70 Million is a song by Hold Your Horses, a French-American band, that has been made into a video by L’Ogre Productions in which members of the band (and presumably a few friends) pose in hilarious mock-ups of 25 or 30 famous paintings from the history of Western Art.

If you get tired of guessing, you can try similarity based image search, or you can just cop out and visit Flavorwire, where Kelsey Keith has put together screen captures from the video with most (but not all) of the referenced paintings.

Somebody (the video director?) has a sense of humor — and a pretty good grasp of art history.

[Might be considered mildly NSFW]

[Via MetaFilter]

The work of UK artist Patrick Hughes lends itself to viewing by way of photographs even less than sculpture, which is unsurprising in that it is essentially a combination of painting and sculptural elements.

Sculpture, to be properly appreciated, must be experienced by moving through the physical space in which it exists, which changes your view of it until multiple views from various angles form a composite, three dimensional image in your mind (see my comments on Bernini).

Hughes creates paintings that change as you move past them, almost like the illusions created by lenticular displays, but Hugh’s illusions are based on a sound knowledge of perspective, both linear and forced.

He has created an intriguing method of using reverse forced perspective, painted onto angular three-dimsnsional supports, to allow the images from multiple physical planes to be perceived as a single image, the elements of which change their physical shapes and relationships when the viewer changes position relative to the work.

To get an idea of how this works, you must view his paintings in videos that change the camera’s position relative to the work, giving you the effect of walking by them. The illusion of unity is so remarkable that video is also the only photographic way you can grasp the dimensionality of the pieces.

There is a large video here, that starts with a brief exposition by Hughes before showing you the effect, a shorter one on his home page and another by a third party on Flickr that shows his remarkable piece, Paradoxymoron, that is in the basement of the British Library in London, from multiple angles. There is also a video of his accordion-fold “multiples” on his News page.

Hughes calls the principle “Reverspective“, meaning “…three-dimensional paintings that when viewed from the front initially give the impression of viewing a painted flat surface that shows a perspective view”. He even has scientific papers on the effect and a discussion of the perspective principles on which it is based.

The above images only hint at the process. View the video to see the effect.

Hughes’ paintings often make wry reference to other artists’ work.

[Via Digg]

Robert McCall, the pioneering space artist who helped chronicle the NASA space program through some of its greatest triumphs, as well as open our eyes to the imagined possibilities of mankind’s future in space, died last Friday, February 26, 2010, at the age of 90.

Even if you’re not directly familiar with McCall, chances are you’ve seen his work.

Take a moment to look through his web site (galleries here), and enjoy some time off-planet courtesy of a visionary artist.

For more, see my 2008 post on Robert McCall.

[Via The Art Department and Mike Burke]

Encaustic painting is an early painting medium, used by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. In the later case it was used for the well-known Fayum Mummy Portraits, the sometimes strikingly beautiful portraits done on wooden panels attached to mummies in Roman Egypt.

Encaustic painting is a process in which pigment is added to heated beeswax, sometimes modified with damar resin or other hardening agents, and applied to the support while still hot. Though wax is thought of as a fragile substance, the addition of hardeners and the “Punic wax” process, lost and then rediscovered by painter Fritz Faiss in the early 20th Century, make it durable. The encaustic mummy portraits date from 100-300 AD.

Modern artists in the 20th Century, notably Jasper Johns, incorporated encaustic into their work; and the process, demanding as it can be, is experiencing something of a revival.

Kevin Frank is a Brooklyn based contemporary artist who does still life, landscape and portraits in the encaustic medium. His paintings have a beautiful character of texture and surface color, due in part to the way in which the artist must apply the paint, quickly and with finesse, before the wax cools. (Inexperienced painters will sometimes find themselves with a brush stuck to the surface.)

I find the way that Frank uses the character of the paint particularly appealing in his still life subjects, which have a visceral, tactile quality reminiscent of Chardin. His landscapes appear to lean to photorealism when viewed small; viewing the details, however (look for a link to the left in the pages on his web site) reveals a painterly, textural surface.

Frank’s site includes an essay on his work, and the nature of encaustic painting, by Joanne Mattera, painter and author of The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax.

In two of his still life paintings Frank pays tribute to his chosen medium, Still Life with Flag makes reference to objects associated with the work of Jasper Johns; and The Lyre (image above, third down and detail, bottom) refers to the mummy portraits, one of which Frank had a life size reproduction of mounted on a board and keeps in his studio for study.