Madonna for Louis Vuitton

These are definately the best looking pictures I've seen of madonna in a few years. Highly airbrushed they might be but who cares. She looks much better airbrushed and the photographs are really stunning. They are for Louis Vuitton's latest campaign for their Autumn 2009 collection. I love how the Madonna appears to glow in vivid colours but the photos have just been made negative in places- an effect I don't think I've seen or appreciated before. It makes the images look quite surreal and dreamlike. I think they're look great as giant billboards if they are used for that purpose.

Bert Simon's Paper Sculptures

These amazing portrait sculptures by Bert Simon's are made entirely from folded paper. They are made by first of all modelling the head's in 3d on an open source cad programme like Blender. They're then printed out as a net and stuck together to made 3d sculptures. I think they're really cool and look just like 3d computer game characters from the 80s. They particularly remind me of the film Back to the Future 2 when it features some 3d talking characters on a screen which are supposed to look futuristic but now look exprememly dated. At the same time as looking like computer graphics though, they kind of also look like they are carved from wood. I'd like to see how I would look as a 3d paper sculpture. 

The Salvador Dali Theatre and Museum - Figueres

When I went to Barcelona this Summer I visited the museum of the artist Salvador Dalí in his home town of Figueres, Catalonia. The museum opened in 1974 and houses the largest and most diverse collection of Salvador Dalí's works, including many from the artist's own collection. Aswell as Dalí paintings from all decades of his career, there are Dalí sculptures, 3D collages, mechanical devices and other curiosoities from Dali's imagination. My favourite part and perhaps the most unusual part of teh museum was a living-room with custom furniture that looks like the face of Mae West when viewed from a certain point on some stairs above the room. I'd certainly never seen anything like it.

What I loved about the museum is that it isn't just a building housing the artists work, but is a work of surrealist art in itself. The building is very striking, with a roof bordered by giant eggs and pink walls covered in gold blobs. Walking around the museum, there are are interesting things to look at everywhere, not just the paintings on the walls. There are holographs, potical games and strereoscopic paintings- double paintings which , when viewed through a mrror, becoem 3D images.

I've always been liked Dali's work for it's surrealism. His work is like something from a dream, when you can't quite get your head around what you saw in your dream or why your brain created these images. His work isn't just abstract for the sake of being abstract but combines thing syou wouldn't mormally see together into wierd imaginative compositions.  Thework in the museum is fun, playful and interactive and it makes you look at things differently. Definatley the most interesting art gallery/museum I've ever been to and worth the trip out of Barcelona.

What You See Might Not Be Real

I saw this scupture on a news website and only being able to see the cloud part of the sculpture, I thought it was a real cloud of smoke. It amazed me to see, when i viewed the full image, that it was part of a sculpture because it looks so real! 

The sculpture is by artist Chen Wenling and is on display in a Beijing  Gallery. It is called What You See Might Not Be Real- a very fitting title as i thought part of it was real- and it is about the global financial crisis. The bull is supposed to represent Wall Street and the man pinned against the wall is supposed to be jailed financier Bernard Madoff. I don't know much about Bernard Madoff but from what I enterpret, the bull is representing Wall Street's anger at Bernard Madoff and the revenge 'it' would like to get on him. I think the sculpture is amazing- it's like a cartoon from a newspaper but with so much animation and life to it. You can get a real sense on the power in the bull. It's quite scary! 

Colourful Portraits

I love these colourful portraits by Francoise Nielly, they're so good I could almost eat them. The colours are so bright and look so juicy they're kind of mouthwatering. I love how she uses colour to portray light tone and shadow and get's it so right, they almost look 3D. I wish I could paint something that looks so messy yet so perfect- something I've alyways tried to do but failed at, with my results either looking too neat or a total mess. It's interesting how she has painted the eyes with more detail than the rest of the portraits so they stand out and stare at you. 

Tilt Shift Photography

I came across these photos taken using the tilt-shift technique of photography. I've never seen photos like hese before r if ihave I was perhaps fooled into thining they were photos of minitiare villages or objects. Tilt-shift photography involves using both tilt and shift camera movements to simulate the depth of field of a macro lens, making normal objects and landscapes appear as though they’re actually miniature in scale. The effect can be incredibly powerful, instantly turning a sprawling metropolis into a miniature village or toy town. 

While some photographers use expensive cameras and lenses to create their tilt-shift images, others choose to use postproduction techniques instead. By blurring the top and bottom of an image, as well as increasing its contrast and saturation, you can create a tilt-shift miniature fake that looks just as good as the real thing. Some of the photos ive seen don't look as good as other's though, possibly because theyr'e fake which weren't done very well. These are pick of my favourites from a selection I found.

Peggy

I think my favourite artist of all time is probably Roy Litchenstein. I love the tongue in cheek comic strip pieces he did with their bright colours and good-looking glamourous subjects.  

Californian bases artist, Matt Billfields created this 3-dimensional interpretation of one of Litchenstein's paintings, which gives the viewer a different experience from every angle. I like how the pixelated appearance of Litchenstein's painting is taken to another level using 3d pegs and I'd like to see how it would look when looking straight on.