Strange Sculpture and Painting Projects of Kari Byron

Kari Byron spent 1998-1999 backpacking around the world, focusing mainly on Asia. During her travels he was involved in personal and collaborative sculpture and painting projects as well as the research and acquisition of pieces for an investor.

Artist Statement – Her work quarantines the world into a more manageable space. The focus is the process, each piece is a meditation in his desire for a simple understanding of the daily white noise. Kari Byron currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

7 Amazing Transparent Animals – Wonders of Nature

Nature is fascinating and often weird, it surprises us when we least expect. Some creatures use the camouflage techniques as a hunting and defense mechanism, others show everything they have -  like transparent animals. Despite of what we are inclined to think, transparent and translucent animals live also on the ground, not only in the abyss of the ocean and we have visual proof of it. Nothing is photoshopped!

1. Transparent Frog

Umm, not so fast, prof… have you seen the “glass frog” (above), native to the Venezuelan rainforest? Like the transparent frogs selectively bred in the lab from generations of pale-skinned Japanese Brown Frogs, the Glass Frog’s internal organs and eggs can be seen without too much trouble. Word to Professor Sumida: take the grant money and run!

2. Transparent Cave Crayfish

Caves are some of the darkest places on the planet – even sophisticated light-gathering instruments are unable to register a single photon in the deepest, darkest caves. Under these conditions, creatures including fish, spiders, insects and crayfish have evolved into “troglobites”: animals so precisely adapted to living in darkness that they cannot survive outside cave environments. Under such conditions, neither eyes nor pigmentation are necessary.

3. Transparent Sea Cucumber

Slow moving, soft bodied bottom dwellers for the most part, Sea Cucumbers are an ancient lineage of sea creatures who have evolved a variety of ways to survive and thrive over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. For some Sea Cucumbers, being transparent allows them to fly under the radar, as it were, of predators in search of a quick & easy kill.

4. Transparent Icefish

Fund in the cold waters around Antarctica and southern South America, the crocodile icefish (Channichthyidae) feed on krill, copepods, and other fish. Their blood is transparent because they have no hemoglobin and/or only defunct erythrocytes. Their metabolism relies only on the oxygen dissolved in the liquid blood, which is believed to be absorbed directly through the skin from the water. This works because water can dissolve the most oxygen when it is coldest.

5. Transparent Amphipod

Called Phronima, this unusual animal is one of the many strange species recently found on an expedition to a deep-sea mountain range in the North Atlantic. In an ironic strategy for survival, this tiny shrimplike creature shows everything it has, inside and out, in an attempt to disappear.

6. Transparent Squid

Found on the southern hemisphere’s oceans, the Glass Squid (Teuthowenia pellucida) has light organs on its eyes and possesses the ability to roll into a ball, like an aquatic hedgehog.

7. Transparent Siphonophores

Siphonophores belong to the Cnidaria, a group of animals that includes the corals, hydroids, and true jellyfish. Marrus orthocanna, a deep sea siphonophore. The combined digestive and circulatory system is red; all other parts are transparent.

Can You Explain the Creatures in this Photo?

Japanese Monsters in Children’s Book Art by Gojin Ishihara

When we was a kid, we went through a phase where we was way into monsters — Draculas, Frankensteins, demons from the pits of Hell, all that good stuff — and, as these were the dark days before the Internet, I would hit the library on a weekly basis checking out books illustrated with the scarier pieces of pop culture and mythology. Well, I’ve got to say that right now, seven year-old Chris Sims is insanely jealous of his Japanese counterparts, because they had Gojin Ishihara, a manga artist whose work on numerous children’s books from the 1970s is both terrifying and awesome.

Here is a collection of wonderfully weird illustrations by Gōjin Ishihara, whose work graced the pages of numerous kids’ books in the 1970s. The first 16 images below appeared in the “Illustrated Book of Japanese Monsters” (1972), which profiled supernatural creatures from Japanese legend. The other illustrations appeared in various educational and entertainment-oriented publications for children.

Read more

Design Gaping Holes in The City – Art by Gordon Matta-Clark

The American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78), who trained as an architect, used the urban environment and more specifically buildings as material. He arranged empty premises by, among other things, cutting out fragments. With his interventions he transformed architecture into sculpture, he exposed the soul of a building: to convert a place into a state of mind.

Read more

All You Need is One Fur Covered Object – Meret Oppenheim

It’s possible to be famous long past your lifetime on the strength of one piece. No one exemplifies that possibility as well as Meret Oppenheim, Swiss painter and sculptor of German birth, whose Object from 1936 is at the Museum of Modern Art. Here are her best known sculptures and short explanation about some of them.

Fur Covered Cup, Saucer, and Spoon, 1936

This Surrealist object was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim and artists Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a Paris cafe. Admiring Oppenheim’s fur-covered bracelet, Picasso remarked that one could cover anything with fur, to which she replied, “Even this cup and saucer.” Soon after, when asked by André Breton, Surrealism’s leader, to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition dedicated to objects, Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle.

Table With Bird Legs, 1939

Oppenheim’s table, like her tea cup touched on a nerve that was about the female. The legs of the table are slender bird’s legs. Choosing the subject of the table, where women serve tea or dinner, the table suggests an object of offering. The table becomes a delicate, erotic object of irony, humor, and beauty.

Fur-covered Ring, 1985

Ma Gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen, 1936

Read more

Top 10 Most Expensive Car Crashes of All Time

In the article there was an attempt to review the most expensive world car crashes. No matter it was done by a celebrity or not it still remains attractive when a beautiful metal horse was wrecked. Here is the list of 10 world famous and most expensive car crashes:

1. Jay Kay, the leadsinger of Jamiroquai band, happened to destroy his beautiful magenta Lamborghini Diablo SE30 (estimated $360000).  Kay couldn’t manage the control when trying to turn. He was thrown onto the edge of the road as well as fined £750. But we don’t care for Jay. And here is the result of the car crime. The magenta horse … or what was left. Next time, Jay, buy a new exotic hat instead, it will be less expensive.

2. Charming mean girl Lindsey Lohan seems not to put much value to her black friend Mercedes-Benz CLK-350. She broke the car trying to escape the paparazzi. Oh yeah, she proved to be a real mean girl. If she were a good girl, she wouldn’t be hunted by these people. The celebrities can easily buy or crack any car. The actress also decided not to fall behind. They say easy come easy go …to the service parts. Bye bye, my little toy car, hope, we’ll see you on the heavens. It’s interesting if she deals with the men the same way.

3. Mr. Kerimov was listed as one of the richest individuals by the Forbes. Suleyman Kerimov is a Duma Member. Mr. Kerimov, 40, the owner of $7.1 billion treasure, once guessed he couldn’t be worse than the US celebrities. He bought a luxurious Ferrari Enzo car. When driving it after the rain he ran into the tree near the seashore in Nice, France. The car was traveling at high speeds though the maximum speed allowed there was only 35 miles per hour. And we see the result of crashed $ 1.2 million.

This used to be a good car…

Read more

Giant Bubble Gum Shapes in Our Towns

Advertising industry can pull off some really creative tricks in order to successfully promote their products. Check out the creative advertising posters are out there to advertise bubble gum. You’ll be amazed by giant bubble gum shapes found in our towns. Cool stuff. Have you ever seen one of those in your town?

Read more

Surrealistic Painter and Follower of Salvador Dali – José Roosevelt

“I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1958. An autodidact, I held my first exhibition at the age of twenty, in Brasilia. Already, my compositions were full of dream-like and symbolic images. In 1988, I had the opportunity to show my paintings and drawings in Europe. Two years later, I set up my atelier in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since then, I have shown my art in several countries: Switzerland, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark and the United States. But painting is not my only activity: I have illustrated many books – notably Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll – written and drawn some graphic novels, drawn a Tarot card deck, and published two catalogs of drawings and one of paintings.”  José Roosevelt

Roosevelt is 15 years-old when he turns towards the painting. He is fascinated by the surrealism of Dalí, that he just discovered, and the fantasy art in general (Bosch, Brueghel, and the contemporary like Woodroffe and Roger Dean). He decides to try this mode of expression and paint his first canvas, in a completely auto-didactic way. He visits the museums and the art galleries and reads hundreds of books about painting history and technicals.

The comics-form stories pass to second plan: Roosevelt works almost all the time with the oil colors and create new paintings. However, from time to time, the first pages of a new graphic novel come to life, but most of these projects do not go beyond the first pages. Notwithstanding, they are full of mystery and fantasy, and their main quality is the will of testing the possibilities in this domain. Also, his influences have changed: from Barks and Hergé, they become more “adult”: Kirby, Moebius, Drucker, Druillet. The french magazine Métal Hurlant (Heavy Metal in the U.S.A.) shows to him a new way to tell stories in a comics-book form.
Anyway, painting becomes the main activity of Roosevelt from 1977. Soon he does his first solo exhibition, in Brasília (October 1979). This exhibition is composed of thirty surrealist pictures, painted mostly in acrylics on canvas. Since the following year, the artist dedicates exclusively to his painting searches. The new exhibitions show works of surrealistic inspiration side by side to photo-realists urban landscapes (in the manner of Ralph Goings and Don Eddy) and optical compositions inspired by the work of Chuck Close. The critics are, in general, enthusiastic. Roosevelt sells his canvas and is asked for some commands.

Read more

Anorexic Models don’t Always Look Like Models

he scientific name for anorexia is Anorexia Nervosa. People with anorexia become completely obsessed with weight and dieting. They develop a fear of becoming fat and have a distorted mental image of their body, always seeing themselves as fat, even when they are extremely thin. Common attributes of anorexic sufferers are under-eating, vigorous exercise, ritualistic food habits and abuse of laxatives cause excessive loss of weight. Most anorexic people have no history of being overweight.

You MUST see these coolest photo galleries! EVER