Friday, February 26, 2010

Bar Code Art




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Are you into prints?

Or a print maker? Then you will be into this artist's work:


www.raquelissima.com



Make sure and follow us if you like what you see! And as always, don't forget to stop by our MAIN website by clicking here. We provide everything you need and need to know about art! You can also stop by our art forum by clicking here. Give us your thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Collaborate with other artists and art lovers via the Art Fortune Art Forum! Can't wait to see you there.



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"I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly."
-Van Gogh

I think most every artist can agree with what Van Gogh said. Have you ever touched anybody with your art? What happened? What did they say? How did it affect you?



Make sure and follow us if you like what you see! And as always, don't forget to stop by our MAIN website by clicking here. We provide everything you need and need to know about art! You can also stop by our art forum by clicking here. Give us your thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Collaborate with other artists and art lovers via the Art Fortune Art Forum! Can't wait to see you there.


Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Something Fresh....

...For your lovely eyes to gaze upon:


by Tiziano Fioriti:


by John Patrick Adams:

by Egil Paulsen:


by Tanya Pshenychny




Make sure and follow us if you like what you see! And as always, don't forget to stop by our MAIN website by clicking here. We provide everything you need and need to know about art! You can also stop by our art forum by clicking here. Give us your thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Collaborate with other artists and art lovers via the Art Fortune Art Forum! Can't wait to see you there.


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Thursday, February 4, 2010



“Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” by painter Lucian Freud sold for 17 million in 2008. Sue Tilly sat for Freud over a long 4 year period, but it’s no wonder why the price is so big, because he remains to be the most expensive living artist today.

Make sure and follow us if you like what you see! And as always, don't forget to stop by our MAIN website by clicking here. We provide everything you need and need to know about art! You can also stop by our art forum by clicking here. Give us your thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Collaborate with other artists and art lovers via the Art Fortune Art Forum! Can't wait to see you there.

A movie about - and made by - the controversial artist Banksy, “Exit Through The Gift Shop” is a film within a film that chronicles the guerrilla art scene that eventually shifts to poke fun at the sly satire of celebrity, consumerism, the art scene, and film making itself.

“Gift Shop” moves from the focus of Banksy himself, and speculates the idea of art appraisal and how we see art in itself. Is it some subjective aesthetic test or economic valuation that we come to these conclusions, or do artists need to earn their names, or is artistry simply imposed upon them through some random algorithm?

“Maybe [the filmmaker is] just someone with mental problems who happened to have a camera,” Banksy says about his friend and accomplice Guetta. “Maybe it means art is a bit of a joke”.



Make sure and follow us if you like what you see! And as always, don't forget to stop by our MAIN website by clicking here. We provide everything you need and need to know about art! You can also stop by our art forum by clicking here. Give us your thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Collaborate with other artists and art lovers via the Art Fortune Art Forum! Can't wait to see you there.


If you’re looking to get better at drawing and composing, as well as an outdated, out of print, fantastic series of instruction books by Andrew Loomis, then all you need to do is click this link.


Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was a German-Austrian sculpture artist most notable for his works of “character heads”. It was around that time, during his 30’s, that he also started having severe hallucinations and dreams of spirits visiting him at night and torturing him. The sculptor once told an author it was his intention to recreate the 64 “canonical grimaces” and was undergoing so much pain during the process that he would pinch his rib in order to relieve that pain. It is now believed that he suffered from undiagnosed Crohn’s disease, but his sculptures seem to depict the story of a shockingly unreal pain both comical and praiseworthy.

1917 - Marcel Duchamp poised ‘Fountain’ in a gallery. It was a urinal set to shock audiences into thinking for themselves.

1931 - Salvador Dali paints Hallucination Partielle: six appatitions de Lénine sur un piano. He sought not only to challenge the viewers taste, but also to disturb.

1963 - Andy Warhol produces the Eight Elvises. He has breached the boundaries between high and low art, placing the products of popular culture and consumer society in the revered space of the gallery. Eight Elvises is sold for $100 million.

2006 - “Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie.” Underground Bristol Graffiti artist Banksy dresses an inflatable doll in Guantanamo Bay detainee camp prisoner and places it within the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at the Disneyland theme park, California.

A friend of mine has started a thread at our forum if you’d like to discover more. We’re covering topics that range from what your most favorite controversial piece of art is, to the importance of controversy as well as censorship. Come join in on the discussion!


Antonio Canova. Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss. 1787.


“My moleskine work is a kind of a visual diary; some stuff is private symbols, some things I don’t understand till after I draw them and then ‘oh, that’s how that fits together.’”

-Kipling West on Tales From The Moleskine



“A little too old to have hair so blonde and lips so red. The darkness rises and threatens to overwhelm. Are those fading dreams around her?”

Roger Hanson. Couldabeen Marlyn Today. 2003. MOBA #196.


“The main lesson for artists is that they should be adventurous, because even if they fail, they may still end up with something that people will respond to and gain recognition for their efforts.”

MOBA - or the Museum of Bad Art - prides itself on bad art and does so with dignity. Of all the work they receive only about 10% is accepted. Artwork is constantly being rejected in the categories of factory art, tourist art, painted on velvet, art painted by children, and kitschy motifs (like dogs playing with cards). But beyond those disqualifications, if an artist submits his own work and is rejected, it’s usually because it’s “just to good for us”. It’s a no-lose proposition. If their artwork is accepted, they get to be in the museum. If not, they can tell their friends and family that they were too good for MOBA.

The above painting is Lucy in the Field with Flowers.

Caleb Larsen. A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter. 2009.



Bidding is at $4,250. Going once, going twice, SOLD! Now put it back on online. This is an artwork whose sole purpose is to sell itself on ebay.

Egon Schiele. Hockender männlicher Akt (Selbstporträt). 1914.

Edward Hopper. Nighthawks. 1942.

This is a spherical painting to show the six point perspective which Dick Termes was known for. If you try to imagine the sphere as something hollow, or transparent, where the painting is on the interior, it will seemingly reverse directions and you’ll find yourself inside the painting.

“Art isn’t art until it’s sold. Until then it’s an obsession and a storage problem.”

- Anonymous

You Must Be An Artist If...

  1. You were more concerned about the color of your car than the fuel consumption.
  2. The highlights in your hair are from your palette and not Clairol.
  3. You are having lunch with the girls and the fragrance you wear is eau d’linseed oil.
  4. The only piece of new furniture you have in your home is a $2000 easel.
  5. You butter your toast with your fingers, just to feel its texture.
  6. You think about taking a picture to a show.
  7. You talk about going to a show where the pictures don’t move.
  8. You are over 50 and still have no health insurance.
  9. Your family takes out a life insurance plan on you for less than $5000.
  10. You know what shade of green the lichen on the trees is.
  11. You can’t find a nice outfit for your date because everything has paint smears on.
  12. Your date ends up with paint smears on her/him.
  13. You’re late for the date because you suddenly knew exactly what that detail of your latest painting needed and just had to fix it while it was fresh in your mind.
  14. You chose to buy that new Russian Sable Number Six Round instead of a Big Mac, a Large Fry, a Milkshake, Desert, and five gallons of gas.
  15. Your favorite home repair store refuses to work with you to repaint your den, because you rename all of their paint swatches and you get upset that they don’t carry the exact nuance of raw umber you had in mind.
  16. You purchase a ton of books, and most are blank inside.
  17. When viewing a sunset, you think in terms of cadmium yellow (light hue), salmon and gold, a tinted teal mixed with gold for the water….”
  18. Strangers save your ‘regular’ spot at the park, perfect for observing children and pigeons.
  19. There are Prussian blue fingerprints on your phone.
  20. You stay awake late at night wondering how to render on canvas the dimly lit shapes and the shadows in your room.
  21. When you go out, you are always stopping and gazing at the world around you.
  22. You travel far to sketch a place of scenic beauty.
  23. You clean your brushes in your coffee.
  24. You carry pencils instead of pens.
  25. You have watercolor swatches on cardboard in your pocket.
  26. You explain your deplorably bad housekeeping by saying, “it’s a work-in-progress…”
  27. You do judge a book by its cover.
  28. You watch the latest kids’ digital animation movies and drool over the effects as much as the story.
  29. You bought paint instead of food!
  30. You paint more than you talk.
  31. You draw your letters instead of write them.
  32. You like to get plastered and paint the town red.
  33. You’re in love … with your studio.
  34. You know that art does not match your sofa.
  35. If dust bunnies are part of your mixed media.
  36. You buy expensive brushes, and have nothing to do your hair with.
  37. You get a feeling of calmness from holding and stroking the bristles of your clean paintbrushes.
  38. When going on a quick errand in your painting cloths you’re finding people rave over the ‘fashion statement’ you didn’t even realize you were making.
  39. You know the difference between beige, ecru, cream, off-white, and eggshell.
  40. You know more than 28 colors.
  41. You get excited about football season because it means your significant other will finally be sitting still on the sofa long enough for you to paint him.
  42. At the gym you take note of the instense facial expressions of the heavy lifters.
  43. You never look at a person’s face as a whole. You break it up into shadows and lines and shapes, and think how they would look on a canvas.
  44. When others are needing to be with the in crowd, you feel lost in the crowd.
  45. You long to be alone with your thoughts while others are lonely without much thought.

Some of these are gems. I want to know your favorites! Let me know, or discuss them over at our art forum.



As if 500 years of being nude isn’t controversy enough. David, the sculptured masterpiece by Michelangelo, is said to have stirring emotions that clash and trigger mental imbalances in overly sensitive and cultivated onlookers. “I’ve called it the David Syndrome. It causes mind-bending symptoms and affects mostly those travelling on their own or in couples,” says one psychologist.

The artistic intoxication is caused by a combination of several things, including the stress of the trip, an “overdose” of beautiful art and the degree of sensitivity of the person. It is one of the top tier masterpieces in the world, a universal art token, conceivably expected to cause a little bit of madness for unsuspecting spectators.


A thief in Paris planned to steal some paintings from the Louvre. After carefully planning, he got past security, stole the paintings and made it safely to his van. However, he was captured only two blocks away when his van ran out of gas.

When asked how he could mastermind such a crime and then make such an obvious error, he replied:

“Monsieur, I had no Monet to buy Degas to make the Van Gogh.”

(And you thought I lacked De Gaulle to post a story like this.)

A total of 12 paintings were stolen in a residential area in Los Angeles late last year, which included works by Hans Hoffman and Riego Rivera. There is a reward of $200,000 to anybody for information leading to the paintings’ return. Click for more art crimes.

Thomas Cole. The Architect’s Dream. 1840.



“None know how often the hand of God is seen in a wilderness but them that rove it for a man’s life. “

Thomas Cole painted The Savage State as part of a series of paintings he titled The Course of Empire. It is the first in the aforementioned that depicts the amalgamation of societies from the feral man to the provincial man eventually evolving, through each painting, and representing, the rise and fall of an empire, leaving the 5th painting “Desolation”, its end result. Although imaginary, it is still said that what comes up, must come down. It happened to Rome, but will it happen to us?



Luck Be a Lady Tonight.

Top Ten Lies Told To Beginning Artists, Designers, & Illustrators

  1. “Do this one cheap (or free) and we’ll make it up on the next one.”
  2. “We never pay a cent until we see the final product.”
  3. “Do this for us and you’ll get great exposure! The jobs will just pour in!”
  4. On looking at sketches or concepts: “Well, we aren’t sure if we want to use you yet, but leave your material here so I can talk to my partner/investor/wife/clergy.”
  5. “Well, the job isn’t CANCELLED, just delayed. Keep the account open and we’ll continue in a month or two.”
  6. “Contract? We don’t need no stinking contact! Aren’t we friends?”
  7. “Send me a bill after the work goes to press.”
  8. “The last guy did it for XXX dollars.”
  9. “Our budget is XXX dollars, firm.
  10. “We are having financial problems. Give us the work, we’ll make some money and then we’ll pay you.”

(via)


El Lissitzky. Neuer (New Man). 1923.

“Good art is in the wallet of the beholder.”

- Kathy Lette