ochre’ by Dutch abstract impressionist Willem de Kooning.

For decades, the painting now worth 160 million US dollars was hanging on the bedroom wall of the couple’s home in New Mexico. It was discovered last year by an antique dealer, as it was part of the belongings of the deceased couple. Jerry Alter died in 2012 at 81, while his wife Rita, who also died aged 81, did so in 2017.

The painting was stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson more than 30 years ago, and the couple was definitely in town when that happened. The Arizona Republic newspaper reported that a family photo had surfaced, showing that the day before the painting vanished, the couple was in Tucson, Arizona.

The theft was simple: the couple showed up early at the museum, early enough to be let in, but not too early to be told to wait. Rita distracted the guard while Jerry went in, cut out the painting, rolled it up, and put it under his coat. They then had a quick 15-minute visit and left with the painting.

According to The Washington Post, the works of De Kooning remain among the most marketable in the world. We told you in July about some works by De Kooning found in a storage locker worth quite a bit.

(Links: waarmaarraar.nl, washingtonpost.com)

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July 23, 2018

Works by De Kooning found in storage locker

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 12:38 pm

800px-Willem_de_Kooning_in_his_studio

In 2016 a Belgian had scored a Willem de Kooning painting at flea market, and now an American art dealer in New York has found works that are probably by de Kooning, as well as a work by Swiss-German Paul Klee in a New Jersey storage locker for which he paid 15.000 USD (12.819 euro).

The art dealer bought the storage locker after an auction house had passed up the opportunity to do so, which indicated it probably didn’t have anything of value, but boy were they wrong if this all pans out.

However, the paintings are not signed. The Willem de Kooning Foundation based in Manhattan does not authenticate works, so the dealer hired an expert who believes that they absolutely are by De Kooning and are worth millions of dollars.

(Links: theguardian.com, Photo of Willem de Kooning by Smithsonian Institution Archives, some rights reserved)

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July 21, 2018

Van Gogh house can stay for autistic son

Filed under: Art,General,Health by Orangemaster @ 1:40 pm

A couple in Florida has painted the outside of their entire house as a huge mural of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ for their autistic son, and has just just won an almost year-long battle with the city to keep it that way.

The commissioned painting works as a beacon for their adult son who has problems communicating and occasionally wanders away from home. By making their house a landmark, which their son refers to as T’he Starry Night house’, he can tell people which house he’s talking about when he gets lost and people will know where it is.

When the mural was started, the city told them it was considered graffiti if the wall didn’t match the house, so they went the whole hog and painted the entire outside of the house. Then, they got fined 10,000 USD (about 8,528 euro) for doing so. While the city said the house was a distraction and improper, the coupled expressed their constitutional right to free expression and won.

Parents are ready to fight for their children under normal circumstances, but if your kid also has a developmental disorder like autism, you’re probably going to fight anybody who tries to make your life more difficult. The city gave the family $15,000 USD (about 12,793 euro) and an apology, which was a big deal for this family who grew up in socialist Poland.

(Link and photo: cbc.ca)

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June 21, 2018

Frisian wheat fields to feature big artworks

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 8:56 pm

As of next week, some Frisian wheat fields along the Wadden dike in het Bildt (now part of the new municipality Waadhoeke), will feature carvings by several Bildt-based artists and others carved into those local wheat fields.

In 2017 artist Marco Goldenbeld tested creating artworks in those fields, one of which was inspired by M. C. Escher’s ‘Impossible Cube’, a two-dimensional figure that resembles a perspective drawing of a three-dimensional one, with its features drawn inconsistently from the way they would appear in an actual cube, shown above.

The specific location of the artworks will be between Oude Bildtzijl and De Westhoek in Friesland. Besides the initiator Henk Rusman, other participating artists include Bowe Roodbergen, Marco Goldenbeld, Rinus Roelofs, Hans Kuipers, Roland de Jong and Ria Groenhof.

(Link and photo: sense-of-place.eu)

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June 17, 2018

This slab H sprouts serifs until it no longer can

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 10:23 am

Typographer Just van Rossum used his brother Guido’s programming language Python to create a capital letter H in which each serif (the dangly bits at the ends of the stems) sprouts its own serifs, creating a recursive H in the process.

Typotheque in The Hague made a limited edition poster of this design:

Slab serif typefaces are characterised by angular terminations at the end of strokes. Just van Rossum designed this ultimate Slab Serif capital H, with an ever-expanding number of serifs. Each H has four serifs, each of which becomes an H by sprouting additional serifs.The serifs on those serifs sprout their own serifs, on and on and on up to the thinnest line that offset press technology can handle.

See also: Geeked out coin wins design comp for another example of Python-based algorithmic art.

(Photo: Typotheque)

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