Tag: galleries

In 2010, illustrator Alex Noriega was having some problems at work and so he started a blog as a way to figure out where he was going wrong. “I wanted to put on paper all that I had learned in life as simple as possible and try to see if what was happening around me made any sense. It didn’t,” he says. It did however lead to this beautiful series of illustrations.

His blog is called Stuff No One Told Me (SNOTM for short), but while Alex may have learned life’s lessons the hard way, he’s making it easy for the rest of us by teaching us everything we need to know. His illustrations range from sobering reminders of things we often overlook in life to useful nuggets of zen-like wisdom to help us to become more conscientious humans. Take a look for yourself, and don’t say no one told you. You can tell that it’s not just anybody’s experiences but his very own, making the pictures below feel personal and even more motivating.

http://www.snotm.com/

Born in England in 1978, Rory Jon Dobner studied Fine Art foundation at Chelsea School of Art & Design before obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts, (Honors), at Central St.Martin’s School of Art & Design. In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious title of Burns Young Artist of the Year.

A well travelled, international artist he has worked and exhibited in the UK, USA, Australia, Haiti, Hong Kong, and New Zealand before returning to the UK in 2005 and setting up his studio in Hampstead, London. Using many different mediums, with a current focus on utilizing brushed stainless steel for paintings, to produce a wide range of original work, he has fulfilled a variety of impressive commissions and completed interior design projects for Agent Provocateur, MTV, Soho House Group, Babington House Hotel, Christian Dior, Candy & Candy, Ibiza Rocks House Hotel, Fortnum & Mason, Arcadia Group, British Telecom, Matrushka Interior Design, Annina Vogel Jewellery, Robert Downey Junior, Shizaru – Mayfair, Waitrose, The Hong Kong Cancer Trust, IBM, Heston Blumenthal, Robin Ellis Design & Build, Roost Living, Sean Cochrane Interior Design, Shop At BlueBird, Arkadius Couture & On Off London Fashion Week, The Arts Club, Stephen Webster & Nike.

Selçuk Yılmaz is a Turkish artist living in Istanbul. His work involves hand-cutting and hammering each individual metal piece. The final pieces contain thousands of hand-shaped pieces and can weigh hundreds of kilos.

I live in a crowded city and that can sometimes make me feel alienated. Especially when I see how the world is shaped by a passion for consumption. To cope with this fragmentation, I retreat to mountains for summer months. Nature helps me reconnect to the things that matter, and eases the sense of isolation. For me solitude is a gateway to creativity. My art is a response to social alienation. I see how society is full of turmoil and chaos. Creativity is a process that is alive in all things, and relates with human roots running deep with meaning. This evolution, from poor progress to doing something better needs patience. We need patience and have to know pain. What we have is time and space to use creativity in becoming better. When using the metal pieces I am using time and space, past and future, all that is in life.

Patrick Villas is a contemporary Belgian born sculptor who is currently working in France. He studied drawing and painting at the School of Fine Arts of Antwerp. He is a self-taught sculptor, spending hours at the Antwerp Zoo to watch the cats. This same zoo that in 2002 commissioned a jaguar for its gardens. He is an animal sculptor in the tradition of Rembrandt Bugatti, he developed a varied bestiary but the most striking works are undoubtedly the big cats that he likes to observe at the Antwerp zoo. These are an opportunity for him to study the different feline postures, their movement and behavior.

He begins by working on the skeleton, building the internal frame of the feline so to clear the lines of force of the animal can then be seen. His technique has evolved in recent years to appear more abstract, by using more diverse materials. The artist remains at the boundary between abstraction and figuration. The pattern is present but less intelligible.

Jeffrey “Jeff” Koons is an American artist known for working with popular culture subjects and his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums of money, including at least one world record auction price for a work by a living artist. Critics are sharply divided in their views of Koons. Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance. Others dismiss his work as kitsch, crass, and based on cynical self-merchandising. Koons has stated that there are no hidden meanings in his works, nor any critiques.

Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York. Koons started creating sculptures using inflatable toys in the 1970s. Taking a readymade inflatable rabbit Koons cast the object in highly polished stainless steel, resulting in Rabbit (1986), one of his most famous artworks.

The Celebration project consists of a series of large-scale sculptures and paintings of, among others balloon dogs, Valentine hearts, diamonds, and Easter eggs, was conceived in 1994. Some of the pieces are still being fabricated. Each of the 20 different sculptures in the series comes in five differently colored “unique versions” Created in an edition of five versions, his later work Tulips (1995–2004) consists of a bouquet of multicolor balloon flowers blown up to gargantuan proportions. Koons was pushing to finish the series in time for a 1996 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, but the show was ultimately canceled because of production delays and cost overruns. The artist convinced his primary collectors to invest heavily in the costly fabrication of the Celebration series. The dealers funded the project in part by selling works to collectors before they were fabricated. The series also includes, in addition to sculptures, sixteen oil paintings.

Referring to the ancient Roman marble statue Callipygian Venus, Metallic Venus (2010–2012) was made of high chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating and live flowering plants. At the center of each scene in the Antiquity paintings (2009–13) is a famous ancient or classical sculpture, meticulously rendered in oil paint and scaled to the same size as the sculptures.

Luke Chueh is a painter and graphic designer active in the artist community in Los Angeles. His images have been remarked upon for their juxtaposition of cuteness with the macabre. His work stems from the intolerance he suffered as a child growing up as a Chinese-American.

Designer and film-maker Storm Thorgerson grew up in Cambridge and was an early friend of Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, all from Pink Floyd, for whom he designed many album covers, including the iconic sleeve for The Dark Side Of The Moon. The graphic art group Hipgnosis (co-founded by Storm with Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell) became one of the most famed design and photographic teams in music, with covers for many other internationally successful artists, including Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Wishbone Ash, 10cc, Black Sabbath, Wings, Peter Gabriel, and Yes. After the team went their separate ways, Storm spent some time creating films and documentaries, but always maintained his design work, most recently as founder of StormStudios, which has created memorable images for Muse, Biffy Clyro, and The Steve Miller Band, as well as the graphics for the recent Why Pink Floyd? campaign.

Storm Elvin Thorgerson was born in Potters Bar, Middlesex (now in Hertfordshire) on February 28th 1944. Of Norwegian heritage, he was schooled at Summerhill free school and then Brunswick Primary School in Cambridge. His secondary education was at local grammar school, the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, alongside Syd Barrett and Roger Waters, who went on to form Pink Floyd.

He studied for a degree at Leicester University from 1963 to 1966, initially in Psychology, but he switched courses, gaining more satisfaction from attaining a BA Honours degree in English and Philosophy. However, his primary interest had always been film, so he progressed to a Masters’ Degree course in Film and TV at London’s Royal College of Art (1966-69). He had a variety of jobs, including being a temporary porter for British Rail, before founding Hipgnosis (by juxtaposing ‘hip’ with the Greek ‘gnosis’ – to know) with fellow college student ‘Po’ Powell.

In 1968, wanting to break into the world of album covers, which had become much more flamboyant and art-oriented since the psychedelic explosion of 1967, Storm asked his friend David Gilmour, who had recently replaced Syd Barrett as guitarist/singer in Pink Floyd, to help persuade the other members of Pink Floyd that they should use him to do the artwork for their latest album.

The resulting cover for A Saucerful Of Secrets still stands as one of the best examples of British psychedelic cover art. As Q magazine stated, the designers attempted to mirror three “altered states of consciousness” – religion, drugs, and Pink Floyd music. The Pink Floyd connection continued with the covers for the band’s subsequent albums, including More, the double album Ummagumma (shot at the house of Storm’s then-girlfriend Libby January) and Atom Heart Mother, but Hipgnosis worked with many other artists, including The Pretty Things, Syd Barrett, The Nice, T. Rex, Marvin, Welch & Farrar, The Electric Light Orchestra, Wishbone Ash, the Climax Blues Band, and Renaissance, before the huge success of 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon and its stark graphic sleeve brought their work to a global audience.

Hipgnosis weren’t afraid to use multiple visual techniques to effect their designs; over the years their sleeves used hyperreal photography, pencil illustration, airbrushing, photo montage, Polaroid manipulation and colour photocopying, while their design for The Dark Side Of The Moon was entirely graphic (with Hipgnosis associate George Hardie). In spite of that, their most celebrated images are still probably the ones using Storm’s favoured method of grotesquely oversizing everyday objects like balls of wool, lightbulbs and sculpted heads and then placing them in an otherworldly landscape.

Speaking of his work in 2012, Storm said: “I think it’s always a very difficult thing for commercial artists and designers to pursue, against either circumstance or financial restrictions, that which you believe. So I’ve been very lucky, really. I was working for the [Pink] Floyd, who couldn’t think of anything better to do than to hire me, and fortunately what we did worked, quite early on. I always thought, and I still think, that Ummagumma is a great design. I probably shouldn’t, as an artist, like my own work (heavens, us artists are supposed to suffer dreadfully), but I quite like it.

He died on 18th April, 2013. His family said: “Yes, Storm has died. He passed away, on Thursday 18th April in the afternoon. His ending was peaceful and he was surrounded by family and friends. He had been ill for some time with cancer though he had made a remarkable recovery from his stroke in 2003. He was in his 70th year.”

David Gilmour said: “We first met in our early teens. We would gather at Sheep’s Green, a spot by the river in Cambridge and Storm would always be there holding forth, making the most noise, bursting with ideas and enthusiasm. Nothing has ever really changed. mHe has been a constant force in my life, both at work and in private, a shoulder to cry on and a great friend.The artworks that he created for Pink Floyd from 1968 to the present day have been an inseparable part of our work. I will miss him.”