Jordu Schell makes monsters; icky, scary, grotesque and hairy, monsters, aliens, creatures and beasties of all manner and configuration.

Schell is a sculptor and concept artist working in the film industry. His credits include Avatar, Leigon, War of the Worlds, Hellboy, Galaxy Quest and many other feature films.

Schell is primarily a sculptor, working in clay and other physical materials, not 3-D CGI sculpture. His studio creates masks, maquettes, busts, full size sculpture and other three dimensional visualizations of imaginary monsters, creatures and alien life forms for film concept design.

Like many sculptors, Schell also works in two dimensions, drawing sketches both as preliminaries for sculptures and as an end in themselves. His Monster of the Day seems to be primarily for his own amusement.

Schell’s site has galleries of his studio’s work in many areas. Be aware that most sections have multiple pages, accessed by a row of small numbers to the lower right. The Illustration and Monster of the Day sections in particular go on for many pages.

The sculpture sections often feature many images of the piece both preliminary and finished, in multiple positions. Some of his preliminary pieces have a nice “sketch like” quality, if you can apply that term to clay.

There is also a blog, on which he posts the Monster of the Day sketch as well as posting about more finished works.

Unfortunately, I just missed telling you about Schell while there was a show of his work at Gallery Nucleus, in California. The gallery still has pieces for sale, however.

If you like fun scary monsters, beautifully done with great attention to surface texture and color, as well as nicely imaginative sketches of wildly bizarre monster concepts, Schell’s work should keep you happily knee deep in monsters for hours.

Addendum: There is an article on Schell in issue #2 of Dan Zimmer’s HorrorShow Magazine.

I don’t normally feature photography on Lines and Colors, not that I don’t think of photography as an art form; I just feel that it’s dealt with better on many other sites, and seems different enough to be in a separate category from the art forms I feature.

But the photographs of Michael Paul Smith just charmed my socks off, and there is more to them then excellent photography. In the images you see above, the houses, cars and streets are 1/24th scale (1/2 inch = 1 foot; 1 m = 4.16 cm).

The cars are die-cast models; the buildings are built by Smith, constructed out of Gator board, plastics such as styrene and Sintra, and found objects (and it looks like the old model makers standby of lichen for shrubs).

The outdoor scenes are set up on a table and photographed against real backgrounds. The interior ones, lit very simply but cleverly, are photographed in Smith’s garage.

There is no digital manipulation, no GCI, no Photoshop compositing; it’s all in the models and the original shot from the camera.

My father, among his other skills, was a museum model maker, so this has a particular resonance for me. He, my brother and I spent many happy hours working on train layouts and even helping him construct his museum models; but we never managed photographs of them that had this kind of emotional depth.

Smith says: “What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in. It’s not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood of my memories.’

There is a two page Flickr set of his photographs, (and here), many of the compositions have been photographed in both color and black and white, the latter looking uncannily like actual photos from the era Smith is recreating.

Luke Jerram is a UK artist who creates sculptures, installations and art events.

In his Glass Microbiology project he has created a series of glass sculptures of viral structures, to, in his words, “contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the doctoring of scientific imagery affects our visualisation of phenomena”.

The sculptures are of viruses that are associated with particularly virulent and well known diseases, Smallpox, HIV, SARS, Swine Flu and, in the case of the image above (with detail below), E. coli.

The fact that the virus sculptures are made of glass, a transparent substance which, in its most basic form, has no color of its own, is indicative of the second aspect of Jerram’s investigation, the suggestion that the coloring of scientific images carries implications beyond conveying information.

It’s common for scientific images to be given false colors for the purpose of clarity, or easy perception of information that may be hard to glean in the images’ “true” state. An example of this might be the application of false colors to astronomical images to display the structure of nebulae or the light from infrared or radio sources.

It is also common to color images of viruses; in fact a majority of illustrations and images of viruses that are not the original electron micrographs seem to be intensely colored. Jerram speculates that as a result, most non-scientists might assume that real viruses are actually brightly colored.

He further speculates that the practice can promote a sense of wonder and and make the images more impressive (possibly intentionally), as well as carrying an emotional tone, perhaps one of menace.

The glass sculptures neatly obviate the effect of color (except for one that was deliberately colored by a photographer, though it acts as a contrast), and reduce the viral shapes to just that: their shapes.

Jerram has another interest in removing the effects of color and judging the effect on perception; he himself is colorblind (an awkward term that might more accurately be called limited spectrum color vision), though I don’t know in what range his limitation extends.

The play of light on these sculptures, however, is still beautiful, and the perception of the shapes is heightened by the refractive characteristics of glass (something I respond to as strongly visually appealing); so I have to submit that Jerram has removed one source of intentional visual appeal only to substitute another.

However, as sculptures they work wonderfully. The shapes of viruses are particularly fascinating forms. I also find it compelling that microscopic structures capable of being deadly on a devastating scale can be represented with such beauty.

Jerram’s glass sculptures will be highlighted in a solo show at Smithfield Gallery, London from 22 September to 3 October, 2009.

[Via MetaFilter]

Assembled Artifacts, a show of sculptural objects that opened today at Device Gallery in San Diego, is aptly named.

The wonderfully odd and eclectic collections of mechanical parts, metal objects, leather and cloth, have assembled into sculptures of figures, vehicles, robots, devices and animals by the participating artists.

As is often the case with these kinds of assemblages, there is great attention given to the nature, appearance and surface qualities of the materials chosen. Color is often subdued, and texture plays a dominant role. Shape, however, is the main focus, with found objects given relationships that produce recognizable forms, sometimes with oddly unsettling resonance.

The group exhibit includes work by Stephane Halleux, who I wrote about previously.

Assembled Artifacts runs until August 29, 2009.

(Image above: Jud Turner, Oliver Pauwels, Christopher Conte, Michiro Matsuoka, Stephane Halleux, Lewis Tardy)

“Living rock” refers to sculptures, monuments and buildings that are sculpted in place, usually out of a mountainside or outcropping of rock, and intended to remain in place; as opposed to most sculptural or carved stone objects for which the stone is transported for carving and the finished work usually transported again and/or assembled in another location.

Some examples of living rock are quite familiar and among the most famous monuments in the world, Mount Rushmore and some of the great monuments of Egypt, for example.

R.J. Evens has assembled a collection of photos on Quazen of some lesser known examples of living rock, both ancient and contemporary: Living Rock: Massive Monuments Sculpted in Situ.

The image above is of a giant Buddha in Leshan, China that is over 70 meters (230ft) in height.

[Via Neatorama]

Liz Lomax describes herself as a “three dimensional illustrator”. Before assuming that means illustration created in a 3-D CGI application, step back and think in more immediate, real-world terms.

Lomax creates her stylized, whimsically exaggerated images as small scale sculptures, which she then places in environments that she also hand crafts, and photographs the result to achieve her illustration image.

Much of her work is based on likenesses, or more accurately, caricatures, of well known individuals, including pop music stars like Sting, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones, movie personalities, political candidates and various other newsmakers.

She also does theme based editorial illustration, with conceptual interpretive images much in the vein of many contemporary illustrators, but realized in her hand-sculpted models and environments.

Lomax starts with a sketch, and her sketches have a nice feeling to them that would suit being followed up as a finished illustration in traditional media; but she then takes them to the third dimension, modeling the figure, tweaking the likeness (which must work from several angles), then painting, finishing and arranging the sculpted figures in 3-D environments, much like dioramas, for the final photograph.

Her client list includes major publications like The Boston Globe, Advertising Age, Newsweek, MAD, The new York Times, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal and many others, as well as a number of advertising agencies and commercial accounts.

There are a variety of her works on her web site in various categories, including some done just for fun.

The Telegraph site has a slide show of her work and some of her working models. There is a video of her working process for a sculpture of Noel Gallagher, and her blog shows work in progress, discusses her working methods and has photos that show the sculptures to scale as she works on them.

Many artists are fascinated with paper, it’s many forms, characteristics, tones, surfaces and colors; and the way it provides a platform and co-meduim for various kinds of drawing and painting.

Jen Stark has chosen to make paper itself her primary medium, creating vibrant, intensely hued sculptures out of hand cut stacks of colored paper.

Her sculptures often drawing on the visual vibrations of complimentary colors and the appeal of hues in the order of the spectrum to give her cut paper arrangements a visual snap that is immediately arresting.

In looking through her gallery in photographs, you can see the dimensionality of some pieces easily, but others lend themselves less well to photographic reproduction (as is often the case with sculpture) and you need to project a bit to get an idea of what they might be like in person.

Her online galleries also include a selection of colorful drawings, which sometimes follow the sculpture into themes of repeated patterns and bands of brilliant color.

There are also a couple animations, or “papermations”, with animated arrangements of cut paper.

Stark studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she received a BA in Fibers and also studied animation, and at the Center for Art and Culture in Aix-en-Provence, France.

In addition to her web site, Stark maintains a blog, with news and information about her projects and exhibitions.

Both the web site and the blog currently feature a video interview with the artist (also on YouTube), in which she talks about her process. The moving camera also allows you to get a better idea of the dimensionality of some of the pieces.

The history of the art of china painting is a long one. It is an art in which the application of paint and glazes was initially used to decorate ceramic vessels with patterns and eventually with images of varying degrees of representational detail and complexity.

Kurt Weiser is a contemporary ceramics artist and painter who creates unique pottery, both vessels and objects, that are painted with detailed representational imagery.

The paintings, inspired by the styles of old master paintings, depict allegories and scenes related to the relationship of man and nature. They are painted in a painstaking china painting technique that requires careful planning of the order and placement of colors, the application of overglazing and multiple firings.

The result is objects that are striking in their shape and physical characteristics as well as carrying the visual and emotional impact of representational imagery.

Some of his pieces are almost straightforward vessels — vases or jars that look as though they could be functional. Others are skewed away from functionality in a way that leaves no doubt that this object only exists as an art object.

Some of them seem to be the fusing of two separate vessels that inadvertently touched in some pan-dimensional way, and are now warped along with the distorted juncture of space-time in which they sit; a surreal effect that is heightened by the spacial sense within the representational paintings wrapped across their surfaces.

There are several series of globe-like objects, irregularly shaped, almost amorphous variations of spheres with paintings on their surface depicting continents, animals and people in juxtapositions that carry multi-leveled musings on the natural world. These are suspended in mountings that function like traditional globe-holders, but curved to match the unique non-speherical shapes of the ceramic object.

The Belleville Arts Museum in Belleville, Washington is currently presenting an exhibit of Weiser’s work: Eden Revisited: The Ceramic Art of Kurt Weiser that runs through April 20, 2008.

In it, you will see globes that span ephemeral worlds and vessels that are made as containers for ideas and emotions.

[Link via Art Knowledge News]

Kris Kuksi is an artist of seeming contradictions.

One moment he’ll be fascinating you with his grotesque, darkly themed “Mixed-media Assemblages”, or disconcerting you with his jarringly electric fantastic realist visions; and the next moment he’ll surprise you with classical portraiture, traditional figure drawing or a delicate, naturalistic rendering of a freshly opened orchid or a dew spattered iris.

I first encountered Kuski’s work at a gallery here in Philadelphia where one of his assemblages was attracting a lot of attention on a “First Friday” gallery walk in the Old City gallery district.

These sculptural objects (image at left top, with detail, below) are wonderfully intricate constructions of pop culture effluvia like plastic model kits, injection molded toys, dolls, plastic skulls, knick-knack figurines, miniature fencing, toy animals, mechanical parts and ornate frames or furniture parts; assembled into grotesque tableaux that look a bit like an explosion in Hieronymus Bosch’s attic or H.R. Giger’s dollar store.

These constructions are usually given a patina of light grey that pulls them together and gives them a nice fake antique look that makes them perfect for that alcove in the dark hallway in your Victorian mansion that leads to the Room that None Must Enter.

I can say from seeing these close up that the photos on Kuksi’s site (in the gallery section labeled “the grotesque”) don’t do them justice. There are better photos, with details, along with an interview, on Dark Roasted Blend. There is a short time-lapse video of the assembly of one of his constructions on MySpace.

When I looked up Kuksi’s web site on returning from the gallery walk, I found more of these assemblages, along with some of his “fantastic realism” paintings and drawings, that range from Art Nouveau meets H.P. Lovecraft to psychedelic visionary paintings that lean into Alex Grey territory (image at left, bottom left).

Continuing to the “portraiture” section, I was surprised to see a portrait that I had come across elsewhere and made mental note to look up, not realizing at all that it was by the same artist who did these constructions (Portrait of George Gillaume, image at left, middle with detail). I was further surprised to see, in Kuksi’s “naturalism” section, detailed, contemplative paintings of flowers and images of animals.

Kuksi paints in acrylic on Gessobord. Most of the images in his galleries are accompanied by highrer-resolution versions accessed from a link in the description text. Don’t miss the fact that many of his galleries have more than one page, accessed by small links at page bottom. There are numerous images from the many sides of this multi-faceted artist.

In my research I stumbled across this listing for a Drawing Workshop with Kuksi in Germany in the summer. Please note that I’m not certain if this is current.

On his deviantArt page, Kuksi lists some of his favorite artists as Alphonse Mucha, Ernst Fuchs, Robert Venosa, Alex Grey, and Andrew Gonzales. Hs also lists his “interests” as Art, Music, Science, Philosophy and Maritime Cannibalism.

Andy Paiko is a glass artist who creates glass sculpture as well as sculptural vesselware and traditional vesselware.

I suppose “gothic” might be a term applied to his fascinating constructions of ornately crafted glass that often incorporate the skulls of small animals, spine-like constructions and other natural elements in ways that are slightly creepy but also fascinating in a pre-20th Century bizarre-object-in-a-bell-jar kind of way.

Paiko does, in fact, create bell jars, among his other nouveau arcana, such as an absinthe fountain and the “Lube Rack“, meant to “enhance one’s friction-free environment” with art glass “spice jars” full of everything from motor oil to lard to burbon.

His glass sculptures are usually constructions that are a sculptural variation on some object that would normally not be composed of glass, like a seismograph, a hammer and nails, a balance, a picture frame, or a spinning wheel; and occasionally are odd takes on objects that are normally made of glass, like a five foot long syringe or his hourglass filled with black sand.

When viewing Paiko’s online galleries be sure to be aware of the options near the top, either text links of small squares, that allow you to click through multiple views of the object, or multiple objects in a series.

The piece shown here, simply titled “The Glass Chair“, is a collaboration with Douglas Little and is owned by Conde Nast Publications, which, inexplicably, didn’t use it in the final spread of the “Gothic Splendor” article in House and Garden for which it was photographed. The piece is chair-size, about 50″ (126cm) tall, and is composed of about 250 separate parts, including a piece of octopus coral, a murex spiny trumpet shell, the skeleton of a rat and the skulls of a rhesus monkey and a mountain lion. Just the thing for that empty alcove in the hall.

[Link and suggestion courtesy of Leah Palmer Preiss (see also my post on Leah Palmer Preiss)]