These strands, or bands if you prefer, are at times more or less defined; Morefield works with their edges as part of the textural differences by which he composes the paintings.

In addition to his website, you can find a selection of his work on his deviantART gallery.

(Note: some images should be considered NSFW.)

[Via Escape Into Life]

However, in Montreal, members of A’Shop, an artists collective that draws from the graffiti and street art culture, has created a mural that is inspired by Art Nouveau designs (primarily Mucha’s background designs), an approach I have not seen before.

Ironically, the mural is done using graffiti techniques and tools – spray paint. There is an article on My Modern Met that goes into the process of painting the mural, and another on the A’Shop site.

It prompted him to wonder if other scientists had similarly chosen to have tattoos related to their scientific pursuits. He put the call out on his popular blog, The Loom, and the responses became the basis of a feature he called the Science Tattoo Emporium (see my post from 2008).

Zimmer has now collected a number of the images into a book titled Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

You can see a few pages from the book on the Amazon preview, but you can view many more of the tattoos by browsing back through the posts in the Science Tattoo Emporium.

Instead of monsters and flaming skulls, we have tattoos of real animals, both prehistoric and extinct, and scientifically accurate skulls of various species.

In place of iconic hearts, we have biologically accurate illustrations of the human organ.

Throw in molecular structures of various compounds (in the example above, the molecule for LSD), planetary bodies, illustrations of the golden section laid out against a chambered nautilus shell, various scientific formulas and, of course, other interpretations of DNA strands — and you have a range of unusual and fascinating tattoo images.

Unfortunately, the tattoo artists, and/or the artists who created illustrations they may have worked from, aren’t credited.

Some of the artists are among the most recognized names in their genres, other are new or less well known. The initiative’s website has galleries of the cards, arranged in sets, though most of the newer ones can be purchased individually as well as in sets or by subscription.

The images in the galleries are linked to larger versions, which is particularly advantageous given the extraordinary level of detail in some of the images. You need to hover your mouse over the thumbnail images to see a tooltip style popup of the artist’s name.

There is even a “Holodeck” set of lenticular cards, each of which contains several images revealed as the card is viewed from different angles.

The link for “Collective” in the top navigation goes to a page with a list of the artists and links to their websites.

(Images above: Andy Thomas, A. Andrew Gonzalez, Vladimir, Ovtcharov, Martina Hoffmann, Luke Brown, Carey Thompson, Kinuko Y. Craft, Alex Grey)

[Via beinArt Surreal Art Collective]

He sometimes collaborates with an artist known as Retna who adds abstract lettering and design to Mac’s portraits and faces. Mac’s signature style involves a fascinating use of patterns and lines that simultaneously add texture and definition to the forms, along with gradations, following the form like topographical maps.

Mac’s website has galleries of murals (“spraypaint”), photorealism, acrylic on canvas (“Brushwork”) and pencil drawings. Most of the paintings are accompanied by larger images and detail crops in which you can see the patterns as paint strokes. In addition, there are some photos of Mac working on the paintings that give you an idea of scale.

The scale of his mural images is likewise revealed in supplementary photos that pull back from the wall and show the surrounding environment.

El Mac also maintains a blog with additional images of murals, paintings and work in progress. He states his influences as “…Mexican & Chicano culture of Phoenix and the American Southwest, religious art, pin-up art, graffiti, and a wide range of classic artists such as Caravaggio, Mucha, and Vermeer”.

[Via MetaFilter]

A coal miner from the age of 14, Lesage supposedly heard a voice deep in the mine say “One day you’ll be a painter!”, followed by a succession of other voices, some of which he took to be the voice of his sister Mary, who died at the age of three.

He began with “automatic drawing”, a practice the Surrealists employed to produce art directly form the subconscious, but one also associated with communicating with the departed by spiritualists. He moved from there into painting, guided by the voices, and began to produce large scale canvasses in which he explored kalidoscopic images, repetitions of surface patterns and themes of spiritualism and symbolism.

Most of the images in this post, and those in many of the resources I list below, came from shawna-bo-bonna’s Flickr stream.

The two images above, bottom, which are both titled A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World but were done two years apart, became the inspiration for animations created in 2010 by Max Hattler (see my previous post 1923 aka Heaven and 1925 aka Hell by Max Hattler).

The two paintings are both named A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World, one painted in 1923 (above, middle left) and one in 1925 (middle right).

Hattler’s animation loops are just that, motion and sound, no story, and they repeat phrases and sequences with variations in color and other characteristics. They are exercises in rythym, pattern repetition and recursion. They were created over a five day period with students at the Animation Workshop in Viborg , Denmark.

You can see more of Hattler’s animations on his website; I’ll try to post more about Augustin Lesage in an upcoming post.

[Via DATAISNATURE and MetaFilter]

Yes, if the vending machine is one of the over 90 classic vending machines around the US and Canada that have been converted to Art-o-Mats, vending machines that dispense original works of art.

I first wrote about Art-o-Mat in 2006; the idea was started in 1997 by artist Clark Whittington. There are now over 400 participating artists, creating small cigarette-pack size works in various media, and selling them inexpensively (usually $5 US) in Art-o-Mats.

On the Art-o-mat website there is a list of machines by location, as well as a selection of images of various Art-o-Mat machines and a list of sample works by various artists, linked to pop-up images of some of their Art-o-Mat works.

There are also guidelines for artists who would like to participate.

For those who wish to purchase Art-o-Mat art, but can’t get to a machine, you can now order an Art-o-Carton of 10 works online for $99.

There is also now a Flickr gallery of Art-o-Mat related photos.

Hey, can I bum five bucks? I need to get a pack of art.

(Images above, below the machines: Lindsay Matthews, Paula Griffin, Lee Fenyves, Julie Armbruster, Asya Soloian, Janie Reavis-Cox, Carrie Price, Jessica Guptill)