Anatomy and Art

I’d intended to speak here about motion graphics and 3D modelling, but instead I’ve gotten distracted with this little bit of awesome…

Seriously, how cool is that?!?  Artist, Lisa Nilsson is making these out of old guilded edged pages from books and Japanese mulberry tree paper.  This is some really great work.  You can click on the artist’s name to see more of her tissue series.

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon the work of Michael Reedy.  He’s really doing some incredible work.  This is an example from his anatomy series here.

His other work shows off his mastery of the human form in all of it’s levels just as well or even more effectively though.

I’m just so impressed.  This guy has figured out light and shadow, anatomy, and how the human form moves and bends.  Plus his overall compositions are just plain interesting.  I’m really pleased to have found his work.

For all of my thought and study into likenesses and human form, this guy is doing it with Rubik’s cubes.  Seriously.  This is one piece of modern art, I will not mock.  I don’t have it in me to make something like that, and it’s crazy neat.

You can read more about the project here from the artist’s own site http://petefecteau.com/

So, it’s no secret really that I’ve got some love for Vincent Van Gogh.  And even though he wasn’t an anatomical artist or medical artist, he did study to improve his grasp of the human figure at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussles for a little while.  As far as I know, this is the closest thing to an anatomical art piece that he ever painted.  So today I thought that I’d like to post that here.

It’s kind of fantastic in it’s balance between simplicity and complexity.  I wouldn’t study anatomy from it, but it’s clear that he was looking at bones to do this and not just making something up.  The cigarette is maybe a little silly, though a lot of years have passed between the time he did this and everything else that might make me feel that way about it.  And you really do get the sense of a burning ember at the tip of that thing.  It’s a neat painting.

So, this week I had a birthday.  And a friend of mine sent me one of those lists of other people born on the same day that you are.  Well, one of the names listed was Lucas Cranach the Younger.  He’s a German painter from the 1500s.  So I thought that sounded cool, and I looked him up.  He’s good!

And apparently he got the descriptor, the younger, by growing up in an art family and learning from his father who was known as Lucas Cranach the elder.  His brother Hans painted too, but it was the elder and the younger who’s style looks so much alike.  The younger was “known for portraits and simple versions of allegorical and mythical scenes” according to Wikipedia (see link above).

So that is something that I only just learned today.  And now you have too.

So I was recently very impressed to discover Choi Xooang.  Based in Seoul Korea and only just a few years older than me, this sculptor is doing some truly amazing work. The best write up I’ve seen so far in looking up this artist comes from Slash/Paris and goes into the various exhibitions seen thus far (see link)
http://www.slash.fr/en/evenements/the-islet-of-asperger

I believe that I am most drawn to these images of stone figures which incorporate highly realistic human components, such as I’ve shown here.  Choi Xooang’s work also includes more complete and elaborate human figures but it’s these I find myself the most fascinated by.

And I just couldn’t refrain from showing this.  The piece is called Pruritis.  It’s true, I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for hands, but come on, just look at this!  I love this work!

So I just stumbled on to the works of Richard Tennant Cooper.  It’s strange, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on the artist out there, but his images seem to be carrying on, on their own right.  So here’s me, propagating that circumstance by putting up a couple images here as well.

I’m not sure if he’s playing to the frightening nature of medical work, or perhaps the idea of riding that line between life and death.  Maybe he just likes things that are spooky.  But it’s interesting work.

You can find more images by searching under his name, just very little information about the guy.

Ooooh, so here’s a really fun artist find. Chek out the work of Heidi Taillefer!

I must say I’m impressed.  What a fun combination of the anatomical and the mechanical all mixed together in these positively romantic sort of settings.  Neat!

Lately I’ve been seeing art pop up that paints real objects and real people as though they were painted or drawn.  I suppose the over all idea is something that I first saw when I went to a live performance of The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch.  The costumes and make-up were very much inspired by Dave McKean’s artwork for the original graphic novel.  Master of mixed-media that he is, he tends to combine photographs with drawings and well pretty much anything.  So when they did the play the, costumers chose to add a drawn or painted element to the actors on stage.

photo is from the LA Times

Well in the last week or so, I’ve seen that idea of painted life come up a couple more times.  And I have to say that the effect is stunning every time.

This video for “Forever Dolphin Love”, completely drew me in, and so much of it is specifically that aesthetic. Well that, and the fact that this guy’s just got such an amazing face to work with here.

Forever Dolphin Love – Connan Mockasin from daniel brereton on Vimeo.

Then just a few days ago, I found the work of Alexa Meade.

And how incredible is this?  She’s creating live paintings and then photographing them.  I’m sharing the links I’ve seen of hers directly here, because I think it’s just so much fun going through her work.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexameade

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hyperrealistic-acrylic-body

All in all, it’s a style that really speaks to me. And I’m tempted to experiment with it a little myself. Maybe just once, I could paint the world, and my friends, and get to walk around in that reality, just for a little while. I don’t even know if I could pull it off, but I think I’d like to try sometime.

So, I was just thinking how it’s gotten awfully technical around here lately, and I should show some more artists’ work for a change of pace again.  And then tonight I stumbled into Tatayuki Hori’s Oritsunagumono (things folded and connected), winner of the 2001 Mitsubishi Chemical Junior Designer Award, according to Colossal Art and Design.

I wish that I had a direct website to point you towards for the artist directly, but for all of the blog articles available on his work, I haven’t seen anything from him directly.  If any of you reading know of a more direct source, please comment.

As for the project itself, please allow me to copy the description up at Design Bloom…

“each translucent sheet is first printed with either the images of fragments of an animal’s skeleton, or,
on some pages, human-made discarded objects that are often ingested by the animals in the wild.
using the ancient tradition of folded paper, hori assembles the pages into a three-dimensional model.
once the paper is folded, the printed components are united as a whole, telling the visual story
of the animal’s plight to survive in an increasingly polluted and hazardous ecosystem.”

The exhibition at large, looks like this…

…with each figure underlit so that it emphasizes the translucency and fragility of the piece, and each featured next to a wall hanging of the printing diagram prior to folding.

Here is one of the diagrams.

And here is the 3D model of that same piece.

Impressive work, most certainly.