by Lawson Wood (more work here.)

I first saw this when I was about 10 and tried my first jigsaw puzzle with my little sister. We were quite mesmerized by the painting. We found the puzzle too difficult and lost the pieces. 26 years later, I found a complete puzzle on eBay and can’t wait to put it together with her 😃

Googling revealed that a certain David Lewis recreated the painting with real officers of the Royston Police Station in Hertfordshire in 1990.

Image via Herts Past Policing

Vox on the history of plain-white Roman statues and how historians attempt plaster reconstructions with the original colors. Like this one:

Q: Why make art? What do you find by doing it? What does it get you?

Serra: I always wanted an alternative existence. And by that I mean I wanted to do something where I could study my own sentiments and experiences. And I found that I can do that in relation to making things and making art in particular. And I did that since I was a kid it was a place I always could go to that I could concentrate and deal with the problems that I thought were of interest to me. And if I was clear enough about what it was that I was probing, and stayed with the premise of I was probing, it was possible that it could also be clear to someone else, and it was important that it not be something that somebody else has done.

I think one of the things art does is that it asks you to perceive what it is on its own level […] I think works of art engage, possibly, an ‘internal memory bank’ that isn’t linear and it can make you see the outside reality in that way also.

That’s from a recording at the SF MoMA. I first heard of him after moving to Des Moines and seeing his “Five Plate Pentagon” at our beautiful sculpture park.

Image Source: DSM Public Art Foundation

Loving these Moebius-like works by Ali Hoff (prints are available.) Imagined it being a short animated series like Aeon Flux 😍

This is just wonderful stuff. More on his website and on Instagram.

Behold Ray Cicin’s yuge version of Ernst Haeckel’s octopus illustration drawn with discarded ballpoint pens. Prints are available.

Beautiful, astoundingly well-crafted, painfully short work of interactive art.

Was watching an episode or two of Joy of Painting with my sister when we wondered what happened to all the finished paintings on his show.

Now we know.

Dom Ricciobene makes stunning 3D topographic maps, and very satisfying time-lapses, with a CNC machine. Like this one (don’t want to embed Instagram.) Here’s one of Westeros 💯

All Yesterdays is an exploration of things we know we will never know about “dinosaurs and prehistoric animals” . Jonathan Wojcik at bogleech.com has an excellent review of the book. Of particular interest: We know little-to-nothing about the creatures’ anatomies and morphologies because of missing soft tissue data. Here are paleoartists’ recreations of a cow and a swan:

Looked up a sperm whale’s skeleton and can’t imagine how lacking a recreation would be:

Source

This article discusses the history and current state of paleoart. And this post is the ultimate TL;DR on the subject

As C.M. Kosemen explains throughout All Yesterdays, we really can’t ever know how much fat and other soft tissues contributed to the overall shape of dinosaurs since that’s the first thing to rot and shrivel tight against their bones and like even a sperm whale has a little skinny skeleton.

so like

how would we know?

Makes amazing sculptures. See the ones of Freddie Mercury and Doc Brown posted on social media quite often. Has an active YouTube channel.

makes absolutely mesmerizing cyberpunky, vaporwavey 3D art.

By John Atkinson

by Kawanabe Kyosai, Kyosai rakuga¹, 1881.

More of his stuff here. As far as band names go, “Hell Courtesan” is metal as fuck.

Mr. Thomas and the photographer Emily Shur rented a home in Los Angeles for a weekend in May. There, they shot several images that harked back to Mr. Rockwell’s “Freedom From Want,” one in a series of four paintings inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 speech to Congress celebrating America’s freedom and democratic values.

“The image haunted me because of the world we live in,” the artist said, referring to today’s divisive political climate. “I wanted to imagine what it would look like today.”

– The New York Times

Some recreations

– Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur

A lot of parodies of the painting here as well.

By Mike Medaglia who’s published an illustrated guide to mindfulness 🙏

Designed by Pininfarina all the way back in 1970 (!) 😍 🤤

Wahyu Ichwandardi used MacPaint and Macromind VideoWorks/Director on an old Mac SE to create this wonderful frame-by-frame animation of “This is America”.

Kei Nomiyama and Radim Schreiber take otherworldly photos of fireflies (and other things)

The latter will be at the Des Moines Botanical Center exhibiting his “Firefly Experience”

Made a “Literary Clock” inspired by Jaap Meijer’s repurposing of an old Kindle. Might not be a bad use for an old iPad. Reminds me that I need to get Mark Formanek’s Standard Time onto a Raspberry Pi at some point.

08/24/18 There’s an app (of course)

A procedurally generated little town 😍

The firm also did the beautiful, interactive version of Transmit’s awesome logo.

This man has a most magical Instagram account 😲🙌

Love this work by Yuri Shwedoff!

Via. Vanity Fair has an article on the illustrated edition of ASOIF.

More amazing work here and on Instagram. And a similar print for purchase.