Inverted Art Made with Spools of Thread
Devorah Sperber is exhibiting at Art Paris – which brings together emerging and established artists in painting, photography, sculpture, and more. Sperber takes multi-colored spools of thread and arranges them in a way so that they appear like pixels. Taken as a whole, the spools look like a “hot mess,” in other words, like your grandma went crazy and glue gunned her thread collection on a wall. Look through a “viewing sphere” (a small, transparent ball) that’s conveniently placed in front of the piece, however, and get ready to be amazed. As Brooklyn Museum states, “Sperber deconstructs familiar images so that the brain can reconstruct them. Her framed crystal reproductions similarly address the way we think we see versus the way the brain processes visual information.”
See more wonderful examples and more info of this at MyModernment
Up-Inspired Floating House
“Our awesome partners over at National Geographic sent over these incredible photos, as they just wrapped up creating a real-life version of Pixar’s animated hit film Up. It’s pretty amazing what human beings are capable of…
Yesterday morning, March 5 at dawn, National Geographic Channel and a team of scientists, engineers, and two world-class balloon pilots successfully launched a 16′ X 16′ house 18′ tall with 300 8′ colored weather balloons from a private airfield east of Los Angeles, and set a new world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted. The entire experimental aircraft was more than 10 stories high, reached an altitude of over 10,000 feet, and flew for approximately one hour.
The filming of the event, from a private airstrip, will be part of a new National Geographic Channel series called How Hard Can it Be?, which will premiere in fall 2011.”
See more photos over at My Modern Met (Thanks Duncan)
Derren Brown (the artist) show now at Rebecca Hossack Gallery
Last night was the opening of the new art show for Derren’s latest works. The gallery will be showing them from 24th Feb until 12 March at 28 Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia, London W1T 2NA. The gallery is free and you can just turn up – but please check the opening times and details on their website by clicking here.
New paintings for exhibition
Well, that’s how you’d look if you were as overworked as me at the moment. Three new large acrylic-on-canvas portraits – my Mother, me, my Father – ready for my exhibition at the Hossack Gallery, Charlotte St, central London. They look after my paintings and sell prints and originals for anyone who has the wall-space and the stomach to want one at home. The exhibition runs from Thursday (Feb 24th) until March 12th. Details are here.
The self-portrait has been tricky, and involved a complete false start. I realise it may not be the image of quite the sparky so-and-so that you know and love… but hey, things don’t get more introspective than self-portraiture and I find this more interesting. And yes, that’s a more honest representation of my hairline once the very kind make-up artist has removed her handiwork after filming. I’ve been tweeting them as they’ve come together over the past few weeks, which has been much fun. And difficult in some ways: it’s normally the case that I wouldn’t show anything until it was ready.
After many fun years, I’m going to close down the derrenbrownart.com print-sale site and gallery, and hand over all sales and management to the Hossack Gallery. Aside from the originals, they will most likely only sell a very limited range of high-end Giclée prints, so if you’ve been thinking of getting a less expensive digi print, or any style of print of a particular portrait, it might be worth browsing the art site in the next few days while it still exists and they’re still for sale. Meanwhile a small gallery of some of the caricatures from that site along with new paintings will soon be viewable on my main site (www.derrenbrown.co.uk – part of which you are currently reading). And any new paintings will be posted, as they appear, on this blog.
Right! That done , I must use the rest of my Sunday to sign off the Faith Healer documentary special and work on the Svengali script. We open soon. Eek.
Must dash.
The secret to commanding lightning
“Mouths agape, a crowd stare at two men with lightning bolts firing from their heads and hands. I am at the Big Day Out, a music festival in Sydney, Australia, and touring alongside the likes of Iggy Pop and MIA are the Lords of Lightning.
The display is indeed stunning to watch. “It was like two wizards fighting,” says Toby, a Sydney hipster who quickly scampers back to the festival’s pounding music. Little did he wonder: how came these mere humans to create and command lightning?
The secret to the Lords’ power is Tesla Coils. The ones they use are two metres wide, on which they stand while thick blue bolts fly around them. First developed in 1891 by Nicola Tesla, a Tesla Coil is in fact two coils – one sitting inside the other. When an alternating current builds up in the smaller coil it creates a magnetic field that induces a current in the larger one.
In the show, one primary coil is wound around two secondary coils which service the two towers. This ensures both towers vibrate at the same frequency. Voltage in the larger coil can build up into millions of volts once the coils vibrate at precisely the same frequency. “That’s what causes the huge voltage rises that you see in the way of lightning,” says Carlos Van Camp, the creator of Lords of Lightning.
To ramp the voltage further, he winds the coils so the towers are pumped with opposing charges. “So, at maximum, one tower reaches two million volts and the other reaches negative two million,” says Van Camp. The massive voltage generated by the Tesla Coil rips surrounding air molecules into charged ions, allowing a current to flow through the air. This is similar to what it is believed happens in nature. While there is some debate, it’s believed that lightning is caused by the sudden release of charge from thunderclouds, which get electrically riled up by collisions between ice particles. Since most of the charge is negative, the ground becomes positive. Once the electric charge becomes large enough to ionise the air, a current will flow as a lightning bolt.
So, how can Van Camp stand atop these massively charged structures and walk away unscathed? He wears a conductive suit made of very small metal links connected together which protects him from the voltage. Electricity runs through the suit rather than through his body, and discharges out of his hands and head.
“If the suit has all the connections in place then you don’t feel anything,” says Van Camp. But, when there are loose connections electrical charges can move off track. When this happens, Van Camp says he can “feel little tingles to thumping shocks inside the suit”. But perhaps it is this danger that entices crowds.”
Read more at New Scientist (Thanks Annette M)
Federico Uribe Makes Art On A Literal Shoestring Budget
“At first glance, Federico Uribe’s “paintings” look like they were done up with oil or pastel on canvas. Look closer, though, and you’ll find they are actually shoelaces pinned on a canvas to form intricate pictures. Yes, those same shoelaces you use to tie your sneakers every morning.
According to the Colombian artist, he first chanced upon the idea while working on some pieces that used training shoes. For some reason, Puma ended up sending him a bunch of shoelaces, instead of trainers. After wondering what he’ll do with all that string, he decided he might actually be able to “paint” with them.
Federico Uribe’s process is as painstaking as you can imagine. He carefully selects the string colors to use, weaves them together and pins each one to the canvas at various points so it doesn’t fall off. Each creation can take up to 30 days (on a 10-hours a day schedule) to finish as a result of the intricate process.
From afar, it’s hard to imagine the pieces as being produced with anything but conventional mediums. I mean, shoelaces, literally, would have been the last thing on my mind.”
Read more at Cool Things (Thanks Christopher C)
Found In The Archives: ‘Modern’ Elephant Taxidermy
“Time spent at the American Museum of Natural History is always time well spent. The dioramas alone could keep a person busy looking and admiring for a lifetime.
Less well-known but just as rewarding is the museum’s film collection, which contains glimpses into some of the most beautiful corners that the world has to offer — both natural and human endeavor. (There are also quite a few peculiarities, such as the film of mime interpretations of Piltdown Man and other anthropological hoaxes.)
Modern Taxidermy: Mounting the Indian Elephant (shown here in abridged form) is a 1927 silent film that documents Carl Akeley’s taxidermy process from the raw hide — fresh from the Faunthorpe-Vernay collection expedition — to finished display.”
Read more at NPR (Thanks Dan)
My new Art Show
From the 24th February until the 12th March, your infrequent blogger has an exhibition of his more recent portraits at the Hossack Gallery, 28 Charlotte St, London. It’ll be a small show – perhaps six or so large pieces, for sale if you wish and general perusalment. An online gallery of my paintings – mainly the earlier caricatures – is viewable online at derrenbrownart.com, where prints are for sale if you are considering a gift for a least loved relative.
For those of you who are talented and attractive enough to follow me upon the Twitter, you may have seen I’ve been tweeting a work-in-progress of my father in real time as it comes together. The plan is to include this and one of my mother, as well as some of the recent ones I have posted on this here blog.
Some of you do enquire very kindly about buying originals. I sell the originals through the Hossack Gallery and I’m sure they’d be delighted to take any enquiries. They are big though (the ones above are each five feet high), so you’ve got to REALLY want one in your room.
Any enquiries about the art show, please call the gallery on +44 (0) 20 7255 2828.
Thanking you kindly.
A new casebook for Sherlock Holmes
“As Anthony Horowitz gets the nod for a new Holmes novel, what mysteries do you think the detective should tackle?
The Sherlock Holmes revival continues. Anthony Horowitz, the screenwriter and Alex Rider children’s series author, has been chosen by the Conan Doyle estate to write a new Holmes novel, to be released this September. He said he hoped to create “a first-rate mystery for a modern audience while remaining absolutely true to the spirit of the original”.
In the spirit of the announcement, imagine that you were given Horowitz’s task. What would you like to see the intrepid hero get up to? What mystery would he solve? Perhaps you can even provide a plot outline – in 100 words or fewer.”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks Sara)
