Literature can be art in more than one way

I love books. I love art. These facts are not news to those who know me. I also love my homeland of Israel (yes, I was actually born there). And I've found someone who combines these three loves beautifully.

His name is Nir Golan, and he specializes in doodling in books. Yes, it may sound like something we all did during class, but in Nir's hands it's so much more. Nir finds old books - some with lovely inscriptions, which you won't be able to read unless you read Hebrew - and turns them into artistic masterpieces. His site can be found here.

Let's make beautiful music together

One thing I absolutely love about the way the internet has developed it's that it has provided ordinary people with a portal to display their talents. Not everyone can get on American Idol, but with the right tools you can post your stuff on YouTube. If the ability is actually there, you could be catapulted into the fame stratosphere. People have gotten recording contracts after their videos proved hugely popular on MySpace (One Republic), gotten published - several times over - based on the strength of their blogs (Jen Lancaster), and now there's Thru You.

This feat of video editing and sound engineering will take your breath away. Pulling from all the assets YouTube has to offer (with all applicable credits given), Kutiman - a Funk/Afro Beat/Psychedelic artist from Israel (according to his MySpace page, here) has created brand new musical masterpieces that will amaze. I am SO impressed with what my fellow countryman has accomplished, words just cannot do justice (but I definitely will buy the mp3's, should they become available. I'm in love with #3). To see/hear/experience what I've been on and on about, check this out:

http://thru-you.com/

Peace.

Infinite patience, infinite care.

Artiste Aoyama Hina’s paper cuts will blow you away. Words simply do not do justice to the intricacy and delicate beauty of these pieces, so I will let the pix do the talking for me. You can see her web page here (in French), and her Flickr photos here. (via black.white.bliss)

More bee art!

Continuing on the theme of bee art, here’s an artist that creates art using a childhood favorite - The crayon. Only Christian Faur doesn’t use them as his medium in the traditional way. Instead of drawing with them, he creates pixel art by stacking them! In his words:

For this body of work I have assembled more than one hundred thousand hand cast crayons of varying colors and shades to produce a body of work that, to the best of my knowledge, is unlike anything done before in art. These individual “pixels” of wax are precisely stacked into specific locations inside of wooden frames to produce a new art form that uniquely balances the qualities of both photography and sculpture. Further, I have developed a mapping system that translates the English alphabet into twenty six discrete colors and I use these crayon “fonts” to add words and language to each of the pieces in the show.

The product is a series of photorealistic landscapes and figurative images that are formed at the surface of the thousands of tightly packed crayon tips. The imagery that makes up this new body tends to focus on isolated elements represented as children, barns, water towers, etc. withinin determinate landscapes, which are intended to reference the individual crayon whose solitary existence, like that of the individual element, is rendered obsolete in the amalgamate. The direct representation of language in each piece further imbues the works with meaning and brings an aspect of color into each composition reminiscent of DNA coding. The alphabetic key at the lower left of each panel allows the viewer to interpret the individual words written throughout the various panels.

Going back to bees, here’s his bee masterpiece:

To see more of his amazing work, please see his website, here.

Bee-utiful Artwork

I knew bees made honey (and in that are unique among insects. Thank you, Eddie Izzard). But as beautiful as the form of the honeycomb is, I had no idea bees had artistic inclinations, as well. Enter Hilary Berseth. According to New York Magazine online: “He constructs basic frameworks of wire and wax, then lets teams of tiny yellow-and-black art fabricators finish the job.”

Here’s a pic of the form:

To read the story and see the finished masterpiece, click here.