April 30, 2009

Fabulous Renaissance Paintings with a Modern Day Touch!

A friend who knows my taste in graphic art, digital art, vector art etc, turned me on to Scottish artist Alan MacDonald's website with the promise that I was going to love the man's work. She was 1000% right! I surf the net looking for this sort of thing! MacDonald's paintings blend the subject and style of the European Renaissance masters with modern day consumerism and pop culture. You will see many of his subjects drinking popular beverages, eating junk food and riding on scooters, etc. MacDonald also pairs his old Europe subjects with other out of place items such as fantasy box carts that look like they may have come from a century ago. This work is really genial!

"There is a cool, quiet elegance to Alan Macdonald's paintings, which belies the disequilibrium at their heart. His figures, grey eyed and dreaming, might be time travellers, drawing distant cousinship from the portraits of Rembrandt or Frans Hals. His bucolic northern landscapes lay claim to an equally venerable artistic heritage. But if an accretion of the art historical past informs his imagery, it is transposed into a world where confidence has been lost, where the spiritual beliefs and myths which once bound man to nature, and through nature, to the divine, fail to connect.

The otherworldly characters in his series of portrait heads have the look of forgotten pilgrims, bonneted and constrained by cords like the followers of some perverse form of Puritanism. Each is neatly titled according to a state of mind: hedonist, altruist, sadist. We read the titles and search their waxen features, hoping to discover their soul in the curl of a lip, or the tilt of a chin. Despite this attempt at self assertion the figures remain isolated, pinned down by their cords, as if by the codes and strictures of society.

These are beautiful paintings, all the more potent for their distilled sense of calm. Macdonald gives us no answers, but the questions he raises about the search for faith and identity in a difficult modern world touch a nerve, and in the faces of his pilgrims, we recognise ourselves."

Jane Burton





































Alan MacDonald

April 29, 2009

Gorgeous Still Life Digital Paintings with Weapons: Guns and Roses, Plants, Fruits...

Talk about irony. Weaponry such as machine guns, grenades, gas masks, bazookas, etc side by side with  the quiet domesticity of  beautiful flowers, fruits, green plants, cheese, wine, etc. Gorgeous still life paintings with instruments of death mixed in. A haunting but electrifying and beautiful collection.












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April 21, 2009

Oi Va Oi's Fantastic Music Video Made from Shredded Paper




This is a very cool music video by a group I had never heard of called Oi Va Oi. The great looking and innovative vid for their song "Everytime" was made from shredded paper. The video was made by Katarzyna Kijek and Przemysław Adamski. Check it out.



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April 19, 2009

"The Bear Buttes" Running Camp - Run Naked for the "Nike Free" Sneakers

Nike released a new and very interesting promo video for it's Nike Free kicks. The action supposedly takes place at a boot camp called The Bear Buttes where a whole bunch of people run in the nude to experience, I suppose, how unburdened it feels to run while wearing nothing but the Nike Free sneakers. Ummm. Okay



April 16, 2009

More Deliciously Fantastic 3-D Body Art

Those of you who've been following Lunatica for a while must have noticed that I really dig body painting; I mean, I just can't seem to be able to come across gorgeous images of the beautiful art form without wanting to post them here. Hence all the fantastic body paint posts. Take a look at Lunatica's latest body art posting below.















Via Get Made Up

April 15, 2009

Harper's Bazaar's Fascinating Beijing Olympics 2008 Issue - Olympic Fashion

I love the cover and the spread of this Harper's Bazaar Beijing 2008 Olympics issue called "Olympic Fashion". But the cover is my absolute favorite because of the fantastic styling with it's simple minimalism.



















Photographer: Chen Zhun
Magazine: Harper's Bazaar
Date: September, 2008

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