Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre

Website

Wilhelm Staehle cuts classy silhouettes, playing on phrases and pop culture with old-fashioned typography. He utilizes lush paintings and century-old fashions, mixing them up with unexpected written humor. The clash of vintage art with fresh meanings gives Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre quite a lot of zing!

Glennz Tees
Shop
Blog

Glenn Jones brings the world very punny (er, funny) tees, iPhone backgrounds, mousepads, and the rest of those good things. Clear illustrations in a pleasing flat-graphic style, Glennz Tees are epicWin.

BevShots
Website

Alcoholic beverages can take on many colors when in glasses. But up close– up really, REALLY close– they’re a phantasmagoria of abstract shapes and color shifts! A drop of the drink is dried in an air-tight container, crystallizing it. Then it is photographed through a microscope, with a polarized beam shooting through.

Will Turnbow

YouTube

Website

This cake is NOT a lie!
Come on, now. Who makes a fully-animated, colored and edible (well the toys and mechanized parts aren’t edible) cake like this for their daughter’s 4th birthday?! Will does, apparently, and spoils his kids sweetly with these fantastic cakes. Forget candles… Let’s watch the cake spin and whirl and light up for half an hour and THEN dig in!

Simon G. Phelipot (Masana)

CFSL Page

Energy, saturated colors, emotion, realism mish-mashed with abstract… Every piece has its own palette, along with loads of beauty!

Fishtank Ensemble

Website

“High-Energy Gypsy Music”– with a dash of Shamisen to boot! These guys played for us at CalArts (I even got up early to see the performance). I nearly exploded they were so fantastic; from a singing saw to crazy hyper (and skilled) violin and guitar, not to mention a mighty double-bass that got flipped up in the air and played at times– VERY high-energy!

Stephan Pastis

Blog

Pearls Before Swine

Blogging can be an art too.  Stephan’s daily comic strip, Pearls Before Swine, involves quirky critters such as da crocs dat want to eet da zeebas! (Twanslation: the crocodiles that want to eat the zebras)– which is hilarious on its own. Little did I know that Stephan also keeps a blog, telling tales of everyday life observances and interactions– wow, that sounds bland. But they’re not. Go read his blog.

Android (Andrew) Jones

Website

Viewbook

Hypnotic patterns, jewel-like colors and visions from the future are what Android Jones does. Catastrophic digital textures all flow together to create an elegant organic harmony. He’s unique, and he’s got style!

Xavi García

Website

To counter the appreciation for extreme digital art, here’s a bank note created by traditional means. The whole thing was hand-drawn! And, it took three months. The amount of fine detail and pinpoint-precision drives in the point that there was once a time when computers offered no artistic aid, and with enough patience, people really are capable of anything. Xavi’s got some really interesting typographical and figurative art, not to mention his concepts are very fresh.

Michael Lockwood

Blog

Website

Deviantart

“Pandora” by Mike Lockwood (Hey look! It’s me! And it looks more like me than my self portrait does!)

Mike and I had a couple of classes together while we went to community college. Now he’s upgraded to Art Center and is an Illustration Major. With careful attention to detail, all his work is beautifully rendered, depicting fantastical, imaginative scenes and concepts. His rendering skills stretch between many mediums, but his patience with painting is most impressive. We have on our hands a very up-and-coming illustrator

Edouard Artus

APOKA

The Hospital

Puzzle Road

Flash web designer Edouard Artus mixes surrealistic imagery with an intense amount of interactive web content. Apoka is his main portfolio site, which also contains downloadable resources and plenty of easter eggs (Drag Point being one, which when clicked and dragged, reveals a whole new section of the site). With a smooth, vectorized interface, the easy transitions between content don’t distract at all from the richness of everything offered. (Be sure to check out his Illustration work under the Portfolio button). The Hospital and Puzzle Road are Flash projects he’s also created, which incorporate innovative Flash interactivity with photography.

Arthur Ganson

Website

TED Video

“Untitled Fragile Machine” by Arthur Ganson

Arthur Ganson creates his machines, or kinetic sculptures, by tying together engineering and precision sculpting of gears and other intricate mechanical parts. While the end result of his machines may prove ambiguous, the intrigue with his endless-looping whimsical functions provide plenty of entertainment. One machine bathes itself in oil, another sets a wishbone in motion. There’s even a machine that explodes apart a chair and reassembles it– then there’s the other machine that, when raced, makes the driver’s hand write out “faster”. These moving sculptures demonstrate a great will to solve problems, along with a great dedication to the joy of creating.

Bobby Chiu

http://www.imaginismstudios.com/port-artist-bob-01.html 

“Rockstar” by Bobby Chiu

Cartoons, characters, and a crazy-innovative mind.  He combines the contrary and exaggerates the obvious in his pieces. His smooth cartoon style is often joined with flawless reality, making amazing cartoon renderings that get to the point with no questions asked. Expressions and body movement are lovely, and his sense of coloring and digital painting is wonderful as well. His work is really refreshing!

Matt Stuart

http://www.mattstuart.com/ 

“Moorgate Underground”, photographed by Matt Stuart

Either he’s in the right place at the right time or he’s got a way for making coincidences happen. Matt Stuart’s photography revolves around taking photos from just the right angles to make things interact that weren’t intentionally interacting at the actual moment of their happening. Some focus on something as subtle as a shadow, or play with background image interacting with foreground object, as observed in Moorgate Underground. I don’t know if he’s got a lot of time on his hands and sits around, waiting for the perfect moment to strike, or sets these photos up how he does it, but the subtlety in the majority of his work is worth a laugh.

Joe Pogan 

 http://www.joepogan.com/

http://youtube.com/user/myfunart 

Sculpted by Joe Pogan

I discovered Joe’s work through the Yahoo “Art and Culture” group (which I do broadcast this monthly AOTM series to). WOW! With a very precise welding technique, Joe combines all sorts of metal objects to create sculptures, often of birds, sometimes of fish. (You can see his working process on the YouTube link). What amazing, precise skill it must take to piece together such intricate, organic works of art! The dainty detail and perfect balance of elements go into making a completely believable form. Yet upon a closer inspection, you see that you’re not looking at anything you thought you saw in the first place, but rather random scraps of metal objects, all shaped and melted together to make a greater form.

This month’s artists are Tim Cantor, Todd White and Lawrence Northey.

Tim Cantor

http://www.timcantor.com

Saint Valentine :: Painted by Tim Cantor

Absolutely stunning surrealistic work. Working from a stylized-yet-unbelievably-realistic perspective, his vast array of works include visual and thematic motifs from spirals, apples, and delicate miniscule brass/gold rings and intricate designs that suspend beautifully-rendered objects or thoughts in air. His sense of composition is that of perfect balance. He uses a very saturated, dark palette. There seems to be a deeper insight and knowledge of life in his work– from the clear floating orbs above figure’s heads to the most textured abstract artworks, the images that come to this artist hold a deep mystery… One that’ll hold your interest for a very long time with each of his pieces!
I first saw his gallery while walking the streets of San Diego, and after leaving it I’d been so impressed by his work that I ran back (literally!) before it closed so I could pick up his book– and to my joy he was even there, so I got to meet him and have him sign my book! Not only is he an amazing artist, but a very pleasant person as well.

Todd White

http://www.artofwhite.com/

Piano Bar :: painted by Todd White

With an unusual sense of form, Todd White’s artwork is primarily composed of people formed into strange shapes, with illuminated expressions and an amazing sense of color (or more distinctly, skin tones). While the bow tie-clad men and women in black dresses (most likely holding a martini) all have unique, blocky form, the faces are painted with such amazing expression and color that some of them appear to be actual portraits– yet upon a closer look one will observe that there’s almost a cubist quality to his sharp and soft edges, color planes appearing and suddenly dropping off into one another. His plays on form and composition sometimes feature pianos: men dressed in white and black, standing next to each other to form a keyboard, people (seen here) enjoying the pianist… Many of his sketches are very edge-driven, movement-filled gestures.
I came across his artwork– more specifically, a giclee print of Piano Bar (painting featured here) at a gallery in Maui. Never had the chance of meeting the artist himself, but he was one of the original creators of Spongebob Squarepants… he’s got a history in animation! (No wonder he’s got so much action in his gestures).

Lawrence Northey

http://www.robotart.net

Shing Yun :: sculpted by Lawrence Northey

Once upon a 3D modeling class, I did a google on ‘raygun’ to see if I could find more inspiration for my project.
And boy did I ever!
Lawrence Northey creates metal sculptures of retro robots with rocket blasters, glassy helmets, and space dogs. These sculptures look like beautiful chrome toys– and I really wonder if their joints are bendable… And I wonder if their feet double as irons? Perfectly polished, intricate detail and a clearly-defined style (not to mention countless parts) are all a part of his sculptures.