Years ago, I saw a show about a woman who made her home a sort of shrine to Precious Moments figurines. She had custom cabinets built for them and everything. I remember being horrified that someone would devote such incredible resources to Precious-freaking-Moments.
Many years later, enter my hero: Canadian artist Keith Busher aka the Precious Mutator. As his artist name suggests, Keith takes old Precious Moments figurines and morphs them into hideous mutations. Yes!
Apartment Therapy:
Though he initially shied away from toying with Precious Moments because he didn’t want to upset anyone (and, practically speaking, because people aren’t in the habit of discarding those particular figurines very often), Busher says he hit the jackpot when he found out a local antique shop had an entire box of Precious Moments it was looking to offload. “The Precious Moments pieces tend to get the biggest audiences as they are so recognizable,” he says. “Everyone knows somebody who had this piece or that one.”
Busher uses a self-hardening clay and mostly recycled materials to transform each figurine. And he takes his time. “I’ve learned that I can make pieces quickly, but I won’t be happy when it’s done,” he says. “I often add things that don’t get seen, several layers of paint to get that right feeling of depth.” He talks more about his process on his newly created YouTube channel.
Want one of his creations? Head on over to his Etsy shop.
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4 new mutants up on our #etsy page!
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Model train hobbyist James Risner creates mesmerizing spirals from HO Scale model trains. His creations remind me of kinetic art sculptures. All aboard!
https://youtu.be/qUZVv0nr2rc
(via The Kid Should See This) Read the rest
Jeremy Mayer is a San Francisco sculptor who creates incredibly intricate creatures from torn-apart typewriters. One of Jeremy's preying mantises has lived in my home for many years and I still marvel at its construction. Wired visited Jeremy's studio for the short documentary above. For more, here are a slew of Boing Boing posts about his astounding work.
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Tom and Jerry's cartoon cat, Tom, has seen his share of bad luck in his many attempts to capture Jerry the mouse. But, besides the original animators, no one has captured what the contortions his body went through in those moments quite like this!
By sculpting Tom's physical mishaps and misfortunes in those vain efforts to catch Jerry, Japanese artist Taku Inoue makes us look at the cartoon in a whole new, and hilarious, way. They're so good that I've included every single one I could find on Inoue's Twitter page:
screenshot via Taku Inoue
Thanks, Andy! Read the rest
After this weekend's snow in Chadron, Nebraska, Jason Blundell and his kids spent the afternoon sculpting a snow replica of their 1967 Ford Mustang GTA. Nebraska State Patrol Sgt. Mick Downing spotted the snow car and decided to have his own fun. From the Omaha World-Herald:
(Downing) drove by and recorded himself giving the sculpted car a pretend tow notice, then posted the video on the patrol’s social media channels...
Downing said he never did the paperwork for the tow notice. It wouldn’t have held up in court.
“If it would’ve been a real car,” he said, “it was parked just fine.”
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Damien Noll sez, "My skulls and bones are all burned (like black line tattoo) using just a magnifying lens and sunshine."
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This Saturday (6/30) in San Francisco, Brooklyn-based artist/designer Scott Albrecht opens "A Forgiving Sunset," a large solo exhibition of new woodworks, works-on-paper, and steel sculptures. Scott continues to amplify his blend of artistic vision and exquisite craftsmanship in captivating works that are based in simple typographical forms but manifested from his puzzle-like assembly of numerous individual pieces of paper, wood, or, now, steel.
“The work for this show pulls from a range of experiences and inspirations over the last two years," Albrecht says. "A recurring point of reference in the work was the social climate and the growing gaps I was seeing among relationships — both on a cultural level as well as a personal level — and my own desire to return to something more connected. When I began this collection I developed a somewhat daily habit of listening to the poem, Desiderata by Max Ehrmann. Although it was originally written in 1927, it is, among many things, a fairly timeless call for empathy, compassion and understanding, which seems just as relevant and needed today as I’m sure it did when it was written.”
A Forgiving Sunset hangs at the First Amendment Gallery until July 28. The opening reception is Saturday, June 30, from 7-10pm.
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On display in Copenhagen, Denmark's Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek art museum is this glass display case filled with noses of myriad shapes and sizes. Why?
According to curator Anne Marie Nielsen, noses on 19th century statues are notoriously fragile and would frequently break off. So the owners of the statues (or perhaps even prior museum curators) would replace them with marble or plaster replicas. Nowadays though, the museum removes any replacement noses because they only want to display the original sculptures, faults and all.
“About 20 years ago, the museum had a box filled with noses [in our archives], and we weren’t sure what to do with them,” Nielsen tells Smithsonian.com. “We decided to group them together and put them [on display].”
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Alex Xiao's video of a flexible jellyfish-inspired LED configuration hints at the artistic possibilities for these programmable displays. Read the rest
Book Art Necklace
These paper sculptures made from discarded books are the creation of Malena Valcarcel, whose work includes beautiful sculptures and wonderful, bookish jewelry. Read the rest
The latest confection from mad steampunk sculptor and clockmaker Roger Wood is this spiffing assemblage raygun. Want. Read the rest
Robbo sez, "Like Giger - but without the creep factor- Pierre Matter's sculptures invoke a bio-mechanical beauty that is both physically sensual and intellectually fascinating." Read the rest
Sculptor Justin Gershenson-Gates produces the most amazing and beautiful clockwork insects and arthropods, which he sells in his Mechanical Mind Etsy shop. (via The Mary Sue) Read the rest
New Zealand artist Bruce Mahalski has put a new sculpture of an AK47 assembled from animal bones up for sale, with a starting bid of NZD3500. It's quite a beautiful piece of work.
The latest bone gun by New Zealand bone artist – Mahalski – is a life-size AK47 machine gun(330mm x 940mm) featuring found animal bones from rabbit, stoat, ferret, sheep, hawk, pheasant, wallaby, snapper, snake, blackbird, tarakihi, hedgehog, broad-billed prion , shear water, thrush, seal ,cat and possum (plus part of a skull from the extinct moa ). The gun is made entirely of bones mounted on an invisible wooden frame and is displayed standing upright on two rods on a piece of recycled matai timber (1130mm x 2000mm). You can see more pictures at - www.mahalski.org
KALASHNIKOV - AK47 (LIFE-SIZE REPLICA) Brand new item
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The latest piece from mad assemblage sculptor Roger Wood is this delightful ray-gun: "Another mental health break from clocks with this Steampunk ray gun and charging stand." Read the rest
M. Otis Beard writes, "Gregg Fleishman, the architect whose team was awarded the honorarium grant to build the Temple for Burning Man 2013 today, makes insane sculpture, furniture, toy cars, etc. out of single pieces of flat plywood, with no metal fasteners, joints, nails, or screws. Some of his pieces even incorporate wooden hinges and springs."
The 2013 Temple design is highly geometrical, and will be built using Fleishman’s patented connectors at each joint, capitalizing on the intrinsic strength of the arch at every opportunity in an interlocking jigsaw of triangles and pyramids. No nails, screws, or other metal connectors will be used at all. The gross form of the Temple will consist of a large central trussed pyramid, sixty-four feet tall and eighty-seven feet square, with four smaller satellite pyramids measuring twenty feet tall and twenty-nine feet at the base, intricately interlocked and ornamented in Fleishman’s signature style: Archimedes, Pythagoras, and R. Buckminster Fuller holding hands and enjoying some really good acid.
Temple Builders Revealed!
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A fanciful post to Thingiverse from 3DTOPO allows you to print out your own version of Arthur Ganson sculpture Machine with Concrete , a system of wormgears that produces a gear-ratio of 244.14 quintillion to 1.
This is a printable version of Machine with Concrete. The sculpture is a series of twelve 1:50 worm gears, with each gear reducing 1/50th of the previous gear. With 12 gears, the final gear ratio is a mind boggling 244,140,625,000,000,000,000 : 1 (244.14 quintillion to 1). With the first gear spinning at 200RPM it would take over 2 TRILLION years for a single revolution at the end of the machine, so the final drive shaft can be embedded in concrete or plaster.
I emailed Arthur Ganson a link to this page and he replied "looks FANTASTIC!".
Printed Machine with Concrete
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