Michael Lentz Drawings Focus On Erotic Nudes, Death And Sex

moray mair | Art and design | April 16, 2013

I know nothing about Michael Lentz or his drawings and God knows I’ve tried. Whenever I come across work I like I often spend hours, if necessary, looking, searching, for some scrap of information; a biog, a statement, a fragment of history, anything at all that gives me some idea of the artist, an insight into their processes, inspirations, a point to start from. A point of departure. But with Mr Lentz there is nothing.

So what do I have, what do I know? He’s German, is a wonderful draftsman and has a dark disposition that leads him to create these wonderful compositions that have a sense of death about them, look like death shrouds.

71 total views, 0 today

John Holcroft’s Illustrations Have A Clean, Bold Print Screeen Aesthetic

moray mair | Art and design | March 7, 2013

John Holcroft‘s illustrations are bold and humorous designs that cut straight to the heart of the matter. These are compositions that waste no time in making their point, simple metaphors that hit you straight in the gut. His wonderful textured backgrounds – that hint at handmade paper – bold flat colours and strong lines are all part of a clean screen print aesthetic that has the power of poster art.

97 total views, 0 today

David Lupton’s Illustrations Are Macabre And Gothic

moray mair | Art and design | March 1, 2013

David Lupton‘s illustrations have a taste of the macabre about them, the lines lingering on the edge of a melancholic darkness, a childhood horror that lives under the bed. Lupton’s drawings are gothic, they’re an aesthetic fog that slowly seeps into your bones, brings up the smells of the hearth, the low dark clouds of Northern Europe casting their long shadows over everything they pass.

What’s wonderful about his style is that it provokes the imagination, creates a narrative that runs deep, is, in a sense, a visual language based in literature rather than art.

92 total views, 0 today

Benjamin Hammond’s Drawings Of Real Fake Nudes Are An Ingenious Gift Idea

moray mair | Art and design | February 26, 2013

I loved this idea the minute I came across it. Artist Benjamin Hammond needed a way of making presents without spending money. Presumably because he, like many artists, doesn’t have much cash lying about. Making art is a hard slog. So he turned to what he does best, drawing, and decided to set up a website called ‘Real Fake Nudes’. Ingenious really. You submit a photo online and he draws you onto a nude. Simple, funny and best of all is that you get to decide how tasteful or not you want it.

152 total views, 0 today

Lars Henkel’s Collages Are Drawn From The Romantic Period

moray mair | Art and design | January 10, 2013

Lars Henkel‘s collages are only part of his story. He’s also a prolific illustrator, painter, film-maker and designer. However it’s his strange collages that interest me most. Perhaps it’s because the elements he uses in his pictures are quite limited; the images drawn from the Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th Century, his colour palette minimal and his compositions formal. However within this narrow aesthetic he’s able to create a world that is rather macabre, full of strange Gothic half-human/half-animals, innards and organs floating, disconnected, free of the body, old musical instruments and implements working hard at some mechanical process.

In short Henkel’s world is melancholic, it lies in the collective consciousness of Western Civilisation. For this is a snapshot of a time past, a period of great change, of mechanics, puppets and automatons, of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, of Romantic motifs and references from Adalbert Stifter and Henry David Thoreau.

136 total views, 0 today

Elsa Mora’s Papercut Illustrations Are Delicate And Ornate

moray mair | Art and design | January 8, 2013

Elsa Mora‘s papercut illustrations, paintings, embroidery and drawings all well from a deep sense of the personal as universal and the magic of creation. Her papercuts in particular are wonderfully delicate, ornate and magical while her latest series of paintings titled, ‘Femina Plantarum’, bring to mind the work of Frida Kahlo, a kind of naive folk art aesthetic that is at once disarming and charming, full of rich colours, symbols and symmetry. Her life is an interesting one and on her site she’s more than happy to reflect on growing up in poverty in Cuba before moving to LA where she now lives with her husband and kids.

132 total views, 0 today

Georgia Hayes Paintings Are Outsider Compositions Full Of Energetic Colour

moray mair | Art and design | January 4, 2013

Georgia Hayes‘ wonderful paintings bring to mind the work of Philip Guston and Alex Katz, her graphic compositions full of energetic colour and simplified graphic images of animals, museums and opera singers. Folk artists, or rather outsider art has always held a fascination for me, it’s unfettered, has no time for formality, rules and Hayes work is a prime example of this style. There is a sense of wonder about her work, a joy of life, an aesthetic that derives its inspiration from the naive, the spontaneous, the untrained. The Art critic Barry Schwabsky has this to say about her work:

Things on display in Hayes’s museums seem as alive and lively as the people, and the people are as detached as the things.

162 total views, 0 today

Eleanor Crow Illustrations Of East End Cafes Are Wonderful

moray mair | Art and design | December 29, 2012

Eleanor Crow‘s illustrations of cafes and snack bars from the East End of London are a wonderful riposte to the drawings and paintings we too often see of the cafes of continental Europe. Her beautiful watercolours are a tribute to those establishments that hold onto a particular culture that has yet to be dismantled by globalisation and the onward march of Starbucks monster inc.

150 total views, 0 today

Marta Slawinska’s Illustrations Are Wonderfully Textured

moray mair | Art and design | December 24, 2012

Marta Slawinska’s illustrations have many facets. Her compositions – for book covers, magazines and newspapers – are simple and clean and her use of texture adds much depth to her pictures particularly when she juxtaposes blocks of colour with print textures. There is a subtle humour there too. A necessary tool in an illustrators toolkit.

What I find most interesting about Slawinska is that she nearly went to Law school but changed her mind at the last minute and took off to study illustration. Says alot about her. As do her influences which include Japanese art, lithography and 50′s photography.

144 total views, 0 today

Goni Montes Illustrations Are Superbly Rendered

moray mair | Art and design | December 21, 2012

Goni Montes‘ illustrations are wonderfully rendered, his line assured, his inking superb. He has a manga inspired style all rich, fantastical and multi layered. Originally from Puerto Rico, Montes is now based in America where he’s worked with some of the biggest magazines in the States including; Adweek, The New York Times, Scientific American, The Village Voice, The Washington Post and Wired.

119 total views, 0 today

Alex Roulette’s Paintings Of Fictional Landscapes Are A Neverending Narrative Full Of Strange Situations

moray mair | Art and design | December 20, 2012

Alex Roulette‘s paintings are of fictional landscapes in which the mundane becomes a neverending narrative full of strange situations, coincidences and synchronicities. They are of possible memories, a dreamscape in which isolation is prevalent and cars, houses and figures are dislocated from reality.

His style is photo-realistic but there’s more going on than that. He has a collage aesthetic, a magpie love of images, that he uses to great affect in his compositions by juxtaposing seemingly normal characters and places in a way that creates a disharmony, bizarre snapshots of past holidays, of friends, of a time past.

107 total views, 0 today

Michelle Morin’s Illustrations Of Nature Scenes Are Beautifully Rendered Watercolours

moray mair | Art and design | December 20, 2012

Michelle Morin’s illustrations of beautifully detailed scenes from nature are wonderfully rendered. Her love and understanding of her subjects is there for all of us to marvel in; the composition, colour, patterns and textures of her watercolours. She worked as a horticulturist for years before concentrating on her work and the experience shows in every mark she makes.

129 total views, 0 today

Landon Metz Paintings From HIs Still Colour Field Series

moray mair | Art and design | December 20, 2012

Landon Metz‘s paintings from his ‘Still’ series are about the material and process; the breakdown between the artist and medium, material and ground, colour and form, positive and negative space. By using coloured dye on unprimed canvases Metz plays with brush and hand – while the dye slowly seeps into the canvas – pushing, scraping, scratching, pulling and pushing the liquid around to form maps of varying texture and opacity, each composition a product of time, moments of instinctual creation, a discussion between the artist and the natural tendencies of the dye.

96 total views, 0 today

Jack Hudson’s Illustrations Are A Visual Delight

moray mair | Art and design | December 19, 2012

Jack Hudson‘s illustrations are a visual delight. His is an imaginary world full of fantastical characters and strange happenings. Inspired by 1960’s sci-fi and horror posters, renaissance patterns and studio Ghibli films – the Japanese animation film studio that made ‘Spirited Away’ – Hudson designs everything from album covers to ipad applications and magazines to posters.

104 total views, 1 today

Maya Bloch’s Paintings Of Figures Are Emotional Pictures That Merge From Globular Pools Of Paint

moray mair | Art and design | December 19, 2012

Maya Bloch’s paintings merge with globular paint; stains, forms and patterns live in saturated hues on her canvases. They are expressionistic in the tradition of Munch, her figures a representation of emotion, a metaphor; anguish, pain, there is a desperate need in their faces, their masks. Bloch is certainly a painter’s painter, her understanding of form, composition and colour is very certain, she knows where she’s going, what she’s doing.

112 total views, 0 today

Page 1 of 4512 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Last ››

search our blog

check out our skills bank

Check out our bank where we pool all our skills for the benefit of our mutantspace members. It's free to join and registration only takes a minute

submissions to our blog

we're always delighted to publish your work in our blog. So If you want your art seen by thousands of people then go to our submissions page to get more info