When I was about 13 or so, I was blown away when I learned that ancient Greek and Roman statues used to be painted (paywalled; cached PDF) and were not commissioned to be ghostly-white. An all-time favorite is this Greek sculpture of a Persian archer.

Source: “We know Greek statues weren’t white. Now you can see them in color”, NPR

I tremendously enjoy any recreations of color in the ancient world. I find it an absolutely lovely feeling to imagine what life must have been like back then. So when I found this mostly intact home from first century Pompeii, I was tickled pink 🥰

Simply astounding. I got those from Le Sireneuse Journal¹. There’s a nice story of its discovery and a lot more detail on their site but the TL;DR is: Built around 1AD, belonged to a rich family (of course), was buried 36ft under a street for a while because of Vesuvius’ eruption, was discovered by a butcher who was digging out a cellar. Was looted.

I hope to visit one day 🤞

This was rather vertigo inducing.

I can stare at photographs of the Nefertiti Bust all day. It’s just so alive. It was carved out of limestone and covered in stucco/plaster. The eyes were made out of quartz and affixed with beeswax. Just so beautiful. Wikipedia has a 3D model you can look at.

Unknown artist, circa 1800

Not gonna lie: Her head reminded me of the Dust Bunnies in Spirited Away 🙏

I just love this. Couldn’t find out who drew it. Via MVB whose grandma is a huge fan and with whom I will watch an episode or two one day 🤗💗🕵️‍♂️

Robocop’s wet dream. Here are the artist’s website and Instagram.

Henry Lin has a degree in Architectural Design is a “a lover of all things transportative”. He draws really lovely Car Silhouettes 😍 Here are a few.

Chevy Corvette C3 (1968-1972)

Jaguar E-Type (1961-1968)

Lagonda Rapide (1961 - 1964)

Mercedes-Benz S-Class (W221)

Mercedes-Benz CLS400 (C218)

Bugatti Centodieci

Artist Unknown

For “the greatest movie never made”, although there appear to be a few contenders¹ for that title, like Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon.

My absolute favorite is the last one by Hugo Emmanuel Figueroa 🙌

Pe-release flyer (Source)

by Matt Chinn.

Variation 1 by Stan and Vince.

Variation 2 by Stan and Vince.

by Hugo Emmanuel Figueroa

From the highly entertaining “Just One More Thing”

Carved by someone in Ancient Egypt between 3700–3500 BCE.

I can’t get enough of Gustav Nordgren’s art. Here’s a Mughal outpost. Not a high-enough resolution but tap/click for a larger image.

Zooming in!

Here’s another. It’s Aztec!

Just beautiful stuff 😍

by @sportsracer48 (Patreon)

I love these etudes by Professor Yun Shin. I saw them at the Des Moines Art Center a few years ago.

All images © the artist

I bought this print at a thrift store a decade ago because it looked ‘nice’ and warm and I loved the colors. It’s an innocent celebration at a glance and from a distance, and a total bacchanal when you examine its scenes up close.

I never knew who painted it until now. It’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder (not to be confused with the Younger) who “was the most significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting); he was a pioneer in making both types of subject the focus in large paintings.” (Source.) I’m glad that’s settled.

Simply delightful. Here’s an article about him.

In college, I remember being blown away by a huge, physical map of metabolic pathways our Biochemistry professor once brought into class. It looked like this:

Here it is online. Kinda like a Google Maps of cellular reactions. It was impressed upon us that the interior of a cell (especially a eukaryotic one) is a really, really busy and tight and ‘goopy’ place: “crowded, compartmentalized, sticky, spatially inhomogeneous”. As that paper notes, this messy, “macromolecular crowding” helps your proteins fold properly (among several other factors.) This was a bit hard for me to appreciate since, up to then, I was only accustomed to images of cells from a light microscope or vastly simplified illustrations school texts.

I was somehow reminded of all of that after seeing some astounding paintings by Professor David S. Goodsell (Wiki, Twitter, Website). He calls the series “Molecular Landscapes.” Here are a few related to the pandemic we’ve been through.

SARS-CoV-2 and Neutralizing Antibodies, 2020

Acknowledgement: David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank and Springer Nature; doi: 10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-025. The painting was commissioned for the cover of a special COVID-19 issue of Nature, presented 20 August 2020, and is currently in the collection of the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences.

(Unknown Title)

Acknowledgement: Illustration by David S. Goodsell

Coronavirus, 2020

Acknowledgement: Illustration by David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank; doi: 10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-019. This painting depicts a coronavirus just entering the lungs, surrounded by mucus secreted by respiratory cells, secreted antibodies, and several small immune systems proteins. The virus is enclosed by a membrane that includes the S (spike) protein, which will mediate attachment and entry into cells, M (membrane) protein, which is involved in organization of the nucleoprotein inside, and E (envelope) protein, which is a membrane channel involved in budding of the virus and may be incorporated into the virion during that process. The nucleoprotein inside includes many copies of the N (nucleocapsid) protein bound to the genomic RNA.

SARS-CoV-2 Fusion, 2020

Acknowledgement: Illustration by David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank; doi: 10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-026. This painting depicts the fusion of SARS-CoV-2 (magenta) with an endosomal membrane (green), releasing the viral RNA genome into the cell cytoplasm (blue), where it is beginning to be translated by cellular ribosomes to create viral polyproteins. The painting includes speculative elements that are designed to highlight the process, most notably, multiple states of the viral spike protein are shown.

SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine, 2020

Acknowledgement: Illustration by David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank; doi: 10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-027. Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines developed for the COVID-19 pandemic are composed of long strands of RNA (magenta) that encode the SARS-CoV-2 spike surface glycoprotein enclosed in lipids (blue) that deliver the RNA into cells. Several different types of lipids are used, including familar lipids, cholesterol, ionizable lipids that interact with RNA, and lipids connected to polyethylene glycol chains (green) that help shield the vaccine from the immune system, lengthening its lifetime following administration. In this idealized illustration, all of the lipids are arranged in a simple circular bilayer that surrounds the mRNA and the PEG strands have both extended and folded conformations. In reality, the structure may be less regular, as suggested in the NanoLetters paper […]

I love this work by @VisualDon. It sold for ~$45,000 at an NFT auction. Here’s how he made it.

Hikaru Dorodango means “Shining Mudcake”. Start with a lump of mud and end with a highly polished sphere. Absolutely amazing. Here’s a short NatGeo video about Bruce Gardner, an artist who makes a lot of these. He says it took him 30 tries to make his first perfect one.

This is one of the most seriously badass representations of Shakti I’ve seen in a while.

I love these paintings by Arturo Garcia. I saw them in Denver. They’re from a series called Tatanka - The Spirit of the Land.

I absolutely love this otherworldly work by Maria Svarbova (Wiki, Web, Insta.) GN thought they looked like stills from a Wes Anderson short film.

Kiawak Ashoona, Musk Ox, 1963

Absolutely lovely stuff by Doug John Miller. Ordered it in puzzle-form (which comes with a giant poster.)

This is a pretty high-res image. Tap to explore!

Ronald Ray Cobb was “an American-Australian cartoonist, artist, and film designer” who passed away in September last year. He worked on movies like “Back to the Future”, “Jodorowsky’s Dune”, and “Alien”.

An ornithopter!

But it’s perhaps his cartoons that are more enduring and eeriely relevant after 40 years of their publication.

This is a silk hankerchief from c.1860 used by one or more people to cheat¹ on the Imperial Examinations.

Via the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Here are a bunch of Art History Professors discussing this artifact and its history

I love, love, love this work by Elke König.

I haven’t seen anything that captures the times quite like this work by Willikin Wolf (Patreon, Instagram)

Update as of January 6th, 2021

Source: ABC News

Here he is on Instagram.

Serigraph for sale at the Davidson Galleries (it’s $550.)

Here’s some more of his art and his Facebook page. Not sure if these are licensed, but you can buy some prints off Indian Amazon.

CK and I loved this short and strange and beautiful ‘game’ by artist Michael Frei and developer Mario van Rickenbach.

There’s even an art exhibition. I don’t know. Take it for what it is.

Well-worth the $2 you’ll spend on it. Don’t look behind you if you have major vertigo or megalophobia. “The Creation of Adam” was hair-raising. The Vermeer was just so beautiful 💯

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:

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

I could just stare at his work all day. This one’s called “The River of Life”

and this one “Deep Forest”

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.

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

Love this work by Yuri Shwedoff!

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