The coolest animated gifs I've ever seen!

Just stumbled across these...

Graffiti GIFs, lettering by INKIE and backgrounds by INSA.



found at dvdp

Tim Burton's Official Website

Tim Burton's website is really fantastic. To navigate through the site you have to use your arrow keys to walk "Stain Boy" around mysterious rooms and corridors. You are given the option of walking into either the Public Gallery or the Private Gallery, where you have to enter your email address to get in. A smart move that really works, even if most of us have a "spam email account".

Although navigation with arrow keys is nothing new, it worked really well in this case as it gives the user a real sense of walking around a gallery in a mysterious, Alice in Wonderland style building.

Leeds City Art Gallery: Sculpture and Tapestry Exhibitions

Emess is a Berlin-based graffiti artist who does work similar to that of Banksy. Stencil graffiti is a new style in the genre and can be seen more and more frequently as it is getting pretty fashionable.

"Sprayer" by Emess.

"Inlaid Patchwork Berlin" by textile artist, Ursel Arndt, 2008/09 is a patchwork of stencil graffiti art.

At first this sculpture did not seem very interesting, however when I read the little plaque it actually proved to be quite intriguing. Left to right: "Momento", "American Garamond", "Antique Olive" and "Orator", 2005, are scale enlargements of full-stops in the four fonts. They each have the same point size but the large scale shows the intricate details which exist within the apparently universal and uniform symbols.


"Artist's Formula for Success Chart: Aquarius" by Laurence Burt, 1970. I found it strange that someone would want to attempt to create a mathematical formula or flowchart to how to find success as an artist. This piece of art, or science(?), almost shows how "unlogical" art is but is juxtaposed with how it is itself a "successful work of art".

An extract of "Family Tree 1970-1981" by David Nash, 1985. This drawn work was appealing to me as it had been carefully hand drawn and showed lots of possibilities that a tree holds.


"A Work Between Two Insitutions" by Stephen Willats, 1987. This shows the relationship between a block of flat and a City Art Museum in a strange, electric-circuit-style diagram.

"Sign Elements III" by Matt Rugg, 1963. I'm not really sure what to think of this piece but I quite liked it...

"Untitled" Computer generated and screen printed by Darrel Viner, 2001. Darrel Viner produced a whole series of these 2D spheres for which he had written a computer program to create them. There is a debate as to whether computer generated works count as art, I personally feel that the computer is merely a medium, like a paint brush or pencil and that it is still the work of an artist.

"Extended Cube" by David Nash, 1996. The same artist who produced "Family Tree" has extended a wooden cube...for some reason...

"Acrobats" by Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1966. This is one of Finlay's "Concrete poems". The title is the main part of the work with the letters jumping and tumbling in mid-air.

"Faithful Servants (Marine)" by Edward Wadsworth, 1928. This piece was in the main art gallery rather than the sculpture exhibition. I particularly like surrealist art as to me it has more thought put into it as there is a meaning behind each object and its positioning.

The plaque reads: "Wadsworth served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a gunner. After the war he made drawings of the Black Country and northern slag heaps that highlighted humanity's devastating impact on the landscape. They echoed Nash's scarred battlefields. In the late 1920s Wadsworth made a series of still lifes of nautical objects in marine settings. Often the objects were no longer in common use. The idyllic, other-worldy nature of these still lifes suggests a yearning for a pre-war era of peace and calm."

"The Bayswater Omnibus", 1895 by George William Joy and "They Could Not Imagine", 2009 by Gasan

The first of these paintings, "The Bayswater Omnibus", shows passengers inside a horsedrawn omnibus. The artist's wife and daughter posed as the mother and young girl on the left.

Joy described the passengers, "In the farthest corner sits a poor, anxious mother of children, her foot propped on an untidy bundle; beside her, full of kindly thoughts about her, sits a fashionable young woman; next to her the City man, absorbed in his paper; whilst a little milliner, bandbox in hand, presses past the blue eyed, wholesome looking nurse in the doorway."

The artist of the second painting, "They Could Not Imagine" said:
"I was interested in how the artist had different classes of society together, and wondered how realistic this was. The painting provides so much information about how people lived, from fashion to travel and advertising. I transported these people into 21st century life. The ladies are fascinated by what they see and the businessman has already adapted with his laptop. The smaller characters have been affected by the recession, but the balloons represent hope. The fading reflection of St. Paul's shows Christianity as a traditional lifestyle disappearing, which I think is sad."

Both photographed in the Museum of London.

"Viaduct", 1998, Michael Johnson

This painting from 1998 is a bitter comment on Modern Britain, made at the time when London was enjoying its reputation as the fashion "capital of cool".

It is set on Holborn Viaduct in London. On top of the viaduct are Arts Council officials, artist Damien Hirst, politician Peter Mandelson, businessmen, scientists and their mad-cow creations. Mandelson is holding the Millenium Dome and Hirst is holding a pickled sheep.

Under the viaduct are the poor, whose contributions to the National lottery keep the arts going.

Photographed in the Museum of London

Espace Dali, Paris

I recently visited the Salvador Dali museum in Paris, Espace Dali. I didn't really know anything about the surrealist artist before I went and was suprised to find that I really liked his work and found it very interesting. Not long before I visited the Museum of Modern Art in the Pompidou Centre and had been really dissappointed by the works there so I was pleased to have my interest in art reinvigorated!

Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989) was particularly interested in the juxtaposition between the strength and fragility of life forms, in particular the snail, with it's tough outer shell protecting it's vulnerable, slug body.
"As Dalí believed that nothing occurred simply by accident, he was captivated when he saw a snail on a bicycle outside [Sigmund] Freud's house, connecting the snail with the image of a human head; more particularly, with the head of Freud. Dalí was also fascinated by the natural geometry of snail shells, and like the egg, the duality of its soft interior with its hard exterior." (Quoted from this site.) This is his sculpture, "The Snail and the Angel":Another animal that fascinated him was the elephant. Dali liked to exaggerate this contrast but giving the elephant long spindly legs in his pieces of art:


This work of art is particularly interesting as Dali has taken a proposal for the site of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to be used as the body and trunk of the elephant:" There was a pre-Napoleonic (1758) proposal by Charles Ribart for an elephant-shaped building on the location of the current arch." (Quoted from this site)

Here are some other items I photographed in the museum....

From his "Alice in Wonderland" series:
Sculptures:
Some of his furniture designs:


Espace Dali Website

"Dreamlands" Exhibiton, Pompidou Centre, Paris

The title of this exhibition came from the name of an amusement park built in 1904 at Coney Island in New York. Dreamland marked the beginning of a sensational new movement in architecture. Dreams were becoming reality.

Dreamland Amusement Park, 1907. This was to be a high-class entertainment village with elegant architecture, exhibitions, rides and thrills however the park was destroyed by a fire in 1911.

The exhibition had a section about Salvador Dali's "Dream of Venus" pavilion for the New York's World Fair in 1939. This was a piece of installation art before installation art had even begun. You can guess that the pavilion was a very weird and wonderful place; topless mermaids swimming around, a leopard-faced mannequin covered in shot glasses, Venus in her boudoir....

"Skyline" by Kader Attia is a collection of fridges covered in tiny mirror panels.

"Delirous New York" original cover by Rem Koolhaas.

“Nothing Stops a New Yorker” by Malachi Farrell. This was a quirky piece of installation art, the cardboard skyscrapers were at first made to do a work-out then that was interrupted by news reports from September 11th, terror alerts broadcasts and exerts from Public Enemy songs. It was interesting how the artist had surrounded the skyscrapers by junk. It seemed to show the collapse of New York's infrastructure and the nature of our "disposable" way of life accumulating in the streets. The installation was cleverly placed by the panoramic windows of the Pompidou centre, showing the city carrying on behind as if forever into the distance.

Visit to the Centre Pompidou

What better to do on the first sunday of the month than visit the Centre Pompidou in Paris? I felt a bit like a fly as I walked round because I found my self attracted by anything with neon lighting. Looking at all the art and stuff kind of made me question whether the things I saw were genuinely "works of art" or just a pretty picture/installation or a load of rubbish.
There was one piece that I did like however, below, but merely for its aesthetic qualities and simple but nice interactivity.

If tree is to birds nest, then the Pompidou centre is to.....? Tree houses =) They're a bit pointless but i like them.It has to be said one of the best things about the pompidou centre is the view. Panoramic view of Paris including the Notre Dame cathedral, Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur.

So I wasn't very impressed by the "art" but I did stop by the book shop and spent at least half an hour flicking through the 2009's D&AD Award Winners book. I have been watching some of the interviews with the judges so it was interesting to see the work they picked. Maybe I'll do another post about that...

Alex Varanese

I really like this guy's work. His website is really nice to read and generally looks great!