Z - a r t B l o g

Today we advise you to take a trip through the fantasy world of Johanna Pieterman. She draws some amazing photo-realistic color pencil artwork. Sources of inspiration are numerous and her style, specially her compositions are very unique. To mention 2 of her main sources of inspiration: "Mists of Avalon" and Stevie Nicks (Fleetwood Mac). You will see that these are very prominent throughout her work if you browse the art galleries.

I just discovered a very well setup flash website displaying the bronze artwork of Stefaan Werbrouck, a Belgian artist. How to get the site going I'll let you figure out yourself, but as the site is completely in Dutch I'll give a hint on how to find the art. Just click on "beelden" (=sculptures) below the artists picture.

I entered this website through the blog which is an interesting read on itself, available both in English and Swedish, but there is more, lots more. Visiting the website of Max Magnus is a treasure hunt with all kind of interesting art stuff. There is the blog which I already mention, but also free games and programs, a shop, a link directory, some type of link swap program and an art discussion board. All this in a rather original, slightly chaotic styled website.

However, the most important part is of course the art of Max Magnus which you will find in 2 categories. One being his paintings, the other his sculptures. If you like surreal art you should really go and explore this mans work. Dig in and discover the visionary world of Max Magnus.

Can art be combined with racing? Sure it can! At least, according to the people behind the Kinetic Sculpture Race. I would say, judge for yourself, I'm inclined to agree with them. I quote: "It's human powered engineering and art all wrapped up in the most imaginative racing machines you've ever laid eyes on!". To me it looks like a lot of artful fun.

Infrared photography creates very special images with a high dreamlike factor. This website might be not much as a website in itself, but it shows some beautiful infrared photography and is easy to navigate. The subjects range from models to landscapes and are in black and white or in color. Go have a look and enjoy the infrared works of Chris Maher and Larry Berman.

People who are into photography themselves will also find an interesting little article on how to shoot infrared with digital cameras.

© Chris Maher

Art News, Reviews, & Commentary. That's what Art a GoGo Podcast is all about. Listen in if you want to here about interesting art news and events.

Art a GoGo comes with a blog with descriptions of the weekly shows. Enjoy!

On Image Latente I discovered a little photo series by Yves Noir called "Simulation". It are sober images with a beautiful tonal range and light setup. The pictures show a female body on the ground as if that is here natural environment. If we read in the who is Yves Noir it says there: "He rather focuses on originally human exposedness and vulnerability." I can do nothing but agree, vulnerability is all over his photos.

More of his fine art photography can be found on his website.

© Yves Noir

The website dreamlandscapes.com displays some interesting experimental photography but the most interesting is the Altered Reality Gallery. By using digital post processing with mirror like effects kaleidoscopic landscapes are created. Get ready to be hypnotized by this surreal view of the world.

© dreamlandscapes.com(TM)

The epic poem 'Paradise Lost' written by 17th century British writer John Milton (1608-1674) is going to be transferred into a movie according to Variety.

This masterpiece, published in 1667 by the blind poet tells us the story of the creation, the origin of sin, death and evil in 12 volumes. In case of commercial success a sequel is possible as John Milton wrote a sequel called 'Paradise Regained', another quiet volumes poem. Scott Derrickson, know for 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' will be the director. When the movie will hit the theaters is unknown as filming one of the major monuments in world literature will take some time...

R. Young Art produces beautiful and very realistic oil paintings and pastels that vibrate with life. The oil paintings and pastels are very realistic and have an almost photographic feeling to them. Amongst the paintings we find female figure studies portraying the girls in all there sensual beauty, very impressive tango and ballet paintings and powerful concert pastels. You can almost here the music, see the movements of the dance!

R. Young Art also shares some other information with us such as an article on how to care for your art and of course ... how to order.

As of today, the guest exhibitions here on Zgallery-art are officially open. Our first guest is a tarot artist from Hawaii, Anna Mills Raimondi. I do not want to put a label on her, but all the artwork in the exhibit is tarot inspired, so....

Anna discovered the fact that we are offering one web page to artists looking for representation on the web for free via the forum of Aeclectic Tarot.

If you are an artist without a website and you would like to become a guest exhibitor here yourself then all you have to do is sent us an email and we will tell you what we need and how it works. You can check out Anna's exhibit to see what you can expect.

For those with no interest in becoming a guest exhibitor, have a look at the colorful tarot art of Anna Mills Raimondi and enjoy.

Whether art is weird, strange or just plain bad is something you have to make up for yourself. Something Bert Chrisensen has done for a number of paintings. He has put online a small collection of artworks he thinks are either weird, strange or just plain bad and accompanies them with a fun caption. If you are feeling like a laugh or maybe just a smile, this page is a nice browse. If you're really in the mood you can participate in his caption contest. Try to look past he sometimes horrible compression of the images and judge for yourself...

Something completely different this time. An interactive website where you can learn in an interactive (really!) and fun way about Renaissance. I guess the people at the Allentown Art Museum watch a lot of Monty python because that was my first thought when opening the site, and not renaissance.

They take it a lot further then art and also cover subjects such as lifestyle, trade, science, etc. Teachers might find the downloadable lesson plans interesting!

This is a very flashy flash site featuring the glamorous model photography of Andre Hoppe. The top of the website looks rather cheap but I guess some people dig this and it goes well with the fact that he digital enhances his photographs. However it is in strong contrast to his very attractive and tasteful digital enhanced pictures of his mostly nude female models. The site is in German but you don't need to speak to watch his beautiful gallery!

Edit:
The web page has (temporarily?) changed and no longer shows models but a special offer on kid portraits.

"Subjects portrayed in this Gallery may be unsuitable for some individuals." is what you will read on the homepage of Galindorf's Gallery, but it isn't that horrible, well, that was what I thought anyway.

What you will find here are fantasy drawings with a special interest for monsterly creatures. The medium is usually pencil combined with some digital post processing. Although there are also other art forms like sculpting present in the galleries. So if you feel like a trip to a fantasy world, go on right in.

As seen on Aeclectic Tarot

Lisa Gallagher creates stunning handcrafted fine jewelry. Her work is as diverse as her materials but the result is always the same: beautiful and artful jewelry. Check out her website and submerge yourself into the world of fine art jewelry!

One of my personal favorites

People interested in contemporary yet still figurative bronze sculptures might want to take a look here. You can see the artwork of the late Anne Marie Paul here and read a short biography. The sculptures of Anne Marie Paul are "stretched out" figures full of organic shapes. My personal favorite are the figures stretched around a whole holding a sphere.

Browsing around the Internet looking for humorous sculptures I bumped into this website. These guys sure know there way around sand. Their website isn't exactly "it" but there sculptures are great. Incredible what man can do with a little sand, well, a little?

"I would describe my work as humorous with a southern slant. I would like for my art to be a mini-vacation from reality for the viewer.", that's how Rebecca Stringer Korpita describes her work in an interview.

How I would describe her work is another matter. I mean I do agree with her on her own view, but if somebody would ask me in which style she paints I would have to say something like surrealism meets impressionism. Although that last bit isn't really on the mark but it are her strong colors and it looks like she works fast that make we see that link. Oh, never mind, just go and see for yourself. Should it interest you enough to buy her stuff you can go straight to her ebay shop.

Let's just finish by saying: her work makes me smile and feel good!

My wive and I recently visited a beautiful part of the world called Patagonia. It was one of our best travel experiences ever. I mention it because I found this fine website which gives a feel of this vast region through the medium of photography. It's a very nice site also offering prints and wallpapers for downloading.

My own Patagonia photography can be found here, you must see it as a photographic diary. The story behind the pictures can be read here.

Vlad Gansovsky is a fine-art photographer with an impressing online portfolio. He does classic photography, portraits, glamour and retro and has interesting images in most of those categories.

However, it's his alternate category that in my humble opinion is the most interesting. A collection of unusual, distressing, upsetting nude photography with a broad range of special effects.

Link found on Unscathed Corpse

Surreal, dreamlike photographic compositions that evoke in me a feeling of sadness, melancholy, chaos.
They say that art has to do something to you, that it has to make you think or trigger emotions. If that's your definition of art then you are where you should be with the work of Barbara Lee Black.

That's a lot of praise for a photographer but it doesn't stop there. She constructs here own frames as well, and not just a frame. Barabara starts working from within the image to build a frame around it, extracting elements from the original composition that are then moulded into a frame. In this way she creates a symbioses between artwork and frame melting it together to one piece of beautiful art. Whether the work in the frames parallels or surpasses that of the photograph I can only guess but to me she is both photographer and sculptor.

For the second time Praga kahn is staging a theatre tour. It was my first time as I didn't' see the first one so I was pretty impressed. I was told though by people who saw both that the first one was better but hey, that couldn't ruin my experience.

Imagine this, to use Praga Kahn, aka Maurice Engelen's own words: ballet, dance, semi nude tango, magic, action painting, break dance, human beat box, flamenco, opera, and all that to the pounding beats of the music of Praga Kahn. Actually, the music was more tranquil than usual, more atmospheric, trying to create a special atmosphere. Unfortunately sometimes completely ruined by an in your face sponsor logo or a request for a loud applauding.

But these where minor irritations in an overall overwhelming show of art mixtures. The fact that the music was a little more softer than on festivals or on his Cd's added to the overall experience of drowning yourself in a visual and musical feast and even resulted in surprising new versions of existing songs like the Flamenco version of Breakfast in Vegas.

The artists where quite a collection too featuring for example dancers from the Royal Ballet of Flanders, the Royal Opera, an illusionist who won the 'Golden Lion Award' in Las Vegas and a Japanese break dancer with lots of international awards. That's only mentioning a few. For people wondering who Praga Kahn is, if you are from the USA it's possible you know him as the man behind Lords of Acid.

Alas, for those of you who after reading this think: "wow, I gotta see this!", the tour is almost at its end and everything is completely sold out.

Click here for more information on Code Red and here for more information on Praga Kahn in General.

If you are into abstract photography this site might be just the thing for you. Xavier Damon blows up colorful Polaroids or other instant film. He uses this medium in an attempt to capture the elusive moments of daydreaming when color and forms melt together into emotion as you can read in his statement.

We already spoke here of Beaufort 2006 (who's website is still down), the art happening on the Belgian coast. In the town of Middelkerken it resulted in quite a stir when the locals saw what was going to be exhibited on there town square.

The artwork in question is "Shark" by David Cerny, a provocative Czech artist. "Shark" features a realistic looking life-size Saddam Hussein in his underwear and with his hands tied behind his back floating in a large glass tank filled with the embalming fluid formaldehyde looking quite dead.

The mayor of the town banned the work for several reasons such as that children can see it in the town square, that he has problems with it because of it depicting a living person still on trial and finally (maybe the main reason?) that he doesn't want to provoke a certain group of people.

You can read a full article on the Radio Praha website and see the work of David Cerny on his website.

Shark by David Cerny

At the Belgian cost Beaufort 2006 has started last Saturday. Beaufort is a contemporary art happening that in this edition, its second, focuses on monumental art. Every city along the coastal line is participating. Among the artworks are a 9 meter high spider above the grave of James Ensor and a herd of elephants in the sea. The event will end in September.

Unfortunately at the time of writing, the website of the happening was down.

I just ran into an incredible cute dog portrait that I wanted to share with you. Speaking about doggy eyes... Check it out.

I ran into the work of Matha Pettigrew on the Internet, by chance I landed on her "Rebecca" page and I was enchanted by this figurative sculpture. I loved the overall form of the statue but most of all I love how she combined colors in this 26" high bronze sculpture.

So I started looking around on her site and she has some pretty diverse subjects going from funny animals (good, humor is always good) to Mexican woman in Bronze (of which Rebecca is one). There is some great other stuff among her work too but it is especially "Rebecca" and "hopi basket" that stole my heart.

The minute I entered his site, straight into his portfolio I was impressed with what I saw. The first thing that caught my eye was that this guy knows his light. Specially the combination of ambient light and artificial light he masters well. This you can see mainly in the second fashion series or at the end of the third.
I'm pretty (not to say completely) sure there is some Photoshop post processing as well but it all results in striking fashion photography showing the best of his models yet making the location, if shot on location, interesting as well.
If you have a look at his Making Off section you will see that this are big time productions, just have a look at the setup of walking on water, again, very impressive. I would say Franck Duez is a major player in the fashion photography field.