ZEVS

Zevs liquidated logos project has been nominated in the top 5 street art projects of the year. He hit Hong Kong pretty hard with the latest round.

Check the work here.

Poster Boy

Posterchild's work involves manipulating ad posters for his benefit and the entertainment and enlightenment of those who see it.


Check his work here.

Logan Hicks

What's most impressive about Logan is his ability to plan and to previsualize. All his canvases are done using extensive arrays of stencils to add color, depth and shape. They are amazing to behold and even more amazing to watch him execute.

Check it out here.

Holidays caught up

The holidays and work have been catching up so I haven't been able to throw up some new stuff these last few days. I started seeing a lot of stuff pop up about Art Basel this last week and have been trolling through all the info and video and pictures being mostly pissed off that I wasn't there. Next year for sure.
Hope everyone is having a great weekend.

Michael DeForge

Michael DeForge is out of his mind. His drawings are disturbing and hilarious at the same time. You just have to see them.

Check it out here.

Matthew Cusick

Sorry for the gap. Holidays, you know?
I don't know a lot about Matt, but his work is really interesting. His collaged maps could be stared at for hours. Seeing all the little cartographic details and trying to figure out where each map is of.
His Defacements series is much more interesting though. He removes all words and images with the exception of one image and maybe two or three words. He also leaves the page numbers so you could reassemble them into another unique book.

Check it out here.

Vincent Pacheco

Co-founder of the WAFA (We Are Fucking Awesome) art collective, Vincent looks to vintage magazines for inspiration. Collaging together old ads, fashion photography, text and titles he (and co.) create new compositions that excite and intrigue. Sometimes they show the work in their space, sometimes they invade a wall of an abandoned building, beautifying it with their art.

Check it out here.

And here.

Charlie Owens

Charlie's an illustrator inspired by pretty girls, city life, punk rock, skateboarding and comics. His work is beautifully rendered and has a great dimentionality to it for illustration. His use of type in his compositions elevates it above most other illustration too.


Check it out here.

Scott Campbell

This isn't the same Scott Campbell as the previous post. I am not sure that they could be any more different. This Scott is an illustrator working in ink and water color. He's got a great sense of humor with his drawings. And he even makes puppets.

Check it out here.

ripo

10 DAYS from ripo on Vimeo.

This is an amazing project. He paints a headline a day. One on top of another using beautiful hand rendered typography.

Joshua Allen Harris

Joshua works with things that we throw away. Not even just throw away, but throw things away in. He works with plastic bags. And twist ties. He glues these bags together to make animal forms, which would be boring, until he ties them to subway grates and when the trains pass underneath the animals fill with air and come to life. So cool.

Check it out here.

Jordan Jelev

This master calligrapher is known as the Labelmaker for his amazing design of wine labels. His work starts by hand and is then refined digitally, but really, I prefer the handwork.

Check it out here.

Anonymous

Not sure who this is, but I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of them.

Art Decks

This isn't an artist, but it's a dope project. These people make huge cassette tapes out of wood and plexi. They can put any band name you want on them, and you pick the graphics. Something every old school head should have.

Check em out here.

Space Invader

8 bit graphics have been making a serious comeback. In part to artists like Space Invader. He uses colored tiles and even Rubic's Cubes to create low fi looking graphics. With the tiles, he makes large versions of Atari's Space Invaders evil invaders and then mounts them to walls all over the world using construction caulk. He even makes maps of where you can go to see these installations and sells kits so you can do it yourself.

Check it out here.

Roadsworth

Talk about using your environment in creative ways. Roadsworth looks for street graphics and objects that can be manipulated to make them more than they are. He loves crosswalks more than anyone thought possible. Making bandoleers, conveyor belts and other playful converstions using just white and black paint.

See what else he's doing here.

Numskull

For an Aussie, Numskull can sure use American cartoon imagery like the best of them. His work focuses on Disney characters, sign typography and comic book typography. He paints mostly on wood, treating it with stains, fire and dirt sometimes. Sometimes he just leaves it clean to be plywood and nothing more, but it gives the feeling like it used to be covering a window somewhere and had been painted on and pulled down. His graffiti work is more traditional graf lettering, but still quality work.

Check it out here.

Dan Witz

Dan works in a much different way than most street artists. He renders in a super realistic style, hummingbirds, tiny people skateboarding, door windows with people peeking through and other things that don't really belong where he paints them. He uses brushes not cans and paints them so beautifully that most people probably mistake them for photo stickers or don't even notice them at all. In his latest series he paints grates and windows with disturbing looking people peeking out of them or gripping the bars with torn fingers.

Check it out here.

Ben Frost

Color? You like color right? Well you better if you are going to look at Ben Frost's paintings. You practically have to wear sunglasses to look at them. His inspiration comes from all over, but with a lot of artists here many come from popular media. He also draws from porn, youth, violence and recent pop history.

Check them out here.

James Gallagher

On the collage tip, James Gallagher works in a more minimalist fashion than the previous couple entries, but no less interesting. He creates unsettling images by geometrically combining newspaper text and faceless figures in monotone compositions that seem to speak about media culture and anonymity in today's society.

Check it out here.

If you like Cless

He's got a piece in a collage artists show in NYC. It's at the Cinders Gallery. It closes this Friday so go check it out if you're up there.

infamecless

Cless is a collage artist from Spain. He does the most insane collage I've seen in a while. Really awesome stuff pulled from vintage magazines and all over.

Check them out here.

And here.

Steve Powers

Steve (aka ESPO) has been on the graffiti scene since the late 80s in Philly. Having moved to NYC sometime back, his work has developed a sign painter aesthetic. He takes ques from carnival signs, classic advertising and hand painted media in general. Then, for his canvases, he combines them with everyday hood slang terms and references to love, violence and capitalism. He's among one of my favorites.

Check him out here.

And here.

THS

Pronounced (this) THS was started by Thomas Schostok in 2002. He describes it as art an meets graphic design studio group. The art that comes out though is as good as any single artist's vision if not better than most.

Check it out here.

Scot Lefavor

Scot's work is great. It's very Roy Lichtenstein meets Barbara Kruger meets an airline emergency brochure. His use of graphic type and simplified figures gives his paintings a real universal appeal. Having a graphic design background has not only influenced his typography, but also his subject matter. Much of his characters look like they just stepped out of a 1950s advertisement. An appeal that never gets old.

Check them out here.

Escif

Escif is a Spanish graffiti artist. I'm still looking into them, but I really love the sketchy style of the art.


Check it out here.

BAST

Bast is one of my favorite collage artists. He's got such an interesting way of creating images that are ugly and beautiful at once. That also convey a sense of chaos, but everything feels like it was put down intentionally. When his works are up on walls (outside) they look like they've been there for years, even if they were just put up.

Check them out here.

Aakash Nihalani

Aakash Nihalani is obsessed with perspective. Not like an opinion, but dimentional perspective. Aakash uses paint, tape, paper. His outdoor tape installations are the most interesting in my opinion. They are all site specific and are not really planned ahead of time. Great use of neon colors too.

Check it out here.

Adam Hathorn

In the same vein as Mike Giant, Adam is an unreal illustrator and painter. He also happens to do a mean tattoo. He takes ques from the tattoo and graffiti world along with religious iconography and just plain lowbrow humor.

Check it out here.

Mike Giant

Mike has the most unreal hand when it comes to pen and ink. He's inspired by Latino graffiti culture, tattoos, race cars and girls. He renders these subjects with such precision you'd think they were printed, or created on the computer.

Check them out here.

Jason Bernhart

I don't know a whole lot about Jason, other than he thinks small. Really small. Tiny in fact. He takes tiny scale figures like you'd get for a model train set and photographs them as if they were living among us. Us being giant humans.

Check them out here.

Klip Collective

This deviates a little from the normal post as it's not about an artist but more a medium. Klip Collective is a media group that creates onsite projections that work with the environment they're displayed in. They can even key in the architectural details and work around or within them. It's pretty amazing stuff.

Check it out here.

Cornelia Hesse Honegger

Since one of the clients I work on is insect focused, I found this body of work while doing research. Cornelia is a trained illustrator working mostly with insects. Since the Chernobyl incident in the 80s she's been collecting mutated insects from that and other nuclear sites and illustrating them. Disturbing and fascinating.

Check it out here.

Scott Campbell

Scott's an artist in NYC who used to tattoo primarily, but has now moved on to other creative endevors. His laser cut dollars series, Let It Rain is mindboggling in it's detail. It pulls imagery from tattoo and lowbrow culture and renders it in a way like I've never seen. His objects are equally as well crafted. Taking everyday things that are used for harm, like box cutters and broken bottles, he adorns them in gold with jewels therefore giving them an almost holy quality.

Check them out here.

Matt Siber

Matt's photography focuses on products and corporations and their effect on our landscape and the way we perceive quality. That's kind of a loose description of 2 of his projects. See the Floating logos and the Compare To projects.

Check them out here.

Halloween

Hope everyone had an amazing Halloween weekend. Got super busy so may not post today, but will try. Watch out for more good stuff tomorrow.

Nigel Tomm

Nigel Tomm is a disrupter. He takes work made by others and disrupts it to make his own afterproduct. His photos of crumpled photos by famous photographers is a really cool series. Mostly focusing on female nudes or fashion images, he literally just crumples them to make a new, distorted image. You can read the rest of his art rantings for yourself. It's fascinating.

Check it out here.

Kevin Cyr

One small recent regret that I have is not buying Kevin Cyr's graffiti van print from Jen Beckmen's 20X200 project. His work is so great and simple. Just great painting of everyday vehicles. Delivery trucks, panel van's, whatever. He's got such a great sign painter style to his work.

Check it out here.

Sam3

A friend reminded me today about Sam3. This Spanish artist obviously takes a que from Matisse's papercuts. He simplify figures by creating silhouettes that interact with the environment around them. He's got a great eye for finding and utilizing spaces so that his characters feel like they have just strolled in and are manipulating objects.

Check them out here.

Sam Schuna

Sam's work is more playful than I usually like, but his sense of humor is right on. He's also got a nice clean style (for most of his work) and doesn't really tend to overwork the ideas.

Check it out here.

GUIDO MÜNCH

I can't tell you a whole lot about Guido, other than he's German and he seems obsessed with process and design. He takes logos that we see every day and elevates them to a simple color design by removing the names of the products. I particularly like his Krylon and Mastercard ones.

Check them out here. (Page is in all German)

Josh Keyes

Josh takes his inspiration from old science textbook illustrations. He renders, in near photorealistic detail, scenes from nature. But he pictures them as cross cuts, therefore creating a really unsettling feeling in the viewer. Similar in ways to Gregory Euclide. He loves combining subjects that would normally never be seen together. All in all, they create a feeling that he's seeing the world after the human race has vanished and when nature takes over again.

Check them out here.

Mark Jenkins

In keeping with the DC theme, Mark came on the scene some time back. His work is extremely smart as well as well crafted. Using packing tape (clear kind) he makes objects that feel at once totally foreign and at the same time familiar and places them in public situations. He also creates human forms out of discarded clothing and puts them into disrupting situations in a way of calling attention to the homeless and less privileged. They are so unsettling that many of the pictures of the installations have pedestrians stopped dead in their tracks.

Check them out here.

Diabetik

Diabetik is a graffiti artist in DC. He is clearly obsessed with sugar. Judging by his name it's either a love or a hate relationship and nothing between. He steals traffic cones and paints them to look like giant candy corns as well as making stickers of the same and stickers of those oh so popular Peeps you see around Easter.

Check it out here.

Word To Mother

Word to Mother's constructs combine found elements, painted fonts and scrawled faces. They represent the urban landscape and scowling public. They have a really beautiful dirty quality to them.

Check them out here.

Gregory Euclide

Gregory spends a lot of time inside staring at pictures of outside. He uses this conflict, the viewing of outside in, as a vehicle to create reliefs using pictures of nature. Instead of framing and hanging them on the wall, he crumples them and cuts them until they themselves become a landscape. He also uses objects like paint cans to create a portal through which it appears a landscape is spilling out of. Is this a comedy about man polluting nature and then trying to replicate it to make ourselves feel better? Or is it a commentary about how paint and graphic tools can fabricate an ideal of what nature is supposed to be? You decide.

Check them out here.

Erika Simmons

In her Ghost in the Machine series, she crafts portraits of musicians using old tape cassettes. She pulls the tape out and glues it to paper to create these simple black and white likenesses. It's impressive how much detail she can squeeze out of such a minimal medium.

Check them out here.

Jose Parla

Jose is sick. He takes graffiti script and elevates it to feel like wisps of grass, or clouds billowing past in the wind. Growing up in the graffiti culture of south Florida he was surrounded by brick walls, bright colors and tropical textures. He also takes a lot of influence from Asian script fonts and calligraphy. His images make me both anxious and then, in the next second, relaxed.

Check it out here.
Sorry for the Google images link, his site is under construction.

Ryan Bubnis

Ryan has been described as a modern folk artist. However having a formal education in art should bar him from that designation. That doesn't revoke the fact that he creates really compelling images. His almost Mr Potatohead like characters have a great accessibility to them, while also being very texturally and tonally complex. I think that Paul Klee or a 5 yr old could appreciate them on the same level.

Check them out here.

Clemens Behr

Clemens Behr takes cubism to a whole new level. Using found materials like garbage bags, cardboard and tape he creates insanely confusing environments. He can take a simple room and make navigating it nearly impossible. Such a simple concept, with such simple materials.

Check them out here.