Papermation: Jen Stark

This very lovely woman makes art from colored construction paper:


"Papermation" by Jen Stark from Jen Stark on Vimeo.

Radial Reverie:Mold Study:
How to become a millionaire in 100 days:The above piece is comprised of 1,000,000 scraps of hand-cut, colored paper.
Meaning she had to cut 10,000 pieces of paper every day for 100 days, hence the apropos title.
Sure-handed Perseverance is the artist's decisive apparatus.

Brain Dettmer

Altered Books & Maps: speak for themselves...

Suzanne Tresiter

From my favorite art blog Beautiful Decay:

"They’re ink drawings transcribing the front page of daily newspapers into Alchemical style manuscripts.

These are so detailed and fun to read, it makes me wonder if papers wouldn't be so doomed if they started printing in this format. These works do embellish the prophetic magic-wordiness of the daily."

Staircases and Crime Scenes

The photography of Maria Levitsky:

I would guess that this artist is from New Hampshire based upon some of the titles of her photographs, irregardless, according to her website, she has an upcoming exhibit in NYC at Deborah Berke and Partners Architecture studio.

Of particular interest to me are her collections of staircases (all man-made: some indoors and some outdoors) crime scenes (a collection of photographs recovered from a fire at a police precinct: so eerie and intriguing), and large structures (also very creepy feeling to this collection, as if these photos just appeared in a darkroom somewhere after developing themselves out of necessity).

The composition of her work is breathtaking, amazing lighting and perfect balance of grays, enjoy.

Staircases:























Stairs, N.H. (2001)




























Shoes on Stairs (Invisible Ascending) (2000)























Stairs, Dijon 2 (2004)

Crime Scenes: Pay attention to all of the detective's scribblings around the border of the photographs; e.g. "NO BLOOD", "Militia Hideout", "Fell through roof", "Insurance Investigation"
































Crime Scene 10 (2004)































Crime Scene 4 (2004)

Large Structures:























Tree Shadow (2002)
























Thunderbolt, Coney Island (2001)

die romantische Stimmungslandschaft (notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling)

Caspar David Freidrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840): the Great 19th Century German Romantic Landscape Painter...

He was born in the Swedish Pomeranian town of Greifswald, where he began his studies in art as a youth. Later, he studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality. This shift in ideals was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization".

He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's work characteristically sets the human element in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension". Friedrich’s work brought him renown early in his career, and contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d'Angers (1788–1856) spoke of him as a man who had discovered "the tragedy of landscape". Nevertheless, his work fell from favour during his later years, and he died in obscurity, and in the words of the art historian Philip Miller, "half mad".

Friedrich said, "The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead."

He often used the landscape to express religious themes. During his time, most of the best-known paintings were viewed as expressions of a religious mysticism
Expansive skies, storms, mist, forests, ruins and crosses bearing witness to the presence of God are frequent elements in Friedrich's landscapes. Though death finds symbolic expression in boats that move away from shore—a Charon-like motif—and in the poplar tree, it is referenced more directly in paintings like The Abbey in the Oakwood (1808–10), in which monks carry a coffin past an open grave, toward a cross, and through the portal of a church in ruins.

As Germany moved towards modernization in the late 19th century, a new sense of urgency characterized its art, and Friedrich’s contemplative depictions of stillness came to be seen as the products of a bygone age. The early 20th century brought a renewed appreciation of his work, beginning in 1906 with an exhibition of thirty-two of his paintings and sculptures in Berlin. By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drew ideas from his work. The rise of Nazism in the early 1930s again saw a resurgence in Friedrich's popularity, but this was followed by a sharp decline as his paintings were, by association with the Nazi movement, misinterpreted as having a nationalistic aspect. It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance.


- The Monk by The Sea (1809)


- The Tree of Crows (1822)


- Fog (1807)


- The Giant Mountains (1830-1835)
a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature.


- View of the Baltic (1820-1825)


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Interior Dictation of Landscape (Tom Clark on Friedrich; from Vanitas Magizine):

He avoided Goethe's invitations to come to Weimar and work together on a collaboration
He was too busy collaborating with certain beings
inside him
whose commands he found so much more compelling
they came alive
during his solitary strolls into the countryside at dawn or just after moonrise
his favorite time
during which he often paused to sketch
a group of trees a cloud a boulder a row of dunes or a tuft of grass
at their urging
Every true work of art (he wrote) is conceived in a sacred hour
and born
from an inner impulse of the heart

As he grew older depression distanced him more
and more
from the world of men
I have to be
on my own
and I have to know I am on my own
so that I can give myself up to what is around me
he wrote
in declining an invitation to tour the Alps
with a Russian poet
who admired his paintings
I have to unite with my clouds and rocks
I have to unite with everything around me
in order to be what I am

When the mineral world dissolves into the cosmic flux
the animal and vegetable worlds will have been long gone
but the beings who existed inside Friedrich and dictated his landscapes
will still be carving vast silences out of elemental gulfs

He had a special interest in the moon
He used to say
that if after death men were transported to another place
then he would prefer one less terrestrial than lunar
in order to allow the beings inside him to feel at home
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Vanitas expounded (i.e. What's that latin for?):

In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic still life painting commonly executed by Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term vanitas itself refers to the arts, learning and time. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term. The Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) renders the verse as Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. The verse is translated as Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version of the Bible, and Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless by the New International Version of the Bible.

Paintings executed in the vanitas style are meant as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, encouraging a sombre world view.

Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, which symbolizes decay like ageing; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death; smoke, watches, and hourglasses, which symbolize the brevity of life; and musical instruments, which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life.

Cueva de las Manos

Let's go to Patagonia! Now what you have here is an archetypal example of a been-there-dreamed-that, dime a dozen, I'm yawning again caus' I'd rather be watchin' Gossip Girl, run of the mill and stuck in a well "Cave of the Hands". Located in the southern region of South America (yep, good ol' Santa Cruz, Argentina), this cave lies deep in the valley of the Pinturas River (River of Paintings). Ostensibly someone deemed this 79ft x 49ft hole in the Earth important enough to be protected as a UNESCO (eh hem: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site on the basis of "paleontological and archaeological historical importance". Go figure.

Clearly this cave gets it's name from the sundry stencils of left-hands painted on the cave walls some 9,000 years ago. The paintings were able to be dated by means of the tools that were found at the scene of the crime. The indigenous inhabitants of the land at that time (quite possibly forefathers of the Tehuelches, Ferdinand Magellan's "Giant People") used bone-made pipes to shoot mineral ink onto the walls, blocked by their hands, therein creating perhaps the world's first stencil art. (Banksy et Le Rat eat your poser hearts out...)

Apparently it was a rite of passage for these graffiti-loving natives to mark their journey into manhood in this cave because the size of the hands resemble that of a 13-year old boy. However it could very well be that they were older, as primitive civilizations tend to be all gross and under-developed like.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. That's not it. As if these flawlessly preserved demarcations of ancient rituals and artistic expression aren't enough to satisfy your curiosity for all things Patagonian, there's also... more paintings! Cueve de las Manos and a few sister caves have been tastelessly littered with depictions of humans, guanacos, rheas, felines, geometric shapes, some zigzag patterns, representations of the sun, and some hunting scenes for good measure. Really all your standard hunter and gatherer fare. The ceilings of these caves also glisten with thick, red dots, supposedly created by the never-gets-old method of dipping your bola in red ink and recklessly splattering your local cave ceiling with it.

This is more information: "The colours of the paintings vary from red (made from hematite) to white, black or yellow. The negative hand impressions are calculated to be dated around 550 BC, the positive impressions from 180 BC, and the hunting drawings to be older than 10,000 years".

So, are we going or not?